I don’t know if ohio has destroyed the ballot trail from the 2004 election yet, but the first convictions of election officials has been handed down.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
(Again a little out of date… still getting caught up on old news to blog.)
An event happened recently that I should have blogged about, but I seem to have taken a month off, so you get it a little bit late.
Space debris is a real problem. There are about 10,000 objects in earth orbit that the US Space Command has catalogued and tracked. These objects are over 10 cm in size and given that they are staying in orbit, are mostly moving very quickly. In 1998 there were 8,000 catalogued objects. Upper stages of rockets sometimes explode, as the upper stage of a Pegasus did in 1996 creating 700 catalogue-able objects, and hundreds of thousands of others. Orbital debris is moving so fast, relative to other orbital objects, that if two meet catastrophic results may be obtained. The international space station is continuously pelted with debris. So is hubble.
The largest problem however is the fact that as more debris is created, the chain reaction of one piece running into another creates ever more debris. There may come a critical point where we effectively deny ourselves the use of space. There has already been one case of mission failure due to space debris.
Recently the US and China have been working on an agreement to try to minimize the amount of space debris. So I have to ask myself, what on earth were they thinking when the purposely created the worst orbital space debris event ever? Didn’t want to be left behind the US?
When the Pegasus upper stage exploded, the impact probability for the Hubble Space Telescope doubled immediately. Fortunately the stage was in a relatively low orbit so much of the danger passed as objects fell back to earth. However this most recent ASAT weapon test by China was in a low-mid range orbit so the middle of the debris cloud is at about 530 miles giving the debris a much longer lifetime. Fortunately the danger to the ISS was short lived to to the orbital dynamics involved.
It will be interesting to see what China has to say for itself on April 23, when they are hosting the international conference on space debris. One things for sure, all that nice nice we were making about joint space ventures, to the moon and all that, well that ain’t happening anymore.
I just hope we get space debris under control and soon, otherwise we may wall ourselves into our planet for a hundred years.
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