As satellites fill Earth’s orbit, the space race risks becoming an environmental crisis | Environment

Our relationship with space is evolving rapidly.

For most of human history, space above us was an inaccessible frontier. Yet in the space of a single human lifetime, Earth’s orbit went from largely empty to cluttered with satellites.

Meanwhile, even though the Moon remains mostly inaccessible, over the coming decades it is expected to become the grand prize for the world’s major powers – the United States, China and Russia. Several countries have ambitious plans to return humans to the Moon, and this time to stay there permanently.

This week, the Guardian launched a series on our evolving relationship with space – from exploration to occupation. We interviewed pioneers seeking to exploit valuable resources on the Moon, worked with astronomers to track tens of thousands of satellites launched into Earth’s orbit, and assessed the role of a United Nations agency that found itself in the middle of a politically charged race to space.

This is a time of great excitement for scientists, enthusiasts and business owners. But it’s also a time to stop and think about our role in space and our responsibilities.

But first, this week’s most important reads.

Essential reading

To the point

History is replete with examples of pioneers who rushed to unknown frontiers, only to realize too late that they had caused irreparable damage to environments they did not fully know.

We are already seeing environmental concerns related to the 21st century space age. One study found that about 10% of particles in the stratosphere (which begins about 10 km above Earth) contain metals from space activities such as rocket launches. The impact is still being studied, but researchers fear it could affect atmospheric chemistry and the ozone layer, which protects the planet from radiation.

A recent UN report highlighted the environmental impacts of space activities, saying there was an “urgent need for sustainable practices to manage potential orbital congestion and environmental impacts on all layers of the atmosphere.”

One of the most striking ways to see our impact on space is to visualize the tens of thousands of man-made objects circling the globe. At the Guardian, we wanted readers to see for themselves how Earth’s orbit is increasingly cluttered with communications, weather, internet and navigation satellites.

We decided to tell this story through an immersive and interactive format that we call “scrolytelling”. In this case, the reader scrolls through the story and can see Earth’s orbit being populated over the decades with more and more satellites. It’s quite fascinating and you can see it here.

Ashley Kirk, the Guardian’s visuals editor, who oversaw this project, explains how the main challenge was finding reliable data. “We needed numbers not only on satellites that are currently in orbit, but also on satellites that have already been launched but have since fallen out of orbit and been destroyed,” he said.

We relied on multiple sources to provide a complete picture and also asked renowned astronomer Jonathan McDowell to cross-reference our data sources and compare them to his own.

And that’s a lot of data. More than 14,000 satellites are in orbit. Space debris, often called “space junk”, is also found there. This includes abandoned rocket stages and the remains of defunct satellites.

Increased orbital activity has created a significant collision risk, and there have already been a handful of accidents. In 2007, a Chinese anti-satellite weapon test intentionally blew up a weather satellite, creating a dangerous cloud of space debris. Two years later, a US satellite and a former Russian satellite collided, creating nearly 2,000 pieces of shrapnel.

Tens of thousands of tiny metal fragments are now moving at high speed. The big fear is that future collisions will cause a domino effect in which Earth’s orbit becomes a dangerous minefield filled with tiny, high-speed pieces of metal.

Frederick O’Brien, a journalist and software developer at the Guardian, created the interactive from proof of concept to final piece. This required weeks of work.

As a globalized society, we constantly rely on satellites, not only to help us navigate using Google Maps, but also to provide internet access and, most importantly, to predict the weather. Space monitoring of the Earth also allows researchers to track deforestation, desertification, the melting of glaciers and ice caps, and the spread of oil spills.

“This article reveals an important problem that, if not resolved, could disrupt some of humanity’s most important services, like the Internet,” says Ashley. “It’s a complex area that really needs to be visualized so you can see how many individual satellites – all with different heights, speeds and trajectories – are now orbiting the Earth.”

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