When we think about environmental pollution, we often think about how our land, water and air have been polluted. However, there is little awareness and coverage of how much we have polluted in space.

Since 1957, with the launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, there has been a construction of of satellite infrastructure in the orbit, yielding a system of byproducts, otherwise known as space debris, or more informally as space junk (Rand, 2016). The space debris is mostly concentrated in the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) which is the region of space around Earth within an altitude of 160 to 2,000km where a large number of active satellites operate (Singh, 2020). Singh (2020) further argues that the high concentration of space debris in the LEO is dangerous as the debris could cause collisions, obliterating the existing spacecrafts in the orbit. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has estimated that there are about  21,000 pieces of space debris that are sized larger than a softball orbiting the Earth that could cause damage to spacecrafts (Singh, 2020). The large number of pieces of space debris in the orbit illustrate the severity of the problem that space pollution creates.

Furthermore, as atmospheric density decreases exponentially the higher the altitude, objects that are above 1000km would remain in the orbit for hundreds and thousands of years, a challenge that our future generations have to deal with (Crowther, 2002). As such, the question of inequitable environmental injustice remains, where we should question whether our decisions of space infrastructure construction has created environmentally pollutive impacts to communities that have no say in the matter.

 

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