Right now, there are 3,800 pieces of junk circling the earth
To the minstrels of medieval Europe, the moon was a kind of celestial junkyard. They consigned to lunar banishment a dolorous assortment of such earthly intangibles as broken vows, fruitless tears and misspent time. Today the moon is a repository of more substantial material: it harbors a pile of gear, left behind by Apollo astronauts, that includes one moon buggy, $5 million worth of camera equipment and two golf balls that Alan Shepard whacked with a makeshift six iron to unplayable lies in a boulder-strewed valley. Still, this lunar refuse is paltry by comparison with all of the man-made debris now sailing noiselessly through the cosmos.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which is responsible for providing early warning against aerial attacks, estimates that some 3,800 pieces of junk are currently circling the earth.* Total weight of this space-age garbage: six tons. Two-thirds of the nuts, bolts, oxygen cylinders, broken solar panels, dead satellites, spent rocket boosters and other litter is in geosynchronous orbit 22,300 miles from the earth's surface, where it will remain indefinitely. One-third of the circling scrap is in low earth orbit, only 120 to 300 miles overhead.
Most of the space garbage consists of nonfunctioning satellites and space probes launched from earth. There is also fragmentary junk, resulting from mid-space collisions between spacecraft and meteorites. Astronauts have dumped sewage, food containers and spent oxygen cylinders overboard. On rare occasions, space walkers have accidentally dropped objects in space. Astronaut Ed White lost a shiny white glove during the Gemini 4 flight in 1965. George ("Pinky") Nelson fumbled away two tiny screws while repairing the Solar Maximum Mission satellite during the shuttle flight last month.
Objects in low earth orbit circle freely until the slow wear of molecular friction and the force of gravity cause them to re-enter the earth's atmosphere at a blazing 18,000 m.p.h. and subsequently burn up. That was the fate of the first man-made satellite, the 184-lb. Soviet Sputnik 1, which incinerated in the heat of re-entry three months after its historic launching on Oct. 4,1957.
Since then 9,695 man-made objects have fallen from orbit, but the number that survived the atmospheric plunge to hit the earth is unknown. Shards have landed on more than a dozen nations, including Zambia, Finland and Nepal. As early as 1961, Premier Fidel Castro indignantly charged that a re-entering chunk of a U.S. spacecraft had struck and killed a Cuban cow. A year later, a 21-lb. metal cylinder landed at the intersection of North 8th and Park streets in Manitowoc, Wis. The debris was later identified by the U.S. Air Force as a fragment of Soviet Sputnik 4, launched two years earlier. It was the first certified piece of space litter to hit the U.S. In 1963 a charred metal sphere with a 15-in. diameter turned up on a sheep ranch in New South Wales. It was part of a Soviet space vehicle, but the U.S.S.R. never claimed it.