A little more than half a century has passed since man launched the first satellite into space in 1957 , and now the incredible, exotic problem has ceased to be such, but has turned into a rather real threat. The first flights into space took place under the sign of universal euphoria. No one had the idea: where will the spent satellites go, what will happen to the launch vehicles, what about the dust from the burnt fuel? The USSR and the USA race explored the near-Earth space, introducing more and more new rockets, satellites and stations into orbit. And the consequences of this short-sighted policy were not long in coming: in 1978, the wreckage of the Soviet satellite Cosmos-594 fell on Canada. Then the Soviet Union paid a huge amount of money to the affected country for the elimination of the effects of radiation infection. But not even a year had passed when the wreckage of the American station, having fulfilled their term, scattered over Australia.
Space debris that fell to the ground did not lead to human casualties in both cases, but the incidents made scientists think. Indeed, in near-Earth space, not only artificial satellites and International Space Stations (numbering about 700) ply their orbits, but also stations that have already worked out their term, their fragments and other man-made objects. And if debris on our planet can be localized and disposed of somewhere, then this cannot be done with objects of rapid cosmic activity of mankind. One could forget about these emissions if they had not moved. And they fly in airless space at a tremendous speed - 9 kilometers per second. Collision at such a speed of a spacecraft with a small piece of iron with a size of just a few centimeters can ram the skin and lead to disaster.
According to scientists, space debris over the past half century has grown to unimaginable sizes. In different orbits around the Earth, 11 thousand objects revolve over 10 cm in size and 600 thousand refuse from one to ten centimeters in size. Now, developing new models of spacecraft, engineers are thinking over and protecting them from possible collisions with unwanted flying objects. The movement of especially large pieces is monitored by special radars that warn astronauts about an impending threat. The ISS 3-4 times a year should deviate from its route to avoid collision with debris.
Thus, space flights have become unsafe also because space explorers can unexpectedly and fatally meet with voluminous debris plowing the starry expanses. And if the sheathing of the ship allows you to save the whole hull (and even then, from small wastes), then this does not apply to solar panels, which have nothing to cover and protect. The worst part is that sometimes two different objects collide and break up. A large object disappears from the radar, and in return there appear thousands of smaller, but no less dangerous fragments.
But how to remove space debris? So far, nothing smarter than to observe the movement of particularly large waste and develop the trajectory of the new satellites taking into account the movement of the wreckage of old ships has not been invented. There is a utopian project put forward by the Swiss Technological Institute of Lausanne, according to which, it is necessary to orbit the Clean Space One satellite, which will find one piece of debris, capture it and rush to Earth, where both of them will burn in dense layers of the atmosphere. But, it seems, 8 million euros is too high a price for cleaning one piece.
So far, scientists have focused on the problem of how to make space debris not increase in volume in the future. Now the satellites that have served their age are moving into a lower orbit so that they enter the Earth's gravity and burn out in the atmosphere, or, conversely, they are taken to a higher trajectory, where they do not run the risk of encountering existing vehicles. The remaining nuclear fuel from the stages of the missiles is drained to prevent explosions from collisions.