Space junk problem rising to new heights

‘Honey buckets’ keep falling on our heads
Deliberate disposal of garbage from manned space stations in the 1970s and 1980s was the rule, not the exception — and experience indicated it was safe. If the trash dumps departed in a safe direction, air drag effects made them descend into lower orbits. Conversion of potential energy (altitude) into kinetic energy (speed) made them speed up and pull ahead of their former homes, but they never would get high enough to threaten recontact.

The Russians even installed a trash airlock for the regular disposal of food containers, dirty clothing, small items of failed equipment, and sealed fecal filters from their space toilet. When military trackers at the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, detected new subsatellites drifting away from Soviet space stations, they would catalog the blips and humorously refer to them as "honey buckets" (an old, old euphemism, most recently an aviation term for the spartan latrine in the back end of an aircraft).

Even on Mir in the mid-1990s, space littering was the accepted practice. NASA astronaut Shannon Lucid, who spent half a year aboard the station in 1996-1997, recalls being astonished to see her Russian shipmates “Yuri and Yuri” (as she affectionately referred to them – Yuri Usachev and Yuri Onufrienko, who both later commanded expeditions on the international space station) gray-taping together masses of surplus packaging foam a few days before any scheduled spacewalk. Once in the airlock, they shoved the 3- to 4-foot-long (meter-long) conglomerations out the hatch and tossed them overboard. 

The past and future of space junk
These activities, aside from giving earthside radar operators more blips to catalog, did no real harm. The reason is that the air drag, even at the 220-mile (350-kilometer) average altitude of the space stations, was enough to inexorably rob this litter of its orbital energy, causing them to slip lower and lower, and burn up within months. Even large, heavy pieces of Russian station-related hardware that were left in orbit could be safely tracked during the several years it took them to slip from space.

The same has been the case with the typical pieces of junk that have come off the international space station. However, the availability of earthbound cargo space in the shuttle (which brings it all the way home) and to a lesser extent in the forward holds of departing Progress and Soyuz vehicles (which are jettisoned to burn up in the atmosphere) has discouraged the policy of throwing stuff out from the station itself.

The space junk problem posed by the piano-sized EAS is just the first of its kind, and it won't be the last. In years to come, when the shuttle stops servicing the station and other vehicles come on line, none will have the down-cargo capacity of the Columbia-class winged orbiters. Big pieces of the station, perhaps replaced by large structures sent up on new launch vehicles and space tugs, will have to be disposed of along the same path that the EAS will soon pioneer.

It’s a harbinger of big space junk problems in the next decade — so getting it right this first time may be critical to planning for the international space station's future.

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