Garbage Collection going Outer Space BIG
It’s fast turning out that even space isn’t the final frontier.
True to the nature of living (and unfettered, non-sustainable) development, our home planet is the de facto garbage dump, and before anyone goes, “There’s always… out there…”, we’ve made a pretty good head start outside earth’s atmosphere too.
It’s thus to no one’s real surprise when the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon – a metonym for the United States Department of Defense - had launched the Orbital Prime programme to basically plant the seed for commercialising space garbage collection.
Korean movie Space Sweepers, aired over at Netflix in 2021, had visited this premise, and incidentally, sets itself circa 2092, the same year of a much older exploration of the same theme by Katsuhiro Otomo’s Memories – Magnetic Rose (1990, comic, 1995, animation).
Both featured space garbage collection, albeit with heavily dramatize plotlines, a given to “sell” the stories which turned out to be fairly realistic.
Admittedly a cool concept until we realise what this means literally.
There’s enough garbage out there to worry the Pentagon. Space, where distances are measured in light years. Enough to be a risk factor to the many satellites including military ones.
Washington Post also reported Pentagon having tracked more than 40,000 objects in orbit, with more smaller debris which could not be reliably tracked. Big ones are said to be around the size of a typical bus.
Granted, its nothing like that imagined in the imagined scenarios in Memories and Space Sweepers, but 2092 is only 60 odd years away.
And thus, the stage is set for professional and semi-professional space garbage collectors to be a viable career path of our children’s children.
Mars, here we come.
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