Update 5-10-2025:
A close version of this article appeared as an opinion column in the Waco "Tribune-Herald" newspaper on Saturday, 10 May 2025. I happen to be on their board of contributors.
---------------------------
News stories have it that sometime this week Kosmos 482 will be entering the Earth’s atmosphere uncontrolled, after 53 years of being lost in a decaying orbit. This is the Venus atmospheric entry craft for a Russian probe to Venus launched in 1972. It failed to leave Earth orbit. Most of it came apart and reentered years ago, but this entry capsule did not.
This thing could come down anywhere on Earth between 51
degrees north latitude and 51 degrees south latitude! It weighs about 1100 lb (or 500 kg). It is an entry craft design, so the claims that it will likely burn up in
the atmosphere are hogwash! It was specifically
designed to survive that!
Update 5-10-2025: Kosmos 482 fell to Earth today, Saturday, 10 May 2025. Most reports do not know where, although Roscosmos in Russia says it fell in the Indian Ocean.
Update 5-23-2025: It apparently fell west of Jakarta in the sea, very near Indonesia. Much of southeast Asia was close enough to have been at serious risk, as it turns out.
It has a landing parachute designed for Venus’s thicker
atmosphere, but after 53 years in
space, that might not work, and certainly the controls to deploy it might
not work. Which means you will most
likely have around a half-a-ton object,
coming down to hit at a few hundred miles per hour, and all in one big piece! The odds are roughly 2 against 1 that it will
hit ocean. That’s mostly empty water, but there are people living on islands out
there! There are also ships and planes
at risk crossing the ocean, not to
mention the many risks on or over land.
There’s more space flights in recent years, so we have seen more space junk coming
back. There was a half-ton chunk of
metal fell on a village in Africa, and a
Florida house struck by a chunk of steel weighing several pounds. Some of this debris has been identified, some not.
Most of it came from things not designed to be re-entry craft, yet they still hit the surface, at least as several pieces. The point is,
there’s now enough of it, and it
is large and heavy enough, to be a
significant risk!
Up to now, the
pronouncements have been (1) it’ll most likely fall in the ocean (true) and (2)
it will mostly burn up in the atmosphere before striking the ground (not
true).
This one (Kosmos 482) is an entry vehicle. Kosmos 954 that fell in Canada back in 1978
was a Russian spy satellite not designed for re-entry, that had a nuclear reactor aboard. It made a radioactive mess to clean up in multiple
Canadian lakes and a swath of arctic land hundreds of miles in extent! Reactors are designed for high core
temperatures: the claim that it “would
burn up on entry” was patently false,
even then.
The US space station Skylab fell on western Australia a
couple of years later. The Space Shuttle
was supposed to re-boost it, but ended
up not even making its very first test flight until a couple of years after
that crash. Skylab was converted from
the thin propellant tankage of a Saturn-5 third stage. It weighed about 85 or 90 tons at entry and
it did break up, but not very many of
the pieces burned up! The Australians
claimed to have picked up some 75 tons of Skylab debris, including a 1-ton film vault that was almost
entirely intact. So much for the “these
things burn up on entry” theory!
The loss of Shuttle Columbia halfway through re-entry over
Texas in 2002, rained down tons of
debris for hundreds of miles, showing
just exactly how ridiculous that oft-repeated claim is.
And this risk has been known for decades! John Glenn’s Mercury capsule was sent to
orbit by an Atlas booster that was essentially a lightweight stainless steel
balloon, relying on some inflation
pressure just to hold its shape. That
shell broke up during entry, yes, but a piece of the internal propellant piping
washed up on an African beach only a few years later. This piece of debris was identified by the
serial number stamped on it, it was in
that good a shape! This was 6 decades
ago that “they” knew this could happen!
There’s a lot of debris up there in orbit that sooner or
later we will have to contrive a means to go get, for disposal.
I think everybody understands that.
But when you find yourself in a deep hole, the first thing to do is stop digging! We do not need to be launching more things
into orbit that inherently become debris that will collide (creating more
debris) or fall back.
We need to modify the international space treaty to preclude
launching satellites that have no means to de-orbit themselves in a controlled
fashion over the remotest part of the Pacific.
We need to preclude the jettisoning of anything at all, not even paint flecks, once orbital-class speeds have been
achieved. We need to very strongly
discourage fielding any future launch and space vehicles that are not fully
reusable, or that do not offer safe stage
disposal capability.
That’s the real lesson here,
and it has been staring us in the face for many years now, unaddressed!
Will it take deaths on the ground from falling debris to prompt
addressing it? How negligent is that?
No comments:
Post a Comment