Speaker 1: Oh hey, it's that friend whose calls it. You always
Speaker 1: pick up because if they are actually wanting to speak
Speaker 1: instead of text with their phone, it must be either
Speaker 1: really good or really bad news, Ali Ward, and that
Speaker 1: one is very true. Back with another episode of this
Speaker 1: show called Ologies. Okay, I'm going to try and make
Speaker 1: this intro speedy as I can. We are a race
Speaker 1: to get to space junk. This episode so good. Thank
Speaker 1: you to everyone at Patreon. Did you know what cost
Speaker 1: a dollar a month to join? That's it? And then
Speaker 1: you can submit questionstologists patreon dot com slash ologies, and
Speaker 1: then thank you everyone also who rates, who subscribes, who
Speaker 1: leaves reviews. I read the hell out of all of
Speaker 1: your reviews, and then I am a laser pointer at
Speaker 1: one each week, such as dear Westler, who wrote, I'll
Speaker 1: be honest, I didn't like podcasts okay, but Ologies has
Speaker 1: had me hooked since day one, and then Wesler called
Speaker 1: me an informed closet goblin, and I thank them for that.
Speaker 1: If you left a review this week or ever, I
Speaker 1: have read it and I have appreciated it. Okay, Onward.
Speaker 1: Space archaeology. Space is a word that's been around since
Speaker 1: the thirteen hundreds. It comes from the Latin spaceum, which
Speaker 1: means room or area, and by the mid seventeen hundreds
Speaker 1: it meant the cosmic expanse, the stellar landscape, the crushing
Speaker 1: enormity of nothingness, which is filled with everything, including all
Speaker 1: of our secrets and maybe some broken glass and someone's
Speaker 1: car keys, which comes from Greek's archaeologia, the study of
Speaker 1: ancient things, which TBD to be discussed. Okay, so patron
Speaker 1: Kevin Biemer posted this on the patreon dot com slash
Speaker 1: ologies community board. They said, I'd like to nominate three
Speaker 1: related but distinctologies. Astro archaeology, the study of how people
Speaker 1: in the past understood and used astronomy. Remote sensing archaeology
Speaker 1: the use of satellites and other remote sensing techniques to
Speaker 1: help with archaeology stuff on Earth and space. Archaeology the
Speaker 1: study of human artifacts in space. Kevin Biemer space archaeology.
Speaker 1: We're doing it. A lot of folks on Twitter also
Speaker 1: pointing me toward this particular ologist. Her Twitter handle is
Speaker 1: doctor space Junk I say no more, and she got
Speaker 1: her PhD in archaeology with a specialty in stone and
Speaker 1: glass tool used post colonization and has worked for years
Speaker 1: in Indigenous heritage management. Is a member of the Australian
Speaker 1: Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Is the
Speaker 1: president of the Anthropological Society of South Australia. She's a
Speaker 1: member of the Advisory Council of the Space Industry Association
Speaker 1: of Australia. She's an associate professor at Flinders University in Australia.
Speaker 1: Is recognized as a world expert in orbital debris and
Speaker 1: launch sites. She's also a TED speaker. She writes the
Speaker 1: Space Age Archaeology Blog. Is the vice chair of the
Speaker 1: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronauts ADELAIDE chapter, and is
Speaker 1: a founding member of the nonprofit organization Archaeology, Science and
Speaker 1: Heritage Council for All Moonkind Incorporated, which helps protect cultural
Speaker 1: archaeology sites in space. Oh and on top of all
Speaker 1: of this, she somehow found time to author the book
Speaker 1: Doctor Space Junk Versus the Universe, Archaeology and the Future.
Speaker 1: So we got on the whole when it was afternoon
Speaker 1: in la and the future in Australia. And every so
Speaker 1: often you might hear the delicate tinkling of a spoon
Speaker 1: against her mid morning tea, So strap in helmets on
Speaker 1: for a chat that covers everything from Sputnik to sports cars,
Speaker 1: cosmic litter, flaming garbage machines raining down on fields, alien
Speaker 1: debris collision, potential radioactive rubbish clean up possibilities, the cutest
Speaker 1: space garbage burials in the void, and how does one
Speaker 1: do archaeology without sitting on a rocket? To get to
Speaker 1: work with doctor space junk space archaeologist, doctor Alice Gorman.
Speaker 2: Quite side five three two one. Oh. So I'm Alice
Speaker 2: Gorman and I'm she her.
Speaker 1: Okay, cool, love God, we have a love God. Do
Speaker 1: you think that you may have been one of the
Speaker 1: first space archaeologists? Was this a thing before?
Speaker 2: I think I probably was one of the first ones.
Speaker 2: I wasn't the first one, and I was not the
Speaker 2: only one back then, and I'm not the only one now.
Speaker 2: But when I think about it, there was something going
Speaker 2: on in the year two thousand, so I sort of
Speaker 2: round about their. My colleague Beffalora O'Leary, who's from New
Speaker 2: Mexico State University, started thinking about cultural heritage on the Moon,
Speaker 2: and bizarrely, there was actually a few people in Australia
Speaker 2: who were thinking about space archaeology as well. You wouldn't
Speaker 2: think Australia would be a big space archaeology hub, but
Speaker 2: I had a couple of colleagues who were thinking about
Speaker 2: the Moon and Mars and also the kind of much
Speaker 2: broader kind of zeno archaeological astrobiological thing as well. But
Speaker 2: around the year two thousand, it kind of all started
Speaker 2: to come together, like we all met each other and
Speaker 2: we started running conference sessions together, and we started sort
Speaker 2: of developing the ideas and the principles, and more importantly,
Speaker 2: I guess we started trying to get a bit of
Speaker 2: credibility with the broader archaeological community. We all kind of
Speaker 2: focused on different things. So I started with space junk
Speaker 2: and that's continued to be one of my major research interests,
Speaker 2: and of sessions others were working on the Moon or
Speaker 2: Mars or terrestrial space sites, rocket launch sites, that kind
Speaker 2: of thing. So I guess this little group of us
Speaker 2: kind of just started putting stuff out there, trying to
Speaker 2: build a profile for the idea that this very recent
Speaker 2: staff actually had things to tell us about how we
Speaker 2: operate in the world and might have heritage value. And
Speaker 2: I think sort of twenty years on. I think we've
Speaker 2: achieved that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it kind of makes me wonder how old does
Speaker 1: something have to be for it to be archaeological. Did
Speaker 1: we have to wait until we had gotten enough junk
Speaker 1: up there and it was old enough. Does it have
Speaker 1: to be thirty years ten years? Can something be archaeological
Speaker 1: if it's only ten minutes old?
Speaker 2: My answer to that is absolutely it can be. Oh.
Speaker 2: So there's a couple of interesting things going on with
Speaker 2: this idea. I mean, one is when does the past
Speaker 2: actually start? And Isaac Asimov actually wrote a very interesting
Speaker 2: short story about this called The Dead Past. A time
Speaker 2: machine had been invented, and there was an archaeologist who
Speaker 2: was dea spread to go back to ancient Carthage and
Speaker 2: see what happened. And he kept applying for permission to
Speaker 2: use the chronoscope and kept getting turned back, and in
Speaker 2: the event, in the end he was so persistent that
Speaker 2: he found out why no archaeologist or historian was allowed
Speaker 2: to use the chronoscope to look into the past, And
Speaker 2: it is because the past could start a milli second ago,
Speaker 2: and such a machine is actually a powerful surveillance tool.
Speaker 2: So it's an interesting story, but it makes the point
Speaker 2: that our definitions of the past are pretty arbitrary, and
Speaker 2: things that are a thousand years old aren't necessarily more
Speaker 2: They don't have more heritage value or more ability to
Speaker 2: inform us about human behavior than things that are ten
Speaker 2: minutes old. And archaeology really, at the end of the day,
Speaker 2: isn't about old things. It's about human inter with material things.
Speaker 2: So that means you and I, sitting at our desks
Speaker 2: right now are creating an archaeological layer that somebody could
Speaker 2: come along and interpret once we got up and left
Speaker 2: the desk.
Speaker 1: Hear that if your workplace is just a repository of
Speaker 1: Chaoss type up a museum placard, sling a velvet barrier
Speaker 1: in front of those moldy coffee cups and unopened bills,
Speaker 1: those artifacts must remain undisturbed and unjudged. And I have
Speaker 1: heard that a lot of archaeology deals with discarded items,
Speaker 1: or shall we say, just historical garbage. That garbage is
Speaker 1: just like chef's kiss when it comes to an archaeologist.
Speaker 1: Is that true? Is that true for archaeology and space
Speaker 1: junk and the work that you were doing with indigenous
Speaker 1: cultures in Australia.
Speaker 2: Well, you're right allie that your standard archaeological site is
Speaker 2: what's left behind. It's people's rubbish, it's structures and buildings
Speaker 2: that existed at the moment people left or died or
Speaker 2: moved to another location. So you're looking at what's left.
Speaker 2: But when we're looking at the very recent past, so
Speaker 2: I guess space archaeology fits into what we're calling the
Speaker 2: archaeology of the contemporary past, another kind of paradox. It's
Speaker 2: the past of ten minutes ago. Again, so this isn't
Speaker 2: always stuff that people have abandoned or discarded. Often it's
Speaker 2: stuff that people are actually using or living in the
Speaker 2: International Space Station being a great example of that.
Speaker 1: Just a side note for context. So the ISS, the
Speaker 1: International Space Station is a joint effort by several countries,
Speaker 1: with the top contributors being NASA, Russia's Space program, and
Speaker 1: the European Space Agency or the ESA, and the ISS
Speaker 1: launched into the void of Eternity in nineteen ninety eight
Speaker 1: and it's been taken a low hovering lap two hundred
Speaker 1: and forty eight miles above your face, just circling Earth
Speaker 1: every ninety minutes pretty much since the Clinton Lewinsky scandal
Speaker 1: erupted and Titanic came out, So between three and ten
Speaker 1: people tend to be up there at any given time,
Speaker 1: just defying what our ancestors could ever even imagine was possible,
Speaker 1: just doing experiments, making music videos. Sometimes peel into a
Speaker 1: suction hose. What a blast. Also, the US had a
Speaker 1: different space station before, named Skylab, but in nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 1: five years after the astronauts bounced and left it uninhabited,
Speaker 1: its orbit started to decay and it got sucked back
Speaker 1: into our gravitational poll. And because it was so large
Speaker 1: and chunky and made of some pretty hardy metals, pieces
Speaker 1: as big as a small car crashed into an Australian
Speaker 1: sheep field, just scattering parts that were gathered and then
Speaker 1: put into a modest tourist museum.
Speaker 2: So these objects and sides are still often active and
Speaker 2: people have relationships to them. So this does add another
Speaker 2: ethical dimension, I guess to doing this kind of archaeology.
Speaker 2: It also gives you huge advantages because you can ask
Speaker 2: people what was going on at a place. But you
Speaker 2: make a good point there is an intersection with indigenous
Speaker 2: archaeology here and this was my main career before I
Speaker 2: became a space archaeologist. I was a heritage consultant working
Speaker 2: with Aboriginal communities in Australia, and for those communities, similarly,
Speaker 2: you don't say, oh, this is one hundred years old,
Speaker 2: so it has a different kind of value. A lot
Speaker 2: of the value comes because things are still very present
Speaker 2: and interwoven in everyday life. So it does give you
Speaker 2: a different kind of sensibility about stuff that is recent
Speaker 2: and stuff that well definitions of rubbish as well. So
Speaker 2: something that is not being used or appears to have
Speaker 2: been abandoned when we're looking at the present those that's
Speaker 2: not necessarily the case.
Speaker 1: So while archaeology means this study of ancient history, that's
Speaker 1: not always the case in practice. And the significance of
Speaker 1: an artifact might have everything to do with the cultural
Speaker 1: significance of its I guess it's impact, so to say,
Speaker 1: and how we interacted, whether it was something we accidentally
Speaker 1: left behind or deliberately abandoned. But what kind of objects
Speaker 1: are we talking? And how do you define space junk?
Speaker 1: I picture just like broken satellites and like a booster
Speaker 1: that's just up there rusting. What is it exactly?
Speaker 2: But this my answer to that, I guess relates to
Speaker 2: what we've just been talking about, because I'm kind of
Speaker 2: really uneasy with the term junk. Okay, there's all kinds
Speaker 2: of other words for things that are discarded or considered
Speaker 2: to be waste. You know, we havesh garbage, all of
Speaker 2: these kinds of words. There is actually a definition of
Speaker 2: space junk, a technical definition, and it says, a piece
Speaker 2: of space junk is an object that does not now
Speaker 2: or in the foreseeable future have a use.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's repeat that because it's important.
Speaker 2: A piece of space junk is an object that does
Speaker 2: not now or in the foreseeable future have a use. Ah.
Speaker 2: So that's the kind of engineering definition I guess. So
Speaker 2: the kinds of things people routinely think of as junk
Speaker 2: are all of the old and abandoned satellites and rocket
Speaker 2: bodies and fragments of those objects that are floating around
Speaker 2: in Earth orbit. And you could also technically say that
Speaker 2: places like the Apollo landing sites on the Moon are
Speaker 2: junk because they have been abandoned or discarded by some definitions.
Speaker 2: But the way I look at it, our definition of
Speaker 2: junk is a very cultural thing. So something that one
Speaker 2: person abandons or discards may actually have very high value
Speaker 2: for somebody who is from a different place or class,
Speaker 2: or has a different understanding of material objects.
Speaker 1: Hey, one person's trash is another's treasure. And this applies
Speaker 1: to everything from old barbecues to romantic partners. And that's beautiful.
Speaker 2: And we do have examples of spacecraft which ceased to
Speaker 2: be used but was still capable of being used, so
Speaker 2: they did actually have a use in the foreseeable future.
Speaker 2: And some very clever people have gone out and reactivated
Speaker 2: old spacecraft, old satellites to repurpose them for I know.
Speaker 2: Is that amazing?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's great. That's like when you watch a program
Speaker 1: and Discovery where it's like someone in the Rust Belt
Speaker 1: putting together an old Chevy and getting it to run
Speaker 1: again some serious technological makeover. How do they do that?
Speaker 1: Are they able to do it from Earth and just
Speaker 1: get some codes and start tippy tapping?
Speaker 2: Yes, well, a lot of the time it is as
Speaker 2: simple as that. They just need to get the codes.
Speaker 2: But the really interesting thing is those codes are often lost.
Speaker 2: And this is the case with the UK satellite Prospero,
Speaker 2: which had its fortieth anniversary a few years back, and
Speaker 2: a group of students tried to re establish contact with it,
Speaker 2: but the codes had been lost in you know, like
Speaker 2: an office move or something.
Speaker 1: Oh god, Oh it's like, so what they need last
Speaker 1: pass or just one of those books. It just is
Speaker 1: it's all lowercase password one, two, three, just drive on too,
Speaker 1: three fours? Do you ever work?
Speaker 2: You know, it's such an interesting thing because we kind
Speaker 2: of have this idea of the space age as something
Speaker 2: that's very orderly and where nothing goes wrong, where technology
Speaker 2: is perfect. And you know, it's the same kind of thing.
Speaker 2: You clear up the filing cabinet in your office and
Speaker 2: you throw out the one file that had the things
Speaker 2: that you needed in it, and suddenly there's a spacecraft
Speaker 2: a drift that nobody can use again. So I think
Speaker 2: around this idea of junk it's really interesting things that
Speaker 2: are considered junk mate still have social uses, for example.
Speaker 2: So an example I often think of when it comes
Speaker 2: to that is a rather famous red sports car that
Speaker 2: was launched into space in twenty eighteen by a rather
Speaker 2: famous space person.
Speaker 3: Well, I think it looks so ridiculous and impossible, and
Speaker 3: you can tell it's real because it looks so fake. Honestly,
Speaker 3: we'd have way better cegif we'll speak yes.
Speaker 2: And it was quite controversial when it was launched because
Speaker 2: people said, why couldn't it have been a proper scientific experiment.
Speaker 2: We could have got something out of it, And other
Speaker 2: people said, you know, this is amazing. It's a visionary
Speaker 2: it's whimsical and quirky, and you know, I love a
Speaker 2: bit of whimsy and quirk with the best of them.
Speaker 2: But it was a red sports car, and we know
Speaker 2: what red sports cars symbolize? Or should I spell it
Speaker 2: out early a week?
Speaker 1: Am I missing something? Are we talking about a different
Speaker 1: kind of space junk? I'm thinking it's just like a
Speaker 1: very much midlife crisis in a phallic symbol, but very much.
Speaker 2: It's also wealth and power, representing membership of an elite organization.
Speaker 2: And you know, there's probably lots of other meanings that
Speaker 2: you could find. But the point about that red sports
Speaker 2: car it didn't do anything. It didn't collect data, it
Speaker 2: wasn't part of any experiment. But it's funk was social.
Speaker 2: Its function was to be a symbol. So for all
Speaker 2: of the people who said, oh, it's just another piece
Speaker 2: of space junk clogging up the orbital paths of the
Speaker 2: Solar System, even though I personally disliked the symbolism. It
Speaker 2: makes a wonderful argument that the function of a spacecraft
Speaker 2: can be social, and if that's the case, then it
Speaker 2: isn't actually junk even if it's not working.
Speaker 1: Okay, just some quick trivia on this. I looked it
Speaker 1: up and Elon didn't get the idea of launching his
Speaker 1: roadster into space while he was like on a Cradam
Speaker 1: bender in a hat up. Apparently, SpaceX announced that they
Speaker 1: needed a boilerplate or a dummy payload for the Felcon
Speaker 1: Heavy test launch, and they were looking for the silliest
Speaker 1: ideas possible. One Twitter user, someone by the name of
Speaker 1: Evelyn Janity, a twenty something Texan self described as a
Speaker 1: Latina writer and poet who's also a trained dental technician
Speaker 1: but a Cosmos enthusiast and aspiring SpaceX employee, suggested launching
Speaker 1: musks swinky commute vehicle into orbit. Musk faved it, and
Speaker 1: the internet to vote. The rest is history that will
Speaker 1: last roughly a billion years. So whether the car is
Speaker 1: a whimsical nod to human potential or an egomaniacal automotive
Speaker 1: version of gas station dick pills, just this object existing
Speaker 1: has a function because we're talking about it and we're
Speaker 1: thinking about it, which might be its greatest use marketing tool.
Speaker 2: And that's a very archaeological sort of way to look
Speaker 2: at things. I think something that we do as archaeologists
Speaker 2: is to look at everyday objects, sometimes really special objects,
Speaker 2: but often it's just everyday objects and look at them
Speaker 2: beyond their strict function to see what roles they perform
Speaker 2: in creating social cohesion, or supporting certain power structures or
Speaker 2: undermining certain power structures. So an artifactor on object is
Speaker 2: never just that. There's always more going on, because that's
Speaker 2: how humans work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's context behind every artifact in every museum, and
Speaker 1: that artifact, when it's interpreted with context, has so much
Speaker 1: more social and emotional value for sure. And now when
Speaker 1: it comes to a timeline here, we haven't been catapulting
Speaker 1: things into orbit for our entire existence on Earth. So
Speaker 1: what do you think was the first piece of space
Speaker 1: debris that was up there? When did we start flinging stuff?
Speaker 2: There's a rather wonderful story in that. I think the
Speaker 2: early nineteen fifties, a nuclear explosion in our underground cavity
Speaker 2: which had what is often called a manhole cover on
Speaker 2: the top actually caused that manhole cover to jet off
Speaker 2: the Earth and get into Earth orbit. So this was
Speaker 2: in the early fifties, and many people say this is
Speaker 2: the first thing that actually made it into space.
Speaker 1: Probably I'm freaking out about that. That's crazy to think
Speaker 1: that there's a manhole cover somewhere up there that's the
Speaker 1: first piece of space junk.
Speaker 2: Okay, there does seem to be some evidence that this
Speaker 2: story isn't apocryphal and may actually have happened. And of
Speaker 2: course we've got a difference here between things that can
Speaker 2: get high, like they get super high that's doing it,
Speaker 2: is super dup bright and kind of be in space,
Speaker 2: but they don't stay in space. They just come straight
Speaker 2: back down. So really, if we're looking at the first
Speaker 2: objects that got into Earth orbit, we have butt Neck
Speaker 2: one in nineteen fifty seven, And I often think about this.
Speaker 2: So in nineteen fifty seven, the first time that a
Speaker 2: human object that people can watch for and listen to,
Speaker 2: but Nick one had a little beat beat beat radio
Speaker 2: signal that became absolutely iconic. How extraordinary that must have
Speaker 2: been to think that there was a human object up
Speaker 2: there with the stars above your head, and of course,
Speaker 2: then you know later that year there's Sputnik two, which
Speaker 2: had poor little Laika the dog on board.
Speaker 1: Why poor little Leicho, what happened? Okay? So, Leika was
Speaker 1: a Russian dog plucked from the streets and quite literally
Speaker 1: thrust into fame as the first living creature to orbit Earth.
Speaker 1: She was launched in the thirteen foot tall Sputnik two
Speaker 1: the month after Sputnik one went up, and her name
Speaker 1: means the barker, and she only survived a few hours
Speaker 1: because the temperature controls failed, but her body continued to
Speaker 1: orbit the planet two thousand, five hundred and seventy times
Speaker 1: over the course of five months before a cremation caused
Speaker 1: by incineration re entering the atmosphere. Truly a rags to
Speaker 1: riches to ash's tail, but it got people very fired
Speaker 1: up about travels unbound by gravity.
Speaker 2: Then you had the first US spacecraft, So by nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty eight, it's not an extraordinary thing anymore. You know,
Speaker 2: there's two or three up there at any one time,
Speaker 2: and then suddenly it's like boom. This whole thing takes
Speaker 2: off every year, more and more and more, until we
Speaker 2: get to the point here in twenty twenty where there
Speaker 2: is going to be a predicted thirty thousand Starlink satellites
Speaker 2: manufactured by SpaceX in Earth orbit in the next ten years.
Speaker 2: At the present time, there are around about two thousand
Speaker 2: functioning satellites, maybe around four thousand not functioning whole satellites,
Speaker 2: and over thirty five thousand bits of junk that are
Speaker 2: greater than ten centimeters. So going from nineteen fifty seven,
Speaker 2: when there's just that one little beat beat beep up
Speaker 2: in the sky to twenty twenty, when we'll be looking
Speaker 2: at the night sky changing so radically that in fact
Speaker 2: the easiest things to see will be human manufactured objects.
Speaker 2: They will be spacecraft and satellites, and this will be
Speaker 2: part of people's everyday experience of going out at night.
Speaker 2: So that's an extraordinary change.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, I'm going to repeat those figures just to
Speaker 1: wrap our brains around them. So two to three thousand
Speaker 1: working satellites are up there now, plus four thousand defunct
Speaker 1: old ones, and there are thirty five thousand bits of
Speaker 1: space junk bigger than about the palm of your hand,
Speaker 1: and millions of smaller, shall we say, micro junk, And
Speaker 1: then soon thirty thousand new satellites will join five times
Speaker 1: the number that are up there now. But SpaceX can
Speaker 1: launch something like this because as a private Cosmos courier service,
Speaker 1: they have made launches much more affordable for themselves. So
Speaker 1: why not go into the satellite business itself instead of
Speaker 1: just being a four higher satellite delivery business for other companies,
Speaker 1: is their reasoning, and astronomer doctor Samantha Lawler wrote via
Speaker 1: the website The Conversation quote, We're about to undergo a
Speaker 1: dramatic transition and our experience of satellites. No longer will
Speaker 1: you escape your city for a camping trip and see
Speaker 1: the stars unobstructed. You'll have to look through a grid
Speaker 1: of crawling, bright satellites. No matter how remote your location.
Speaker 1: Starlinks are lower in orbit and brighter than ninety nine
Speaker 1: percent of other satellites out there, she writes. Other folks
Speaker 1: justify their presence saying that they're mostly just visible at
Speaker 1: dawn or dusk. And my good friend Casey Hanmer is
Speaker 1: in the rocket science business, and he writes a great
Speaker 1: space blog and said quote, Starlink's world spanning internet will
Speaker 1: bring high quality internet access to every corner of the globe.
Speaker 1: In highlighting starlink's enormous power for bringing about positive change.
Speaker 1: He writes, The Internet is able to help people hold
Speaker 1: leaders to account, communicate with people in other places, share ideas,
Speaker 1: invent new things, and unify the human race. The history
Speaker 1: of modernity is one of increased capacity for human data sharing,
Speaker 1: first through speeches and epic poetry, then writing, which enables
Speaker 1: the dead to speak to the living, data storage, and
Speaker 1: asynchronous communication. He continues by likening this development to the
Speaker 1: printing press. So naturally, these unnatural objects, possibly up to
Speaker 1: forty two thousand of them, have cheerleaders and have detractors.
Speaker 1: And I keep thinking of the Billy bragg lyric I
Speaker 1: saw too shooting stars tonight. I wished on them, but
Speaker 1: they were only satellites. So maybe we need to just
Speaker 1: start wishing on starlinks and hoping for the best. So
Speaker 1: does technology bleeding out toward the edges of our unknown spaces?
Speaker 1: Does that rate of advancement rely on these private space
Speaker 1: tech companies. Well, there's rights law, which bases the exponential
Speaker 1: progress of technology on the number of iterations of something produced.
Speaker 1: But what about Moore's law observed in the early computing days.
Speaker 2: Ma's law is the idea that I I think every
Speaker 2: two years computing power doubles, so we're still seeing that hold,
Speaker 2: and obviously spacecraft rely very much on computing power to
Speaker 2: do their jobs. I think one of the interesting things
Speaker 2: that is going on here is there's a constant tension
Speaker 2: between the services that can be delivered on the ground
Speaker 2: using terrestrial infrastructure and the services that can be delivered
Speaker 2: by satellite, and things like navigation, telecommunications, various other things
Speaker 2: aren't always best done by satellite. Now.
Speaker 1: The terrestrial where we get our phones to light up
Speaker 1: with essentially portable omniscions is mostly via phone circuits, fiber
Speaker 1: optic systems, cell towers, and broadband cables. So those long
Speaker 1: ass wires have to go over the rivers, through the woods,
Speaker 1: across the oceans, but they stay on Earth as opposed
Speaker 1: to circling above.
Speaker 2: So yes, when we're looking at the movement of telecommunications
Speaker 2: into Earth orbit, as we're seeing with the proposed Starlink
Speaker 2: satellites and other massive, massive constellations that have been proposed
Speaker 2: for the future, that's not a necessity. We don't have
Speaker 2: to run our telecommunications like that. These are technological and
Speaker 2: political choices, I guess, So that as an archaeologist. This
Speaker 2: is the sort of thing that's interesting to me. What
Speaker 2: kind of you know, social background leads to decisions being
Speaker 2: made which mean we end up being very space reliant
Speaker 2: and vulnerable. Massive soular flare, for example, could take out
Speaker 2: our navigation, communication and Earth observation satellites, take them offline,
Speaker 2: which happens from time to time, and so then what
Speaker 2: do we do we don't have backups on Earth? What
Speaker 2: do we do if we're over aligned on having space
Speaker 2: delivered Internet. So there's yeah, a lot of repercussions.
Speaker 1: That's maybe looking forward in the future, but as they exist. Now,
Speaker 1: do you have any space artifacts up there that are
Speaker 1: close to your heart or that particularly vACC you.
Speaker 2: There are so many amazing artifacts in Earth orbit, and
Speaker 2: so many that deserve to have their stories told more
Speaker 2: widely and to be appreciated by a much wider range
Speaker 2: of people. When people say space junk, I do have
Speaker 2: some that I feel very fond of. One of my
Speaker 2: all time favorites is Vanguard one, which was the second
Speaker 2: US satellite and is now the oldest human object in
Speaker 2: Earth orbit. So I think that's pretty special. Yeah, it's
Speaker 2: kind of beautiful too, So it's a polished silk, a
Speaker 2: sphere with six and tenor sticking out, and it's got
Speaker 2: a very sort of retro vintage feel and it's kind
Speaker 2: of friendly and warm, and I think of it. You know,
Speaker 2: it's been out there all this time. It's seen everything happen.
Speaker 2: It's seen you know, once upon a time it only
Speaker 2: had a few other neighbors. Now it's part of Orbit
Speaker 2: is starting to look busier and busier with all these
Speaker 2: new kids on the blog. I just think, you know
Speaker 2: what it's seen during its time in space. So I'm
Speaker 2: very fond of that satellite.
Speaker 1: I mean, how can you not be. The thing is
Speaker 1: a three pound, shiny little sphere that can fit in
Speaker 1: one hand, and one Russian politician nicknamed it the greepefruit
Speaker 1: because it's the size of a greekfruit, I guess, but
Speaker 1: a really big greeenfruit, more like a pamello, which is
Speaker 1: like a big greepefruit. So note I had to google it,
Speaker 1: and googling, I found out that grapefruits are an invention,
Speaker 1: and there are a cross between the pamelo and the
Speaker 1: sweet orange. World didn't even know about them until seventeen
Speaker 1: fifty when they were found being cultivated on a Caribbean
Speaker 1: island and then deemed the forbidden fruit, because there's really
Speaker 1: nothing tastier or sexier than I guess a graaffruit. So
Speaker 1: when America launched Vanguard one in nineteen fifty eight, the
Speaker 1: year after Smutnik went up, maybe the Russian leader called
Speaker 1: it a grapefruit, but meant to pommelo. I mean, for
Speaker 1: a size comparison, it would have been more accurate, but
Speaker 1: I guess weirder to call it the baby's head.
Speaker 2: Another of my favorites is an amateur satellite launched by
Speaker 2: a group of Australian students called Estralla Soska five. It
Speaker 2: was launched in nineteen seventy, but they started to design
Speaker 2: it and build it in the mid nineteen sixties, and
Speaker 2: it's part of a whole sequence of amateur satellites that
Speaker 2: started in the early nineteen sixties and is going today.
Speaker 2: And I love that story. You know, we think of
Speaker 2: space as being about the incredibly wealthy nations, the space
Speaker 2: bearing nations, with all of their technology and all of
Speaker 2: their brilliant scientists. I love that there's a whole tradition
Speaker 2: of satellites. There's probably I don't know fifty or sixty
Speaker 2: of these amateur satellites in orbit. These are just people
Speaker 2: saying we want to get involved in space, or a
Speaker 2: lot of small nations actually use this amateur program to
Speaker 2: launch their first satellites as well. So I love this.
Speaker 2: This is just about regular people getting involved in space,
Speaker 2: and it's such an important tradition to acknowledge and to
Speaker 2: talk about. I think if I think about some of
Speaker 2: the spacecraft technically called junk that I've become obsessed with recently,
Speaker 2: I do tend to move through different phases of obsession
Speaker 2: about these thing. There's a series of experimental satellites for
Speaker 2: testing radar that were launched throughout the sixties, and two
Speaker 2: of them I love. They're called dough Decapole one and
Speaker 2: Dodecapol two.
Speaker 1: Okay, these puppies were about the size of an uncomplicated
Speaker 1: beach ball and just adorable.
Speaker 2: And their kind of nickname is Porcupine one and two
Speaker 2: because they were like van Godewa. They were a little
Speaker 2: polished silver sphere and they had twelve antennas, and these
Speaker 2: antennas were twelve feet long each, so they really do
Speaker 2: look they're extraordinary. So if you can just imagine that
Speaker 2: a little silver ball with these incredibly long legs sticking
Speaker 2: out of it, and to me they're beautiful. And they're
Speaker 2: still up there in orbit right now, so they're space
Speaker 2: Jump two. But they tell a story of spacecraft design,
Speaker 2: those experimental projects in the early decades of the space age,
Speaker 2: when people are just testing equipment and systems and how
Speaker 2: things work.
Speaker 1: I guess how much is flatsam, how much is jetsam,
Speaker 1: how much is accidentally like whoops, there goes a caprice
Speaker 1: don bottle, you know, And how much is like we
Speaker 1: gotta just we're gotta cut this thing list.
Speaker 2: There's certainly a lot of accidents that happen in space. Okay,
Speaker 2: so you know, something gets up there, it just doesn't work,
Speaker 2: just doesn't work, nobody can turn it on. Something gets
Speaker 2: up there and one of its solar panels fails to
Speaker 2: roll so it doesn't have the energy it was supposed
Speaker 2: to have and it can't operate fully. Something gets up
Speaker 2: there and just come on explodes. Mm hmmm. So there's
Speaker 2: all kinds of reasons where things don't work. And interestingly,
Speaker 2: space insurance is a huge industry.
Speaker 1: Is it really.
Speaker 2: Industry?
Speaker 1: What are the deductibles? Like can you imagine they're like
Speaker 1: full coverage. You're like, yes, please, I can't even imagine
Speaker 1: what a fender vender on like a falcon is. Oh god,
Speaker 1: what a dragon mard.
Speaker 2: We think of space as being about the rockets and
Speaker 2: the satellites, but in fact there's this whole web of
Speaker 2: connected industries as well, which I think are interesting. Usually
Speaker 2: a satellite will be launched with an idea of what
Speaker 2: its mission life is, and everything will be planned around that,
Speaker 2: and it might get to that time and everything's going great,
Speaker 2: so they extend the mission life. The satellite keeps working.
Speaker 2: It's still got teams that people devoted to keeping it
Speaker 2: in its orbit, to getting the data to you know,
Speaker 2: sending updates to its codes, all of that stuff. Sometimes
Speaker 2: it gets to the end of its mission life and
Speaker 2: there's no compelling reason to keep it going, so they
Speaker 2: just stop using it, even though it might have fuel
Speaker 2: and battery and actually be physically capable of functioning well.
Speaker 2: But to keep a satellite working in orbit requires teams
Speaker 2: of people, and those resources are sometimes needed elsewhere. So
Speaker 2: there can be all kinds of reasons why a satellite
Speaker 2: just sort of stops being used, and whether you then
Speaker 2: say it's junk if technically it could be reused or
Speaker 2: how you classify it. In fact, it would be really interesting.
Speaker 2: As far as I know, nobody's ever made a list
Speaker 2: of satellites which have the capability of being reused.
Speaker 1: Well, there you go. You just inspired someone.
Speaker 2: I hope, so, I hope. So Usually when a satellite
Speaker 2: gets reused it's biinamateur group. But you know, there are
Speaker 2: plenty of people with those skills out there, and putting
Speaker 2: an old satellite to use collecting new scientific data, you know,
Speaker 2: would be an amazing thing to do. Well.
Speaker 1: That leads me to a question. It keeps nagging at me.
Speaker 1: I imagine that as an archaeologist, you do a lot
Speaker 1: of site work, you collect a lot of data, you
Speaker 1: go back, you analyze it, your crunch numbers. Right, what
Speaker 1: do you do if the objects you need to study
Speaker 1: are tens of thousands of miles away? How do you
Speaker 1: study it?
Speaker 2: It's true, archaeology is such a physical discipline. You know,
Speaker 2: we're camping in remote locations. Well they're not always remote,
Speaker 2: sometimes they're in the middle of cities. But we're out
Speaker 2: there walking the land. We're excavating things, getting covered in dirt,
Speaker 2: doing physical labor. We're walking through gorges and across beaches
Speaker 2: and mountains, and really we're present in these places. And
Speaker 2: part of the joy of archaeology is it's physicality. I guess.
Speaker 2: So you're right. It's a bit of a paradox. I
Speaker 2: can't go to space. I can't see the objects that
Speaker 2: I'm studying. I have to rely on proxies. I have
Speaker 2: to rely on catalogs and data and scientific papers and
Speaker 2: visualizations and things like that. So it is a bit
Speaker 2: different to normal archaeology. But I think I don't know.
Speaker 2: I spend a lot of time visualizing and imagining the
Speaker 2: spacecraft that I'm looking at, Like I will take a
Speaker 2: dry paragraph from some scientific paper and in my mind
Speaker 2: spin it into a vision of a particular spacecraft. One
Speaker 2: example of this is at one point I was doing
Speaker 2: a lot of work on all of the Russian landing
Speaker 2: craft on Venus.
Speaker 1: Okay, this was in the nineteen sixties, and Venera means
Speaker 1: Venus and Russian. And it wasn't until right now that
Speaker 1: I learned that venereal comes from Venus, the Roman goddess
Speaker 1: of love. They didn't name it a venereal probe and
Speaker 1: that's good.
Speaker 2: Which everybody said, Oh, you know, surface conditions on Venus
Speaker 2: are so harsh that they're just melted puddles of metal.
Speaker 2: And I thought, well, we don't know that. So I
Speaker 2: started trawling through all the scientific papers about surface conditions
Speaker 2: on Venus and what the spacecraft were made out of.
Speaker 2: And we do have pictures of them before they left Earth,
Speaker 2: and we also have artists visualizations of them the ven
Speaker 2: or Or Landers when they got to the surface of Venus.
Speaker 2: But you'd find little things in the papers that suddenly
Speaker 2: made you realize that those pictures were very incomplete. So
Speaker 2: there was one US surface mission to Venus called Pioneer Venus,
Speaker 2: and the landing craft had little windows made out of
Speaker 2: sapphires and diamonds. And this is just a little detail
Speaker 2: in the paper that describes its technology and exactly you're
Speaker 2: thinking sapphire and diamond eyes. That's beautiful, I think it is.
Speaker 2: That's just an engineering detail. But for an archaeologist, it's
Speaker 2: that kind of stuff that helps me relate to them
Speaker 2: as physical objects. And then I'll hope convey to other
Speaker 2: people that these are just so much more than a
Speaker 2: complicated bit of measure on a planetary surface.
Speaker 1: Oh. I also, I have so many questions from patrons.
Speaker 1: I tell them you were coming on the show. They
Speaker 1: launched a lot of questions that you know, so I'm
Speaker 1: just going to let them. I'm going to say them
Speaker 1: in their words. Okay, But before we get to your
Speaker 1: very good questions, let's toss some money toward a good
Speaker 1: cause chosen by Alice and this week it's going to
Speaker 1: Deadly Science, which provides STEM books and early reading material
Speaker 1: to every remote school in Australia. And it was founded
Speaker 1: by STEM communicator Corey Tutt, himself a Kimilori man, who
Speaker 1: saw that some remote schools had just fifteen books in
Speaker 1: their whole school library. And so Deadly Science has now
Speaker 1: shipped over fourteen thousand books, five hundred telescopes and chemistry sets,
Speaker 1: plus other resources to over one hundred and twelve schools,
Speaker 1: with more to comes. So Deadly Science wants to ensure
Speaker 1: all schools have access to our history of science by
Speaker 1: providing First Nations resources to connect back to our first scientists.
Speaker 1: There'll be a link to Deadly Science in the show
Speaker 1: notes in case you also want to throw some dollars
Speaker 1: their way. And our donation was made possible by the
Speaker 1: following sponsors of the show whoms I like. Okay, your
Speaker 1: questions starting with one that was orbiting a lot of
Speaker 1: your brains. Okay. One of the most repeatable questions I
Speaker 1: got Rada Vicaria, Anna Thompson, Andrew g so Cosino, Jen's Girl, Alvarez,
Speaker 1: Mason Turner, Heather Densmore, Justin McCormick, Matt Dee, Sebastian Osterbrink,
Speaker 1: Angeliae McDonald all wanted to know, essentially, how often does
Speaker 1: it fall to Earth?
Speaker 2: Ah, it's a very good question.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: So this is one of the other things about space junk.
Speaker 2: So once the satellite stops being used, it's all but
Speaker 2: can't be controlled or isn't controlled. So things that are
Speaker 2: low enough get affected by atmospheric drag. The atmosphere starts
Speaker 2: to lower their orbit and pull them back in. Oh dear.
Speaker 2: So the answer to that question is that every day
Speaker 2: bits of space junk get dragged back into the atmosphere
Speaker 2: and burn up. They're not always large bits, and they're
Speaker 2: not always whole satellites, But I would say, I don't know,
Speaker 2: probably once a week there's a whole satellite or a
Speaker 2: large piece of space junk that re enters and you
Speaker 2: can actually go and find out there are sites which
Speaker 2: track these re entries.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh. Really, so it was like forecast bonked
Speaker 1: by space junk.
Speaker 2: That is pretty much it. There's two levels of forecast.
Speaker 2: One is what's going to re enter the atmosphere, and
Speaker 2: the good news about this is stuff mostly completely burns up.
Speaker 2: The risks of being hit by a space junk are
Speaker 2: incredibly low, okay. And then there's what's looking like it
Speaker 2: will likely collide actually in Earth orbit. That's what's really
Speaker 2: concerning because those collisions on orbit create more space junk,
Speaker 2: which will collide with more space junk and more space
Speaker 2: junk and all of that. But if people are really interested,
Speaker 2: they can go to celestetrak Astriograph, Heavens Above Sea Set
Speaker 2: and a number of other satellite catalogs that you can
Speaker 2: easily find on Google, and you will be able to
Speaker 2: get the updates on what's looking like it will re enter.
Speaker 1: Oh great, of course, I look this up and all
Speaker 1: those tiny glowing dots sparkling like seed beads spilled over
Speaker 1: a rendering of Earth. It's a bit bargling to see,
Speaker 1: even color coded. So the sheer number of thousands of
Speaker 1: dead satellites up there is really apparent, just cruising like
Speaker 1: very expensive ghost ships in the night. And as I
Speaker 1: was staring at these animations though, there was this peculiar
Speaker 1: mode and I clicked on it and they were starlinks
Speaker 1: all in a line like a Marty Grand necklace and
Speaker 1: circling the planet, just staggering to see. To expand on
Speaker 1: that a little bit, Several different patrons asked Gwen Kelly,
Speaker 1: who is a terrestrial archaeologist and first time question asker
Speaker 1: Pim Bonders with a great name. Also first time question
Speaker 1: asker Juliet Churka and Mallory I'll be first time question
Speaker 1: asker Meryl Stark, Kazia Wanuski and my buddy j R.
Speaker 1: Rollaff asked. Does space junk want to become bigger and
Speaker 1: bigger blobs? Or does space Junk's orbit decay and just
Speaker 1: fall into the atmosphere? Jr asked is space drunk clearing
Speaker 1: itself more slowly than we're replacing it? Also? Why was
Speaker 1: Firefly canceled? He's got that question. Did you ever see Firefly?
Speaker 1: I guess.
Speaker 2: I didn't ever see it, but I know it had
Speaker 2: a very devoted following, So I wish that need the answer.
Speaker 1: To that JR. I gotcha, and it's means this. Joss
Speaker 1: Whedon's I Fi futuristic questern, which aired for just eleven
Speaker 1: episodes in twenty or two, had a terrible Friday night
Speaker 1: time slide, just unfortunate. Also, Fox aired all the episodes
Speaker 1: out of order, and then the series finale titled Objects
Speaker 1: in Space. Hahuh, I see why you asked now wasn't
Speaker 1: even supposed to be the finale at all, So rip Firefly.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of stuff in there. One is that
Speaker 2: we are in fact putting more things into orbit, which
Speaker 2: create more junk than is being dragged out of the atmosphere.
Speaker 2: So that is one of the problems at the moment.
Speaker 2: I think at the beginning there was a question about
Speaker 2: whether bits of space junk tend to kind of coalesce
Speaker 2: into blops. And while there are the really tiny, tiny fragments,
Speaker 2: so the size of space junk goes from the size
Speaker 2: of a house down to you know, microscopic submelli metal level,
Speaker 2: a little little time tiny particles, and there are millions
Speaker 2: and millions of these, and some of them, depending on
Speaker 2: their origin, kind of are in little clouds. But it's
Speaker 2: not really a blob but one of the big questions.
Speaker 2: So most of the outer planets in the Solar System
Speaker 2: have ring systems. So we all know Saturn's beautiful rings,
Speaker 2: but in fact, Neptune has rings, Euranus has rings, Eurmus
Speaker 2: has rings. Yeah, I said it, and I'm not backing
Speaker 2: down from that either. So most of most of those
Speaker 2: planets actually have rings. And in the inner Solar System, Mercury, Venus, Mars,
Speaker 2: Earth do not have rings. But there was a paper
Speaker 2: written in nineteen seventy. It's very famous paper. It's by
Speaker 2: Donald Kessler, after whom the Kessler syndrome is named, and
Speaker 2: Verton Corpele, and they tried to figure out if Earth
Speaker 2: could get its own ring system made out of space junk,
Speaker 2: which I actually think could be quite beautiful.
Speaker 1: Alice says. The good slash bad news.
Speaker 2: Is we don't have enough space junk to get a
Speaker 2: ring system that would form naturally. So apparently there's not
Speaker 2: enough mass, which means blobbiness and clumpiness isn't going to
Speaker 2: sort of, you know, we might not get any mini
Speaker 2: moons that are made out of space junk hall mushed
Speaker 2: up together like a Bretsher or something like that. So
Speaker 2: it's an interesting question about orbital dynamics to think about
Speaker 2: why that is, And maybe part of that is we
Speaker 2: know we have to clean space junk up. People often
Speaker 2: think I'll be upset about this. They say, alas, how
Speaker 2: can people will get rid of these artifacts that you love?
Speaker 2: You know, say, well, if it's part of the sort
Speaker 2: of natural evolution of space industry, I would like them
Speaker 2: to keep the beautiful stuff which has a lot of
Speaker 2: cultural significance if it's a low But if it's a
Speaker 2: high risk, then heritage isn't enough to counteract that. But
Speaker 2: we will have to get rid of some of it,
Speaker 2: and for some of it, the best solution is to
Speaker 2: push it higher out of the way of the high
Speaker 2: density orbits. And we actually have a graveyard orbit at
Speaker 2: the moment, which is out beyond the geostationary orbit, so
Speaker 2: which is where telecommunication satellites are. It's about thirty five
Speaker 2: thousand kilometers high above the Earth. Wow, it's quite a
Speaker 2: complicated task to get something that high. And then when
Speaker 2: these satellites get to the end of their life, ideally
Speaker 2: they have enough fuel left to boost them just a
Speaker 2: bit higher, about five hundred kilometers above into the graveyard orbit. Wow.
Speaker 2: So we do kind of have a ring, a design
Speaker 2: structured ring in that graveyard orbit, but without it being controlled,
Speaker 2: the spacecraft tend to sort of drift out, missed away.
Speaker 2: There's not enough gravitational weight to hold them together. But
Speaker 2: maybe in the future we might think making some kind
Speaker 2: of structure out of all of this space junk into
Speaker 2: I don't know what you call it, engineered art, astro
Speaker 2: engineered art. That might be something we could do.
Speaker 1: The biggest Burning Man installation in the universe, just well
Speaker 1: died space junk. Carolyn Butler has a very serious question.
Speaker 1: Wants to know are there five hundred billion single unmatched
Speaker 1: socks floating out there, and if not, any insight on
Speaker 1: where they might be.
Speaker 2: If we're going to take the precedent or from Hithacker's
Speaker 2: Guide to the Galaxy and the biro pens that have
Speaker 2: gone missing over the years, all of those socks are
Speaker 2: not currently in a th orbit. They are on some
Speaker 2: other planet somewhere. There haven't been any sightings of socks,
Speaker 2: so I regret to say until that planet is discovered,
Speaker 2: we're just going to have to live with our sock situation.
Speaker 1: So something is afoot on another planet perhaps Now, speaking
Speaker 1: of extraterrestrial matters Kate H. Jesse Dragon and Sadie Baker
Speaker 1: and Alyssa Ramirez RJ. Deutsche. They all had the same
Speaker 1: question in patron Samantha Healy's student Peters words, have you
Speaker 1: found unidentified space junk from somewhere that is not Earth,
Speaker 1: something that we don't know what it is, from somewhere
Speaker 1: we've never been a lot of patrons wanted to know,
Speaker 1: do we ever see any alien space junk? Like what
Speaker 1: about the ooh muhamoa Oh.
Speaker 2: Yes, So I will probably not pronounce it correctly, but
Speaker 2: um ohmur was an extra solar object that just barreled
Speaker 2: into our Solar system at very high speed, did a
Speaker 2: bit of a sort of gravity bend around the side,
Speaker 2: and then took off again. And its inclination and speed
Speaker 2: indicated it had come from a very long distance away
Speaker 2: somewhere in the galaxy. So there was some speculation by
Speaker 2: particularly by one astrophysicist, is the very first interstellar object
Speaker 2: to have been discovered in the Solar System, sort of
Speaker 2: like having a guest for dinner, RV lobe that this
Speaker 2: was an alien spacecraft or some kind of alien object.
Speaker 2: Now I can't say that it isn't. But scientific consensus
Speaker 2: is that it is not an alien object. And you know,
Speaker 2: we might revise our opinions about that if we get
Speaker 2: to observe other similar objects. We don't know when they're
Speaker 2: going to come. The appearance of that object was a surprise.
Speaker 2: No one knew that it was on its way. But
Speaker 2: when we have a little bit more to compare with,
Speaker 2: it might be possible to to be clearer about that.
Speaker 2: Now there was something, oh, alien things in Earth orbit.
Speaker 2: There's actually a bit of a conspiracy theory, a bit
Speaker 2: of a conspiracy theory about an object called the Black Knight. Ooh,
Speaker 2: and the Black Knight is supposed to have been in
Speaker 2: orbit around Earth for thirteen thousand years, so it was
Speaker 2: not made by humans. And this pops up every now
Speaker 2: and then I get Black Knight conspiracy theorists emailing because
Speaker 2: they think, I mean, I try to be generous and
Speaker 2: respectful when I get these sorts of queries, but they
Speaker 2: often see space and archaeology combined and think that I
Speaker 2: will be somehow less scientific than other space scientists or
Speaker 2: astronomers that have approached. And I regret to say that
Speaker 2: isn't the case. But I do get queries about this,
Speaker 2: and there is no evidence that anything other than objects
Speaker 2: manufactured by humans has ever been in Earth orbit.
Speaker 1: When Listener and Kathy Flint on that note asked, is
Speaker 1: there any type of space junk, real or potential that
Speaker 1: scares you to your core? Oh?
Speaker 2: Gosh, well, there's one piece of space junk that I
Speaker 2: and many others find very worrying. I don't know if
Speaker 2: it scares me to my core. But oh, actually there
Speaker 2: is one that scares me to my core. But I'll
Speaker 2: do the I'll do the There's a European Space Agency
Speaker 2: spacecraft called Envysat, which was Earth observation scientific satellite launched
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety two, I think. And it's huge, the
Speaker 2: size of two double decker buses. It's now a piece
Speaker 2: of space junk, and it's uncontrolled, and if anything hits it,
Speaker 2: it will create so much space junk that the effects
Speaker 2: are going to be really, really bad. Oh no, but
Speaker 2: we also haven't got any way of getting it out
Speaker 2: of orbit at the moment, so I find that quite scary.
Speaker 2: All we need is for something big enough to hit
Speaker 2: Envysat and create thousands, hundreds of thousands more bits of debris,
Speaker 2: and we have a pretty bad situation in Earth orbit.
Speaker 2: So that's scary. But what really terrifies me if we're
Speaker 2: going to talk about visceral terror, is an experimental space
Speaker 2: station called Genesis one, or it could be Genesis two.
Speaker 2: There are two Genesis inflatable space stations empty currently in
Speaker 2: Earth orbit. They were made by Bigelow Aerospace and they're
Speaker 2: related to the technology of the inflatable module being tested
Speaker 2: on the International Space Station right now. So these space
Speaker 2: stations were sent up because nobody was ever intended to
Speaker 2: live in them or you visit them. Even they were
Speaker 2: sent up with various kind of interesting or funny objects.
Speaker 2: One of them has Madagascar hissing cockroaches. Now we know
Speaker 2: that cockroaches are basically predicted to be able to survive
Speaker 2: a nuclear holocaust. Cockroaches are hardy, and cockroaches and don't
Speaker 2: tell me I'm wrong. Cockroaches are smart.
Speaker 1: Oh, there absolutely.
Speaker 2: It worries me that someone deliberately said cockroaches into space,
Speaker 2: and at some point that spacecraft might be deorbited or
Speaker 2: maybe someone will go inside and we will have found
Speaker 2: that our real problem isn't the space junk. Our real
Speaker 2: problem is space cockroaches who have involved and mutated and
Speaker 2: are coming to take us over. And I'm not even joking.
Speaker 1: I wonder if they're out there nibbling on tartar greeds
Speaker 1: maybe And actually I.
Speaker 2: Guess we sent food up for them.
Speaker 1: What are you looking? Apple cores and just cheese rind
Speaker 1: a pizza crust just float around. Oh this actually dovestails
Speaker 1: perfectly into first time question. Asker Marie Honore asked how
Speaker 1: dangerous is space junk? Like is it radioactive or toxic?
Speaker 1: Monica author asked, is there any special decontamination process after
Speaker 1: things have crashed landed on Earth? Like can we get
Speaker 1: space junk down? And what do we use on it?
Speaker 1: Like purel?
Speaker 2: That's a really great question, because in fact, I should say,
Speaker 2: if anybody is in the situation where a piece of
Speaker 2: space junk has survived falling out of allbit and has
Speaker 2: allownded near them, don't go and touch it. So the
Speaker 2: first thing is some of spacecraft fuels are quite toxic.
Speaker 2: Hydrozene is one of those. It's very commonly used. Fuel
Speaker 2: tanks are among them. More robust parts of your average
Speaker 2: satellite rocket or spacecraft. They're made out of stainless steel
Speaker 2: or titanium aluminium alloys, so they're quite robust. But that
Speaker 2: fuel is toxic, so don't touch it. There's other spacecraft
Speaker 2: materials like beryllium, for example, which is a metal. People
Speaker 2: might remember the beryllium spheres from Galaxy Quest, so that
Speaker 2: is also toxic. Do not touch it. So if a
Speaker 2: piece of space junk lands near you, first of all,
Speaker 2: it doesn't it's not fined as keepers. It actually belongs
Speaker 2: to the launching state, so you can't take it and
Speaker 2: sell it on eBay ha, don't touch it. Alert your nearest.
Speaker 2: I don't know government authority, space agency, if you have
Speaker 2: one environmental protection agency something like that. As for decontamination processes,
Speaker 2: I would say, don't undertake them yourself. I'm not sure
Speaker 2: what you would do. But not touching these objects is
Speaker 2: this will You'll hardly ever be in this situation because
Speaker 2: not that much actually survives down to the surface. But
Speaker 2: the other interesting question is nuclear fuel. So there is
Speaker 2: kind of now a standard that nuclear fuel is only
Speaker 2: used for deep space missions, but there are quite a
Speaker 2: few satellites in Earth orbit that are powered by RTG's.
Speaker 1: RTG you ask, I have the same question. That's a
Speaker 1: radioisotope thermoelectric generator or a nuclear powered battery. It's just
Speaker 1: full of that good, good juice.
Speaker 2: They have plutonium, for example, so it's not the same
Speaker 2: as a nuclear reactor. We don't have any satellites powered
Speaker 2: by a nuclear reactor, but we do have nuclear fuel,
Speaker 2: if you see the difference. And in nineteen seventy eight,
Speaker 2: the year before Skyline re entered, there was a very
Speaker 2: terrifying and at the time I think largely hushed up
Speaker 2: incident where a Russian Cosmos spacecraft re entered the atmosphere.
Speaker 2: It had nuclear fuel, so the Cosmos re entered, broke
Speaker 2: up and the nuclear fuel was scattered over a broad
Speaker 2: area in the Arctic Circle, over forests. There were indigenous
Speaker 2: communities who lived in these areas, and it was highly,
Speaker 2: highly toxic, and it took a massive international cleanup effort
Speaker 2: to try and recover all those bits of fuel. The
Speaker 2: good news is there are still spacecraft inner orbit that
Speaker 2: have nuclear fuel, but as far as I know, none
Speaker 2: of them are a massive risk. But it is just
Speaker 2: worth keeping in mind. Another reason not to go near
Speaker 2: space junt. I mean, you could go and look up
Speaker 2: the predictions and work out if the predicted thing to
Speaker 2: reenterineer you is something which does not have nuclear fuel,
Speaker 2: so you can do that, but you couldn't guarantee its
Speaker 2: toxicity in terms of other products and materials that are
Speaker 2: used in spacecraft.
Speaker 1: Right, are human remains ever shot into space?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 1: You bet they are, But usually they're already ashes, and
Speaker 1: they orbit and re enter the atmosphere and burn up
Speaker 1: with all the flamboyance and indulgence of a twice baked potato. Also,
Speaker 1: it should be noted that doctor Eugene Shoemaker, one of
Speaker 1: the founders of planetary science, is just NBD chillin' on
Speaker 1: the Moon. Some of his ashes were delivered there by NASA.
Speaker 1: Just the ultimate backstage pass. You got to know someone, though,
Speaker 1: And that space funeral question was asked by Felix and
Speaker 1: casein Wally and on the topic of Wally. Aaron Onunsen,
Speaker 1: Michelle Neer and Felix asl have been harboring questions about
Speaker 1: it since two thousand and eight. A lot of people
Speaker 1: wanted to know how you felt about Wally the movie Wally,
Speaker 1: where there's essentially just like a shell of garbage around Earth.
Speaker 1: Any thoughts are we gonna let it get to that point?
Speaker 2: Do you think what you see in the film Wally,
Speaker 2: and in fact, it's an incredibly evocative scene Little Wally,
Speaker 2: the garbage robot clinging to the rocket, which hunctures this
Speaker 2: thick layer of space junk, really thick, and Sputnik one
Speaker 2: gets caught in Wally's hands or a bit of the rocket.
Speaker 2: And I actually show that film to my classes when
Speaker 2: I'm teaching space archaeology in contemporary archaeology. It's a beautiful,
Speaker 2: fun film, but there's a lot going on in there.
Speaker 2: It's a really graphic representation of It's not an accurate
Speaker 2: representation because space junk, in fact, is very far apart.
Speaker 2: You would never see something that looked like like that
Speaker 2: in Wally. But the point of that scene in Wally
Speaker 2: isn't to accurately represent a future situation where space junk
Speaker 2: is that. It's a metaphor, it's a warning. It's part
Speaker 2: of the degradation of the surface of Earth as you
Speaker 2: see it in that film, literally covered in garbage with
Speaker 2: only cockroaches and robot alive. And then you go to
Speaker 2: space and you see you see the devastation that has
Speaker 2: been created in Earth orbit. So I think it's a
Speaker 2: very powerful piece of the film. But the thing to
Speaker 2: remember is that space junk is in fact, I can't
Speaker 2: think of a good visualization. It's slightly When people see
Speaker 2: those images that space agencies have made showing the distribution
Speaker 2: of space junk, they're usually not to scale, so you
Speaker 2: do get the impression things are very close together, but
Speaker 2: it actually isn't like that. I suppose if we did
Speaker 2: make our own planetary ring out of space junk, it
Speaker 2: might look a little bit like that scene you see
Speaker 2: in Wally. Wally's such an interesting film because it's also
Speaker 2: got a strong heritage theme in it. Of course, Wally's
Speaker 2: little collection of objects that he doesn't fully always know
Speaker 2: what are for, but he finds esthetically pleasing or they
Speaker 2: speak to him in some way. So if you haven't
Speaker 2: seen Wally, I'm pretty sure as people would have, but
Speaker 2: it really is worth looking at.
Speaker 1: Oh, I haven't seen it yet, so now I haven't. No,
Speaker 1: I know, I haven't seen it yet, but I understand
Speaker 1: I'll ball my eyes out at some point during it.
Speaker 2: I'm afraid you will.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, I'll report back as soon as I watch Wally.
Speaker 1: You will know because I will tell you about my
Speaker 1: emotional breakdown in the secret at the end of the
Speaker 1: episode perhaps next week. Oh also, I took a Twitter
Speaker 1: poll and twelve percent of you had no idea that
Speaker 1: I tell a secret at the end of each episode
Speaker 1: after the credits, which is amazing. So many things to
Speaker 1: go back and learn, some of them you don't want
Speaker 1: to know, but have fun. So Matt d Sofkosonoe, Wayne Hovey,
Speaker 1: Kaisa Venuski, Star, Misty Dulovich and Kate h asked, what's
Speaker 1: the next space junk collision event.
Speaker 2: Going to be?
Speaker 1: A lot of people wanted to know. Our Space Agency
Speaker 1: is concerned about collisions with space junk.
Speaker 2: Oh. Yes, So there's a whole massive area of study
Speaker 2: and policy and law in the international space community that's
Speaker 2: called Space Situational Awareness or SSA, and that's basically about
Speaker 2: how to manage the space junk situation so that we
Speaker 2: can continue to use satellites for services like telecommunications, navigation,
Speaker 2: Earth observation, where the prediction all of those things. So
Speaker 2: this is a massive concern. There is actually an international
Speaker 2: committee which is made up of representatives from most of
Speaker 2: the space agencies whose job it is to look at this.
Speaker 2: The United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of out
Speaker 2: of space has This is a major item on its agenda,
Speaker 2: so there's no need to be concerned that this is
Speaker 2: not on the radars of the people making the decisions.
Speaker 2: But we do have problems because it's not possible at
Speaker 2: this point in time to just whizz up there and
Speaker 2: pull out a dangerous piece of junk. There's technical issues
Speaker 2: with going into orbit to try and remove something, and
Speaker 2: then there are international relations issues because if you have
Speaker 2: the capacity to actively remove a piece of junk from orbit,
Speaker 2: you have the capacity to remove an active satellite, maybe
Speaker 2: a military one. I'm sorry, didn't mean to do that, really, sorry,
Speaker 2: but you know this could be the cause of very
Speaker 2: serious conflict on Earth and in space. So while we're
Speaker 2: still very much working on the technology, and there have
Speaker 2: been a couple of breakthroughs in recent times, that part
Speaker 2: of it we haven't made a lot of progress on.
Speaker 2: From my perspective, I think lobbying by the public could
Speaker 2: have an impact here.
Speaker 1: How would you even start to do that? So much
Speaker 1: worse than cleaning out your classets? Okay, well, first off,
Speaker 1: it costs money to go to space, a lot of it,
Speaker 1: so that's kind of a thorny business issue. First, our says,
Speaker 1: But all kinds of propositions have been made, from nets,
Speaker 1: to land based lasers, to an eighteen mile cloud of
Speaker 1: fine tungsten dust that sweeps lighter particles into re entry
Speaker 1: with it, burning as it accelerates toward Earth. But what
Speaker 1: about like a space tug bolt.
Speaker 2: So a little space tug sent up in this way
Speaker 2: would have to take so much fuel with it to
Speaker 2: do more than get just one thing that you know,
Speaker 2: it hardly becomes worth doing. There's lots and lots of
Speaker 2: proposals for different kinds of methods. So last year there
Speaker 2: was a successful test of the harpoon method, in which
Speaker 2: a spacecraft would spare a little harpoon out into space,
Speaker 2: which would pierce the body of a piece of space
Speaker 2: jung and then it could be maneuvered back into the
Speaker 2: atmosphere to burn up. This was done successfully in space.
Speaker 2: That was the first time we've had a test like that.
Speaker 2: But that's what it was. It was a test. It
Speaker 2: doesn't and we can go out tomorrow and start sparing
Speaker 2: all of these objects. There's all kinds of proposals for
Speaker 2: sales and nets and tethers. What the standard at the
Speaker 2: moment is that if you are launching a mission, you
Speaker 2: design the mission to minimize the amount of space junk
Speaker 2: that it will create. Sadly, a lot of spacecraft operators
Speaker 2: don't do that at all because it often adds weight
Speaker 2: and expense to the mission. So something that could be
Speaker 2: done would be to somehow figure out how to enforce
Speaker 2: compliance across the board so we're not continuing to create
Speaker 2: new debris. So it's going to be a while, I
Speaker 2: think before we've really got this problem under control.
Speaker 1: Right, And I was way too many years old before
Speaker 1: I found out that cruise ships just unload their toilets
Speaker 1: in international waters? Is that happening on the iss are there?
Speaker 1: Space turns? To be honest with.
Speaker 2: Me, I didn't actually know that about cruise ships.
Speaker 1: But can you believe they just open their hatch once
Speaker 1: you get like two miles from shore or something? It's horrifying. Okay,
Speaker 1: it's not that close. It's not two miles. That was hyperbole.
Speaker 1: It's actually three miles, three miles from whatever beach you're on.
Speaker 1: Just a floating city could be streaming porta potty slurry
Speaker 1: into the ocean with a fart and a shrug. Now
Speaker 1: is it happening over our heads? As well, gloriously Patron
Speaker 1: Hollis had the same question, But I wonder do they
Speaker 1: are there ree strike boos up there?
Speaker 2: Well? Some of the Russian space stations used to eject
Speaker 2: liquid waste, as we call it, and there were stories
Speaker 2: that the Mere Space Station, which was deorbited in two
Speaker 2: thousand and one, was surrounded by a little cloud of
Speaker 2: frozen urine. Now, so people might be aware that the
Speaker 2: Space Shuttle windows used to be placed regularly because they
Speaker 2: had been bombarded by little, tiny, tiny micro meteorites and
Speaker 2: bits of space jung. They're very, very expensive to replace,
Speaker 2: but some of them came back with little, tiny yellow
Speaker 2: streaks where it appears that a piece of frozen urine
Speaker 2: had plowed through the surface of the window. As for
Speaker 2: solid waste, I don't think so, but I could be wrong.
Speaker 2: Most of this stuff would be very low orbit and
Speaker 2: is likely re entered. What they do on the International
Speaker 2: Space Station is they eject a lot of their waste
Speaker 2: in spacecraft with the enter and burn up so it's
Speaker 2: not up there floating around. And they do have to
Speaker 2: bring some samples back for biomedical research as well. But
Speaker 2: the ISS is pretty clean. It's not contributing to turds
Speaker 2: in space? You know.
Speaker 1: Well, I guess, on the topic of things that are crappy,
Speaker 1: what is the worst part about being a space archaeologist,
Speaker 1: either from something petty to something existential, like what sucks
Speaker 1: the most about your job?
Speaker 2: I guess I still sometimes encounter people who think that
Speaker 2: it's ridiculous to look at the social and symbolic and
Speaker 2: political aspects of space endeavors in the twentieth and twenty
Speaker 2: first centuries, who think it's just about the technology. And
Speaker 2: I also come across people who think, because I might
Speaker 2: be critical of some aspect of space policy or space industry,
Speaker 2: that this means I'm some unreconstructed luddite who never wants
Speaker 2: to go to space. And I do find these attitudes
Speaker 2: quite mystifying. I'm not interested in justifying what I do.
Speaker 2: But if people come around eventually and think, oh, well,
Speaker 2: you know, maybe this is important, that's fantastic. But I
Speaker 2: suppose there's a sort of a hardcore, a hardcore hardcore
Speaker 2: of the space community for whom there are no ethical
Speaker 2: dimensions to what we're doing and there are no negative
Speaker 2: impacts on anyone. And it can be quite interesting getting
Speaker 2: into those conversations.
Speaker 1: And what about your favorite thing about it? What just
Speaker 1: gives you butterflies still about it? Even doing this for
Speaker 1: twenty years.
Speaker 2: Well, we know so much about human space exploration. There's
Speaker 2: so many books and archives and papers and oral history
Speaker 2: interviews and documents. You know, there's so much information to
Speaker 2: work with. But I will still come across, you know,
Speaker 2: odd little facts or personal stories or weird things just
Speaker 2: hiding in some odd corner of an archive, or some
Speaker 2: casual statement that someone makes to me. There's so many
Speaker 2: amazing stories about the human engagement with space. And telling
Speaker 2: those stories and finding them and communicating and sharing them
Speaker 2: for me is the most exciting part of being space archaeologist.
Speaker 1: And of course people can find that inductor Space Junk
Speaker 1: versus the Universe archaeology in the future.
Speaker 2: I'm guessing that, yes, lots of these stories loaded into there.
Speaker 1: How silky smooth was my segue there. It's just masterful. Also,
Speaker 1: it's just an excellent book. And where can people find you?
Speaker 1: Because I know this is something that I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: going to have dreams about Space Junk for for decades.
Speaker 1: I think, where can you find where you're writing and
Speaker 1: where you're telling these stories?
Speaker 2: So you mentioned my book doctor Space Junk versus the
Speaker 2: Universe Areology in the Future, So that's a sort of
Speaker 2: a general overview of the field of space archaeology, also
Speaker 2: space history, and also a discussion about some of their
Speaker 2: ethical issues and some of those stories that I love telling.
Speaker 2: So they're all in that book. You can also find
Speaker 2: me on Twitter at doctor space Junk, so I talk
Speaker 2: a lot about space archaeology and heritage and cake over
Speaker 2: there as well, so there will be cakes. You just
Speaker 2: have to live with that. I also write a blog
Speaker 2: called Space Age Archaeology, and that's often got things in
Speaker 2: it that aren't quiet enough to write into an academic article,
Speaker 2: but just little thoughts and threads that I want to
Speaker 2: follow and investigate.
Speaker 1: Amazing. Thank you so much. I'm so glad that you
Speaker 1: got into my orbit and then I got into yours.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for letting me ask you so
Speaker 1: many questions.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you Ellie. Your question we're very insightful, and
Speaker 2: so was that of the pageons. It has been a
Speaker 2: pleasure to talk about this with you.
Speaker 1: So ask focused folks spacey questions, because how the hell
Speaker 1: else would you know about spacep and sacrificial cosma Nott
Speaker 1: docs So do follow doctor Elis Gorman on all platforms
Speaker 1: and get her book Doctor Space Junk Versus The Universe,
Speaker 1: Archaeology and the Future, and there will be a link
Speaker 1: to all of that in the show notes. You can
Speaker 1: follow me if you want to at Ali Ward just
Speaker 1: one l on Twitter and Instagram. We're also at Ologies
Speaker 1: on Twitter and Instagram, so do be my friend. And
Speaker 1: if you need a sweet Ologies gift, including a mask,
Speaker 1: order soon go to ologiesmarch dot com. The link is
Speaker 1: in the show notes. Thank you Shannon Feltus and Bonnie
Speaker 1: Dutch for managing that they host a very funny podcast
Speaker 1: called You Are That, so do check that out. Thank
Speaker 1: you Aaron Talbert, who admins Theologies podcast Facebook group will
Speaker 1: of really good human People. Thank you to Emily White
Speaker 1: and all the transcribers who help get free transcripts available
Speaker 1: for anyone who needs access to them. Those are at
Speaker 1: the link in the show notes. Thank you Caleb Patten
Speaker 1: for bleeping episodes so they are kid safe. Those are
Speaker 1: also on my website for free at the link in
Speaker 1: the show notes. Thank you and happy birthday to Valerina
Speaker 1: and my right hand lady Noel Dilworth, who helps schedule
Speaker 1: all the guests. Thank you to the wise and wonderful
Speaker 1: Jared Sleeper of my Gem Media, who not only assistant
Speaker 1: edits but has also kept the trains running on time
Speaker 1: and gotten me into a better production schedule this week,
Speaker 1: which is very exciting. Thank you as always to the
Speaker 1: Mission Control lead editor Stephen Ray Morris, who puts all
Speaker 1: my brain debris together. He also hosts the Percast and
Speaker 1: See Jurassic Write, two really great podcasts. And Nick Thorburn
Speaker 1: wrote the launch in re Entry Music and he's in
Speaker 1: a band called Islands. Now a few stick around, pass
Speaker 1: the credits. Maybe this is the first time you've ever
Speaker 1: heard me tell a secret. Jared and I happen to
Speaker 1: watch this new comedy special on Netflix called Nate, which
Speaker 1: is so good and so weird, and in the middle
Speaker 1: of it, we just looked at each other because we
Speaker 1: realized that we looked exactly like the two characters central
Speaker 1: to the show, and so it's a joke. We took
Speaker 1: a picture and put up a side by side pick
Speaker 1: and the star of the show saw it and reposted
Speaker 1: it and also said that we were the couple that
Speaker 1: inspired the whole show, which was fucking hilarious of her
Speaker 1: and also not true. We don't know her, but I
Speaker 1: had such a weird fangirl moment of being like, ah,
Speaker 1: she noticed me. But also I hope no one takes
Speaker 1: as the truth, because if you watch the show you
Speaker 1: would know why. But yes, the resemblance is uncanny, particularly
Speaker 1: the hair. But it's a very great thought provoking special.
Speaker 1: It's called NATO Netflix. Okay, that's it. Don't be afraid
Speaker 1: to fail, cut banks, textra, crush, huff some bark. All right,
Speaker 1: that's enough enemy for by pacadermatologyology, no zoology, lithology and Technology, meteorology,
Speaker 1: old pathology, anthology, seriology, sinology, m