Space debris, a real and growing danger in the planet's orbit.
In space there are many dangers, storms of solar radiation, breakdowns of the systems that keep you alive or the possibility of someone on the crew acting in a bad way, for any reason; But all these dangers do not compare to the permanent threat of space debris. There are broken satellites and spent rockets that are continually tracked by space agencies so that manned vehicles and space stations can evade them.
Low orbit is basically becoming an Indian street in space, but the real threat is screws, whether screws or bits of metal and even chips of peeling paint that are too small to know where they are and that can damage or puncture a vehicle putting its crew in danger.
And the taikonauts on the Chinese space station were the latest to experience an emergency caused by increasingly abundant space debris. Getting stuck is not okay, if you get stuck in an elevator, even if you are not claustrophobic, it is annoying and a huge setback, but you have no choice but to press the emergency button and wait, if your car breaks down and leaves you stranded, it is annoying, but call the tow truck and wait, in none of these situations are you in danger, unless your car leaves you in certain parts of some cities that I am not going to mention.
Even if you get stuck on a remote island in the Pacific, you can survive and wait for help to come while chattering with some inanimate object, but getting stuck in space is another level. If being stuck on an island where there are water, coconuts and fish can be a survival challenge, imagine being in a can floating in the vacuum of space with a limited amount of food, water and air, while the integrity of that can depends on it not being hit by a tiny fragment of metal, traveling to dozens of times faster than a bullet.
If this happens to the international space station or the Chinese space station, there are always docked emergency ships where the crew can evacuate, but what if it's one of those emergency ships that gets hit by space debris? It gets interesting, because that's what happened to the taikonauts of the Tiangong space station, which means heavenly palace, it's not at all heavenly.
On October 31, the Shenzhou-21 ship arrived at the Tiangong space station with a new crew that included the youngest taikonaut in the Chinese space program, Wo Fei, 32 years old. The three taikonauts arrived to relieve the previous crew that had commanded the station since April. the station, Shenzhou-21.
That ship had been docked at one of the station's ports since April and the previous crew was preparing for its return on November 5, but they found something disturbing: small cracks in a window of the ship. A spaceship is one of the two places where you don't want to see cracks in the window glass, well spaceships and submarines.
After making an evaluation, they decided that the ship was not suitable to safely return the taikonauts, so the return was cancelled, in order not to make the taikonauts wait any longer, who had already spent 6 months on the Tiang Gong, the Chinese Space Agency decided to return the three taikonauts from the Shenzhou-20 mission in the newly arrived ship from the Shenzhou-21 mission and they would try to repair the ship with the damaged window to return it to Earth without a crew while it scheduled the dispatch of the Shenzhou-22 automatically without a remote control crew.
But the crew of Shenzhou-21 had no options, for 11 days, from November 14 to 25, they had no lifeboat to jump to during a critical emergency, they were truly left to their own devices.
Souce
The space that surrounds the Earth, which serves to communicate with us and as access to outer space, is an enormous volume, but if a fragment hits a satellite, it destroys it and creates more fragments that in turn end up impacting other objects, producing many more fragments. This aligns with the prediction of Donald J. Kessler, an astrophysicist dedicated to the field of space debris, who proposes that the more objects reach orbit without a mechanism to return them to Earth when their useful life is over, the debris, fragments, and collisions will increase. They will multiply exponentially and everything indicates that we are already in that process and we do not seem very concerned about finding a solution.
The classic, why am I worried now if it doesn't affect me? The price to pay will be to close our access to space, yes, very transhuman and very interstellar. But if going into space becomes Russian roulette just by thinking about the immediate benefit, the aspirations of colonizing Mars or even the Moon will remain out of reach and perhaps that is for the best.
If we can't go out into space without leaving a huge footprint of our presence, we don't deserve it.
The images without reference were created with AI
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