Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Thursday, April 3, 2025, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt.

Last month, a team of aerospace engineers at MIT released their findings from a research study on the effects of climate change on satellites in the Earth's upper atmosphere.

What happens when today's treasure satellites that give us access to broadband internet and accurate weather forecasts, among other things, become tomorrow's trash.

Or in other words, where does all that space junk go? And what does climate change have to do with it?

Here to discuss the impact of global warming on satellites is Will Parker, PhD candidate in aeronautics and

astronauts at MIT, lead author of the study. Thanks for joining me,

Will. Hey, thanks, Dana. First, is it time to change our thinking regarding the vastness of space

and looking at the total number of satellites? I understand there are more than 11,900 circling

the Earth right now.

Is it already too crowded up there?

Yeah.

We used to live in this world where we had a mentality that space is big, and we didn't have

to be sustainable in the way that we acted in space because we didn't have to worry about

collisions between satellites or debris objects.

It was mostly a clean environment when we started our operations in space in the late 50s.

Today, the environment is very different.

We have, like you said, tens of thousands of objects that are orbiting Earth,

many more smaller debris objects that we have a hard time tracking.

And so because of that, satellite operators constantly have to dodge debris. So the operating

environment is becoming really complex and really difficult. And that's bad news for the long-term

sustainability of the environment for us to use for all the things that we rely on space

for.

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