Official News page 6

REAL LIFE NEWS: HAPPY BIRTHDAY SPUTNIK

by Hazed

On Thursday October 4, the space age will be fifty years old. On that day back in 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 into orbit and the world was changed forever. Humankind became a space-going species, and even though the hectic race to get man on the moon came to an end, still we have taken control of the areas around the Earth.

Today there are around 5000 tonnes of stuff in orbit around the Earth, whizzing around above our heads. Some of these are useful items: proper satellites which monitor our environment or relay communications. There are more than 460 operational satellites, owned by more than 40 countries. The US alone runs more than half of them. Nearly a fifth are military satellites. The largest single use, though, is for commercial comms, mainly tv. The size ranges from tiny little boxes, less than a foot square, up to huge truck-sized satellites.

But most of the stuff up there is junk. It is estimated that something like 93% of the objects in orbit are useless debris, ranging from retired satellites to abandoned rocket stages, and lost accessories like lens caps and tools. There's also smaller fragments, mostly the wreckage of more than 200 recorded spacecraft explosions, not to mention a few collisions. There's an awful lot of litter up there - in fact, it's beginning to resemble a zero-g junkyard!

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