The second date is coming to loom larger than the first, though H istory remembers October 4, 1957 better than January 4, 1958. The world's first satellite, Sputnik, was launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957.
The Los Angeles Times shouted "RUSS SATELLITE CIRCLING EARTH"
The Chicago Daily Tribune said "Reds fire 'MOON' into sky".
Three months later, the little beachball-sized satellite fell from the sky, burning up in the fiery heat of reentering the atmosphere. The world's first satellite was the first piece of space debris. It wouldn't be the final one.
A huge belt of junk has been accumulating around the Earth since 1957 There are at least 36,500 space debris objects greater than 10 cm across and 1 million objects ranging from 1 cm to 10 cm. It also poses a collision risk to both crewed and uncrewed spaceships, as well as threatening the 7.7 billion of us below.
The 25-ton core stage of a Chinese Long March 5B rocket fell from the sky in an uncontrollable plunge. Chunks of debris rained down on Borneo despite Chinese assurances that the mass of spent metal posed little or no danger to population centers.
There were no casualties or property damage reported, but debris is close to villages and a few hundred metres either way could have been different.
Most national space programs and private sector companies design their rockets to have enough maneuvering fuel left on board to land in the ocean or on vast stretches of desert. There is no guidance system in the Long March 5B.
It is not the only country that has been a menace recently. A 10-foot tall piece of debris that landed on an Australian farm last month has now been identified as belonging to SpaceX. Brad Tucker, an astronomer at the Australian National University, was able to identify the origin of one of the panels on the piece of junk.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson reserved his fire for China when it came to the SpaceX incident. He said that the People's Republic of China did not give specific trajectory information as their Long March 5B rocket fell back to earth. Spacefaring nations should follow established best practices and share this information in advance. That is a dressing-down in the genteel parlance of diplomat speak.
According to the New York Times, NASA has now said that the object is likely the remaining part of the Dragon spaceship that was used in the Crew-1 mission. The trunk segment burns up in the atmosphere according to a statement from the FAA. In this case, it was in the air for more than a year and some parts of the trunk survived to reach the Earth.
Finger-wagging won't fix anything. With national space programs around the world continuing to launch, and with the private sector getting into the game, the space debris problem will only get worse. The Atlantic Council issued a report this week that called on the world to come up with an international framework for orbital traffic management.
In order to achieve security, economic, and societal objectives in the 21st century, free and open access to outer space is required. The future of security and prosperity in space is at stake.
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