Spaced Out

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | Dec. 14, 2024

The Space Race began way back in 1957 when the old Soviet Union launched little Sputnik, the first human-made object placed in earth orbit. It didn’t do anything but blink and beep, but it was a very big deal at the time. The U.S. responded in 1958 with Explorer I, and the race was on.

Since then, tens of thousands of satellites have been launched (including two very special American satellites we’ll discuss later), about 30,000 of them are still in orbit, though only roughly 10,000 are still active. There is no truly accurate counting of what’s up there since the U.S., Russia, China, and probably others have sent up military satellites they chose not to publicly discuss; surveillance and communication would be the primary purpose since space weapons are banned by treaty.

All the while, those nonfunctional satellites are just circling and circling, lower and lower, until gravity finally wins and they burn up falling to Earth.

Most satellites are in what’s called low Earth orbit, 1200 miles or less above the planet and some, in high earth orbit, are as much as 22,000 miles up there. In contrast, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is responsible for all those photos of deep space, is literally a million miles out there, so it is far away from any of Earth’s light or reflected light. The JWST doesn’t even orbit Earth; it orbits the sun like planets do.

The finish line for the space race was getting people on the moon, which we finally did in 1969. By the end of 1972, our Apollo program had put a dozen American men on the moon, but that was the end of it; budget restraints and congressional squabbling killed our moon missions. The Soviet Union/Russia, China, India, and Japan have all successfully landed probes on the moon but not human beings.

We plan on sending more folks to the moon in 2027, but that’s just the interim goal. We want to place people physically on Mars, though it will take a very long time to get there. There have already been successful Mars landings, all unmanned, with the first being from the Soviet Union way back in 1971. That probe operated for less than two minutes, but it was functional for that brief time. The U.S. has made 10 successful Mars landings, including multiple rovers and even a rover with its own little helicopter, so we know getting there is possible.

It won’t be easy or without danger. In addition to natural perils like space dust and micro-meteors traveling at mind-boggling speeds, human-made satellites become space junk once they die and can get in the way. Satellites traveling in low Earth orbit, including those no longer functional, zip along at about 17,000 miles per hour, so it’s best to avoid them. And it’s not just intact satellites that are dangerous.

According to the Museum of Modern History, there is plenty of “space junk” from defunct satellites—those that have exploded or slammed into each other or failed missions that were abandoned. About 30,000 bits of space junk larger than 10 centimeters and almost 700,000 pieces larger than one centimeter are all out there cruising at alarming speeds waiting to hit something.

Which brings us to NASA’s most remarkable satellite achievements, Voyager 1 and 2. (Some believe saving the crew of Apollo 13 was their greatest achievement, and that’s a reasonable argument.)

In 1977, we launched Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 to be the first human-made objects to approach and photograph the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter. The mission figured to take about four years, so they engineered the spacecraft to last five years, at which point they would run out of energy and just wander away.

Voyager 1 photographed Saturn and Jupiter and then became the first to take close up photos of Uranus and Neptune and even our little dwarf planet Pluto before it just kept going and transmitting. Two weeks ago, after what NASA feared was finally the end, Voyager 1 sent a “hello” message indicating it is still alive.

The five-year satellite is now in its 48th year and still functional, more than 15.5 billion miles from Earth, beyond the heliosphere and what most consider the solar system. It is the first human-made object to make it to interstellar space. (Voyager 2 dallied a bit in the solar system and is now a scant 12 billion miles from Earth.)

It is now so far away it takes its signals, traveling at the speed of light—186,000 miles per second—23 hours to reach us and another 23 hours for our responses to get back, but they do still connect. It is astonishing.

Meanwhile, your phone can’t get a signal in the woods and will be obsolete in a year or two.