Space junk is perhaps a silly-sounding name, and while it's not new, the rise of private aerospace firms has exacerbated this very real and serious problem.
Also called "space debris," human-made detritus floating in space began accumulating with the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957.
As CNN recently reported, trash in low orbit has been building up "at a fantastic pace" in recent years due to private launches — but researchers have hit upon a potential approach to solving this growing problem, one that might sound familiar to the eco-minded people of Earth.
Although orbiting debris hasn't posed much of a direct risk to humans for much of Earth's space-faring history, that's changing.
A crew was recently stranded in orbit after space junk damaged their capsule, and one startup developed a protective suit to protect astronauts from this dangerous debris.
On Dec. 1, a team from the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom published a paper in the journal Chem Circularity, applying the principles of a circular economy not just to rapidly accumulating space junk, but also to unnecessary, avoidable waste in the aerospace sector.
As the authors observed, most missions are structured as single-use, with no provision for recovery, meaning "valuable materials are lost."
In that respect, their findings went beyond just tackling garbage in space, which often falls to Earth, posing risks to humans and ecosystems in its path. Researchers analyzed supply chains to identify inefficiencies in the space sector during the study.
The study's abstract applied the principles of reducing, reusing, and recovering to the aerospace industry as "a promising lens through which to reimagine material use in space and on Earth."
The team proposed using cutting-edge AI modeling tools and digital twins, finding that AI analysis in particular had "significantly advanced the development of space sustainability" despite limited access to datasets.
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Heck yes 👍 University of North Dakota space studies professor Michael Dodge was not involved in the study, but he told CNN that the researchers' solutions to aerospace waste and space junk were wholly novel.
"I've never seen it presented this way. It's an area that needs to be discussed further," Dodge said.
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