Space Ecology

There are hazardous risks on the ground from satellites and space debris that re-enter the atmosphere and do not burn up completely during re-entry and land on Earth. Some satellites may be navigated into a safe landing in an ‘uninhabited’ region of an ocean but most often the satellite randomly re-enters the atmosphere and it is very difficult to predict where it will hit Earth. In March of 2007, pieces of space junk from a Russian satellite coming out of orbit narrowly missed hitting a jetliner over the Pacific Ocean. In 1978 the Soviet satellite Cosmos 954 disintegrated over Canada, scattering across a vast area thousands of radioactive pieces of radioactive debris. Although nobody has yet been killed by falling space debris, as the number of intended re-entry events and accidents increase, so will the risk. "Of course," says Ken Hodgkins, of the office of Space and Advanced Technology at the U.S. State Department, "the probability of real damage being caused is low, but if something does happen, the consequences could be catastrophic for everybody."

If the prospect of the sky literally falling on our heads isn’t bad enough, people on the ground are already paying for the legacy of our space age with their health from the launching of rockets. Ammonium perchlorate, a toxic ingredient of solid rocket propellant that disrupts thyroid hormone function and can affect the brain development of fetuses, is increasingly discovered in soil and water throughout the U.S. In September of 2007, a Russian Proton Rocket exploded two minutes after takeoff, showering central Kazakhstan with debris and toxic heptyl rocket fuel, which can kill if digested, rendering thousands of acres of farmland useless for agriculture. The village of Ploskoye, in Siberia, is also under the flight path of Russian launch vehicles. When the first stage of the rocket separates, a large amount of unused rocket fuel explodes and rains down on the village. Ploskoye and its neighbors report cancer rates 15 times higher than the national average.