DAN'S PAPERS, March 27, 2009 Page 14 www.danshamptons.com
Space
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by at a little over 20,000 miles an hour. They three men waited six more minutes, then, Captain Finck spoke into the microphone to Houston again. “We’re cleared,” he said. One minute later, after Houston concurred, the men were ordered back into the space station and back to bed. But they did not go back to bed right away. They were too nervous to do that. They paced around for a while — er, they floated around. A piece of space junk, even one only a few inches wide such as this one, would have killed them all instantly if it had made a direct hit on the station. It would have gone right through the skin on one side and out the skin on the other, and in seconds, the space station’s air would be gone. Hsssssssss. And that would be that. Finally, at 1:14 a.m., the astronauts went back to bed. This is the second incident involving space junk and an operational orbiter circling the earth in just a few weeks. Three weeks ago, over Siberia, an unmanned American tele-
phone communications satellite 10 feet wide slammed into an abandoned Russian military communications satellite nine feet wide. The Russian satellite had been shut down in 1998. It had become obsolete. The telephone satellite went up in 2002. Both were known to be in orbits that crossed. But it was unlikely they would hit. Also, Houston could fire small maneuvering rockets aboard the live communications satellite by remote control to swerve enough to avoid any collision. But nobody in Houston made that order. The collision shattered the two satellites into as many as 1,000 little pieces, each with its own new orbit around the earth. Now there is even more to keep track of. Indeed, there’s probably enough junk up there already to keep any aliens from outer space from getting down to us, or at least trying to do so. Russian space experts chastised Houston for not having the telephone satellite dodge the Russian satellite, which, because it was abandoned, had no ability to swerve. That’s what was supposed to happen. Just as it was supposed to happen this time.
Early reports said the four-inch-long piece of space junk was a defective carburetor which a space walk engineer had cut loose with a wrench and tossed over his shoulder, but later reports said that was wrong and it was a heavy titanium ring with a 39-inch wire running out the back. It had been attached to the second stage of a rocket putting a new American communications satellite up into space last year, and a small charge had blown it off the second stage right on schedule. So everybody knew it was up there. And as with every other piece of junk up there, they had a tracker on it. Why hadn’t the space station been given enough notice to swerve around it? According to NASA spokesman Kyle Herring in Houston, this metal ring had worked its way into a very off kilter orbit, going very high, then very low and in fact showing up on their radar screens only at long intervals with arrival times that each time had to be newly calculated. It had this very screwy (continued on page 18)
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