What Happens when Space Junk Falls on Your Property?

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 14 August 2024

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Debris from satellites, rockets and other space infrastructure are crowding low-Earth orbit. Occasionally, that space junk crashes down to Earth. For Samantha Lawler, an associate professor of astronomy at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, such debris was mostly a theoretical nuisance. Then a nearby farmer found remnants of a SpaceX craft on his land, and Lawler was pulled into the murky legal landscape around space junk in the skies and on the ground. Recommended reading: SpaceX Dropped Space Junk on My Neighbor’s Farm. Here’s What Happened Next Space Junk Is Polluting Earth’s Stratosphere with Vaporized Metal Space Trash Threatens the Global Economy E-mail us at sciencequickly@sciam.com if you have any questions, comments or ideas for stories we should cover! Discover something new every day: subscribe to Scientific American and sign up for Today in Science, our daily newsletter. Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was hosted by Rachel Feltman with guest Samantha Lawler. Our show is edited by Fonda Mwangi with fact-checking by Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck. The theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:25.7	I just feel like we are surrounded in this world by bullshit so how can you know
0:32.0	what's real and what's not? Science passes, that's how.
0:36.5	We answer questions like, does anti-aging skincare actually work?
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0:58.4	If you are listening to this podcast, chances are pretty good that you've heard about the problem of space junk.
1:06.0	The countless pieces of trash from dead satellites, old rockets, and other assorted space infrastructure orbiting our planet that can travel as fast as 22,000 miles per hour or more.
1:17.0	You may also know that at those speeds, even the smallest pieces of debris can damage satellites and space stations.
1:24.6	But even if you're aware that hunks of this cosmic trash occasionally crash down to Earth,
1:29.7	it probably feels like a pretty abstract problem.
	...

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