International Law: Space

hard level

Space - International Law / Junk in space

Episode 211007/ 7 Oct 2021

4.0(12,000 ratings)·21,419 studentsBestseller

Transcript

Note: This is a transcript of a spoken conversation and is not a word-for-word script.

Maggie

Hundreds of new satellites are launched every year but what happens to the old ones?

Space is getting crowded so we ll show you what the law says about who s responsible and what happens if things start crashing into each other.

Is space junk putting our way of life at risk? And what happened when NASA's Skylab fell from the sky?

The European

Space Agency estimates there are currently 170 million bits of rubbish orbiting the Earth. How did they get there? And could they be more serious than you think?

Space travel is not something to take for granted it could actually become impossible - dramatically impacting our daily lives.

In 1978, Nasa scientist Donald J Kessler predicted that as we keep launching things into orbit, more of them could hit each other and break up into smaller bits.

Those bits hit other objects and break again, and again.

Eventually the amount of space debris could make it unsafe for any space travel - or even satellites for things like GPS, TV or weather forecasts this is called the Kessler Syndrome.

Professor Moriba

Jah is taking this very seriously. His map tracks all known human-made objects in space to help scientists monitor and predict their behaviour.