Tournament: John Edie Holiday Debates Hosted by The Blake School | Round: 2 | Opponent: Eden Prairie AG | Judge: Czyz, Kaya
Fitzgerald 3/9 ~(Shanon, Assistant Websites Editor at Liberty Fund), "Why Human Space Exploration Matters," March 9 2021, https://www.econlib.org/why-human-space-exploration-matters/~~ TDI
While the yields to space exploration and the development of spaceflight technology may appear minimal in the immediate future, shifting our perspective to the longer term renders the human situation vis a viz space exploration extremely clear: if humans want to survive in perpetuity, we need to establish ourselves on other planets in addition to Earth. It is as simple as that. And yet we are not doing all that much to make that happen. To be clear, I'm long on Earth, too, and hope that technological improvements will continue to allow our species to get "more from less" right here on the third rock from the sun, enabling us to keep occupying the planet that saw us evolve into consciousness. I like to imagine that the distant future on Earth has the potential to be an extremely pleasant one, as advances in our scientific understanding and bio-technical praxis should hopefully allow our descendants to clean up any of the remaining messes previous generations will have left behind (e.g., nuclear and industrial waste, high amounts of atmospheric carbon, other lingering nasties) and stable-state free societies will hopefully allow all persons (or very nearly all persons) to live free and meaningful lives in productive community and exchange with their fellows. As the previous qualification highlights, the trickiest problems here on Earth and extending to wherever humans end up in the spacefaring age will still be social and political, and their successful resolution will depend more on the future state of our governing arts than our hard sciences. But regarding the negative events that could very well happen to Earth I think we all need to be equally clear: life might not make it here. There is no guarantee that it will, and in the very long run, with the expansion and subsequent death of our sun, we know with near certainty that it will not. Consider just a few possible extinction-level events that could strike even earlier: large meteors, supervolcanic eruptions, drastic climactic disruption of the "Snowball Earth" variety. As SpaceX founder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently observed on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, "A species that does not become multiplanetary is simply waiting around until there is some extinction event, either self-inflicted or external." This statement, applied to the human species, is obviously true on its face. As doomsday events go a giant asteroid might be more shocking, since we (people living today) have never experienced one before while concerned atomic scientists warn us about the nuclear bomb all the time, but the odds that we blow ourselves up are still there. Slim, but there. It's more plausible that a severe nuclear war and the nuclear winter it would likely trigger would leave the human population greatly reduced as opposed to completely extinct, but then the question becomes: why is that a risk we would want to take? The bomb is here to stay for now, but there is no reason that 100 of known life in the universe needs to stay here on Earth to keep it company, waiting around for something even more destructive to show up. While we're on that happy subject: Do you have any good intuitions about our collective chances against hostile, or simply arrogant or domineering, technologically-advanced extraterrestrial lifeforms, if and/or when they decide to pay us a visit on our home turf? These scary situation sketches will suffice. At bottom, the core reason I am a believer in the need to make life—and not just human life—multiplanetary is the same basic reason I would never counsel a friend to keep all their money and valuables in one place: diversification is good. Wisdom and experience suggest we store precious resources in multiple safe(ish) places. Diversification limits our exposure to risk, and increases our resilience when bad things do happen. One reserve gets hit, two or three others survive, and you probably feel that the effort to spread things out was worth it. What I'm saying here has strong undercurrents of common sense, yet our approach to the human population itself—the universal store and font of "human capital"—does not currently prioritize diversification to the degree our technological capabilities would allow. The distribution of the human population, and of almost all human knowledge and works, is overwhelmingly local. (Let us set to one side the possibility that aliens somewhere maintain an archive of captured human information.) Establishing outposts at least as large as those we maintain in Antarctica on the Moon and Mars, or other more suitable sites, by the end of this century would be a great first step toward genuinely diversifying the physical locations of the most precious resources known to us: human consciousness and creativity, human love and human soul, the great works in which all these things are displayed. Add also to this list repositories of scientific knowledge and knowhow, seed reserves, and certain materials necessary to re-start the manufacturing of fundamental technologies. Spreading these goods to a few additional locations within the solar system would be a major species-and-civilization-level accomplishment that all living at the time could feel satisfied by, and even take some pride in. And this is something that we seem to be just on the cusp of being able to do, given our recent and rapid technological advances in rocketry, computers, and materials science and engineering, among other important fields for space exploration and settlement. Quickly the uniplanetary human situation is becoming, if it is not already, one of pure choice.
West 20 Darrell M. West, 8-18-2020, "Five reasons to explore Mars," Brookings, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2020/08/18/five-reasons-to-explore-mars/ TDI
The recent launch of the Mars rover Perseverance is the latest U.S. space mission seeking to understand our solar system. Its expected arrival at the Red Planet in mid-February 2021 has a number of objectives linked to science and innovation. The rover is equipped with sophisticated instruments designed to search for the remains of ancient microbial life, take pictures and videos of rocks, drill for soil and rock samples, and use a small helicopter to fly around the Jezero Crater landing spot. Mars is a valuable place for exploration because it can be reached in 6 ½ months, is a major opportunity for scientific exploration, and has been mapped and studied for several decades. The mission represents the first step in a long-term effort to bring Martian samples back to Earth, where they can be analyzed for residues of microbial life. Beyond the study of life itself, there are a number of different benefits of Mars exploration. UNDERSTAND THE ORIGINS AND UBIQUITY OF LIFE The site where Perseverance is expected to land is the place where experts believe 3.5 billion years ago held a lake filled with water and flowing rivers. It is an ideal place to search for the residues of microbial life, test new technologies, and lay the groundwork for human exploration down the road. The mission plans to investigate whether microbial life existed on Mars billions of years ago and therefore that life is not unique to Planet Earth. As noted by Chris McKay, a research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Science Center, that would be an extraordinary discovery. "Right here in our solar system, if life started twice, that tells us some amazing things about our universe," he pointed out. "It means the universe is full of life. Life becomes a natural feature of the universe, not just a quirk of this odd little planet around this star." The question of the origins of life and its ubiquity around the universe is central to science, religion, and philosophy. For much of our existence, humans have assumed that even primitive life was unique to Planet Earth and not present in the rest of the solar system, let alone the universe. We have constructed elaborate religious and philosophical narratives around this assumption and built our identity along the notion that life is unique to Earth. If, as many scientists expect, future space missions cast doubt on that assumption or outright disprove it by finding remnants of microbial life on other planets, it will be both invigorating and illusion-shattering. It will force humans to confront their own myths and consider alternative narratives about the universe and the place of Earth in the overall scheme of things. As noted in my Brookings book, Megachange, given the centrality of these issues for fundamental questions about human existence and the meaning of life, it would represent a far-reaching shift in existing human paradigms. As argued by scientist McKay, discovering evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars would lead experts to conclude that life likely is ubiquitous around the universe and not limited to Planet Earth. Humans would have to construct new theories about ourselves and our place in the universe. DEVELOP NEW TECHNOLOGIES The U.S. space program has been an extraordinary catalyst for technology innovation. Everything from Global Positioning Systems and medical diagnostic tools to wireless technology and camera phones owe at least part of their creation to the space program. Space exploration required the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to learn how to communicate across wide distances, develop precise navigational tools, store, transmit, and process large amounts of data, deal with health issues through digital imaging and telemedicine, and develop collaborative tools that link scientists around the world. The space program has pioneered the miniaturization of scientific equipment and helped engineers figure out how to land and maneuver a rover from millions of miles away. Going to Mars requires similar inventiveness. Scientists have had to figure out how to search for life in ancient rocks, drill for rock samples, take high resolution videos, develop flying machines in a place with gravity that is 40 percent lower than on Earth, send detailed information back to Earth in a timely manner, and take off from another planet. In the future, we should expect large payoffs in commercial developments from Mars exploration and advances that bring new conveniences and inventions to people. ENCOURAGE SPACE TOURISM In the not too distant future, wealthy tourists likely will take trips around the Earth, visit space stations, orbit the Moon, and perhaps even take trips around Mars. For a substantial fee, they can experience weightlessness, take in the views of the entire planet, see the stars from outside the Earth's atmosphere, and witness the wonders of other celestial bodies. The Mars program will help with space tourism by improving engineering expertise with space docking, launches, and reentry and providing additional experience about the impact of space travel on the human body. Figuring out how weightlessness and low gravity situations alter human performance and how space radiation affects people represent just a couple areas where there are likely to be positive by-products for future travel. The advent of space tourism will broaden human horizons in the same way international travel has exposed people to other lands and perspectives. It will show them that the Earth has a delicate ecosystem that deserves protecting and why it is important for people of differing countries to work together to solve global problems. Astronauts who have had this experience say it has altered their viewpoints and had a profound impact on their way of thinking. FACILITATE SPACE MINING Many objects around the solar system are made of similar minerals and chemical compounds that exist on Earth. That means that some asteroids, moons, and planets could be rich in minerals and rare elements. Figuring out how to harvest those materials in a safe and responsible manner and bring them back to Earth represents a possible benefit of space exploration. Elements that are rare on Earth may exist elsewhere, and that could open new avenues for manufacturing, product design, and resource distribution. This mission could help resource utilization through advances gained with its Mars Oxygen Experiment (MOXIE) equipment that converts Martian carbon dioxide into oxygen. If MOXIE works as intended, it would help humans live and work on the Red Planet. ADVANCE SCIENCE One of the most crucial features of humanity is our curiosity about the life, the universe, and how things operate. Exploring space provides a means to satisfy our thirst for knowledge and improve our understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe. Space travel already has exploded centuries-old myths and promises to continue to confront our long-held assumptions about who we are and where we come from. The next decade promises to be an exciting period as scientists mine new data from space telescopes, space travel, and robotic exploration. Ten or twenty years from now, we may have answers to basic questions that have eluded humans for centuries, such as how ubiquitous life is outside of Earth, whether it is possible for humans to survive on other planets, and how planets evolve over time.
CSIS 18 ~(Center for Strategic and International Studies), "Why Human Space Exploration Matters," August 21, 2018 https://www.csis.org/blogs/post-soviet-post/space-cooperation~~ TDI
U.S.-Russian space cooperation continues to be a stated mutual goal. In April 2018, President Putin said of space, "Thank God, this field of activity is not being influenced by problems in politics. Therefore, I hope that everything will develop, since it is in the interests of everyone…This is a sphere that unites people. I hope it will continue to be this way." During his statement at a recent event at CSIS, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said, "~space~ is our best opportunity to dialogue when everything else falls apart. We've got American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts dependent on each other on the International Space Station, which enables us to ultimately maintain that dialogue." The U.S. and Russia both benefit from the ISS partnership. Russia provides transportation to the ISS for U.S. astronauts, from which Russia receives an average of $81 million per seat on the Soyuz (and recognition of its status as a space power). The U.S. also benefits from Russia's technical contributions to the ISS while Russia benefits The U.S. and Russia signed a joint statement in 2017 in support of the idea of collaborating on deep space exploration, including the construction of the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, a research-focused space station orbiting the moon. Through agreements on civilian space exploration, such as the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway or future Mars projects, that have clear benefits to both sides, some degree of cooperation will remain in both countries' interest. The high price tag for pursuing space exploration alone and opportunities for sharing and receiving technical expertise encourages international partnerships like the ISS. However, at least three factors, apart from the overall deterioration of U.S.-Russia relations, threaten this cooperation. First, growth of the private sector space industry may alter the economic arrangement between the U.S. and Russia, and ultimately lower the benefits of cooperation to both countries. The development of advanced technologies by private companies will give NASA new options to choose from and reduce the need to depend on (and negotiate with) Russia. If NASA and its Russian counterpart, Roskosmos, have no need to talk with one another, they probably won't in the face of tense political relations. The U.S. intends to use Boeing and SpaceX capsules for human spaceflight beginning in 2020, and a Congressional plan in 2016 set a phase out date of Russian RD-180 rocket engines by 2022.
It's make or break for the relationship—Ukraine, decline of US moral authority on international affairs puts us at the brink of the end of Russian diplomacy and even war
Weir 21 ~(Fred Weir has been the Monitor's Moscow correspondent, covering Russia and the former Soviet Union, since 1998. He's traveled over much of that vast territory, reporting on stories ranging from Russia's financial crash to the war in Chechnya, creeping Islamization in central Asia, Russia's demographic crisis, the rise of Vladimir Putin and his repeated returns to the Kremlin, and the ups and downs of US-Russia relations). "Worse than the Cold War? US-Russia relations hit new low." Christian Science Monitor 4-20-2021 https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2021/0420/Worse-than-the-Cold-War-US-Russia-relations-hit-new-low~~ TDI
Russia's relations with the West, and the United States in particular, appear to be plumbing depths of acrimony and mutual misunderstanding unseen even during the original Cold War. After years of deteriorating relations, sanctions, tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions, and an escalating "information war," some in Moscow are asking if there even is any point in seeking renewed dialogue with the U.S., if only out of concern that more talking might just make things worse. Events have cascaded over the past month. Russia's treatment of imprisoned dissident Alexei Navalny, who has been sent to a prison hospital amid reports of failing health, underlines the sharp perceived differences between Russia and the West over matters of human rights. Meanwhile, a Russian military buildup near Ukraine has illustrated that the conflict in the Donbass region might explode at any time, possibly even dragging Russia and NATO into direct confrontation. With its relations with Washington at a nadir, Russia is eyeing a more pragmatic, if adversarial, relationship with the U.S. in the hopes of getting the respect it desires. President Joe Biden surprised the Kremlin by proposing a "personal summit" to discuss the growing list of U.S.-Russia disagreements in a phone conversation with Vladimir Putin last week. He later spoke of the need for "disengagement" in the escalating tensions around Ukraine, and postponed a planned visit of two U.S. warships to Russia-adjacent waters in the Black Sea. But days later he also imposed a package of tough sanctions against Russia, for its alleged SolarWinds hacking and interference in the 2020 U.S. presidential elections, infuriating Moscow and drawing threats of retaliation. Last month, after Mr. Biden agreed with a journalist's intimation that Mr. Putin is a "killer," the Kremlin ordered Russia's ambassador to the U.S. to return home for intensive consultations, an almost unprecedented peacetime move. Over the weekend, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov suggested that the acting U.S. ambassador to Moscow, John Sullivan, should likewise go back to Washington for a spell. On Tuesday, Mr. Sullivan announced he would do just that this week. And there is a growing sense in Moscow that the downward spiral of East-West ties has reached a point of no return, and that Russia should consider abandoning hopes of reconciliation with the West and seek permanent alternatives: perhaps in an intensified compact with China, and targeted relationships with countries of Europe and other regions that are willing to do business with Moscow. "Things are at rock bottom. This may not be structurally a cold war in the way the old one was, but mentally, in terms of atmosphere, it's even worse," says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, a Moscow-based foreign policy journal. "The fact that Biden offered a summit meeting would have sounded a hopeful note anytime in the past. Now, nobody can be sure of that. A hypothetical Putin-Biden meeting might not prove to be a path to better relations, but just the opposite. It could just become a shouting match that would bring a hardening of differences, and make relations look like even more of a dead end." Room for discussion Foreign policy experts agree that there is a long list of practical issues that could benefit from purposeful high-level discussion. With the U.S. preparing to finally exit Afghanistan, some coordination with regional countries, including Russia and its Central Asian allies, might make the transition easier for everyone. One of Mr. Biden's first acts in office was to extend the New START arms control agreement, which the Trump administration had been threatening to abandon, but the former paradigm of strategic stability remains in tatters and requires urgent attention, experts say. "If you are looking for opportunities to make the world a safer place through reason and compromise, there are quite a few," says Andrey Kortunov, director of the Russian International Affairs Council, which is affiliated with the Foreign Ministry. "There are also some areas where the best we could do is agree to disagree, such as Ukraine and human rights issues." The plight of Mr. Navalny, which has evoked so much outrage in the West, seems unlikely to provide leverage in dealing with the Kremlin because – as Western moral authority fades – Russian public opinion appears indifferent, or even in agreement with its government's actions. Recent surveys by the Levada Center in Moscow, Russia's only independent pollster, found that fewer than a fifth of Russians approve of Mr. Navalny's activities, while well over half disapprove. An April poll found that while 29 of Russians consider Mr. Navalny's imprisonment unfair, 48 think it is fair. Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny, shown here during a hearing in the Babuskinsky District Court in Moscow Feb. 12, 2021, is in poor health amid his hunger strike while in prison in Russia. He was recently moved to a prison hospital. Tensions around the Russian-backed rebel republics in eastern Ukraine have been much severer than usual, with a spike in violent incidents on the front line, a demonstrative Russian military buildup near the borders, and strong U.S. and NATO affirmations of support for Kyiv. The Russian narrative claims that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy triggered the crisis a month ago by signing a decree that makes retaking the Russian-annexed territory of Crimea official Ukrainian state policy. Mr. Zelenskiy has also appealed to the U.S. and Europe to expedite Ukraine's membership in NATO, which Russia has long described as a "red line" that would lead to war. But Russian leaders, who have been at pains to deny any direct involvement in Ukraine's war for the past seven years, now say openly that they will fight to defend the two rebel republics. Top Kremlin official Dmitry Kozak even warned that if conflict erupts, it could be "the beginning of the end" for Ukraine. "This is a very desperate situation," says Vadim Karasyov, director of the independent Institute of Global Strategies in Kyiv. "We know the West is not going to help Ukraine militarily if it comes to war. So we need to find some kind of workable compromises, not more pretexts for war." Time to turn eastward? In this increasingly vexed atmosphere, the Russians appear to be saying there is no point in Mr. Putin and Mr. Biden meeting unless an agenda has been prepared well in advance, setting out a few achievable goals and leaving aside areas where there can be no agreement. "Russia isn't going to take part in another circus like we had with Trump in Helsinki in 2018," says Sergei Markedonov, an expert with MGIMO University in Moscow. "What is needed is a deeper dialogue. That could begin if we had a real old-fashioned summit between Biden and Putin, one that has been calculated to yield at least some positive results. We need to find a modus vivendi going forward, and the present course is not leading there." Alternatively, Russia may turn away from any hopes of even pragmatic rapprochement with the West, experts warn. Mr. Lukyanov, who maintains close contact with his Chinese counterparts, says they felt blindsided at a summit with U.S. foreign policy chiefs in Alaska last month, when what they expected to be a practical discussion of how to overcome the acrimonious Trump-era legacy in their relations turned into what they saw as a U.S. lecture about how China needs to obey the "rules-based" international order. "It was the Chinese, in the past, who were very cautious about participating" in anything that looked like an anti-Western alliance, says Mr. Lukyanov. "We are hearing a new tone from them now. Now our growing relationship with China isn't just about compensating for a lack of relations with the U.S. It's about the need to build up a group of countries that will resist the U.S., aimed at containing U.S. activities and policies that are harmful to our two countries."
Space weapons heighten potential for escalation and make perceptions of US-Russia space conflict key.
Alexey Arbatov et al, head of the Center for International Security at the Primakov National Research Institute of World Economy and International Relations, Major General Vladimir Dvorkin, a principal researcher at the Center for International Security at the Primakov National Research Institute of World Economy and International Relations and Peter Topychkanov, fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center's Nonproliferation Program, '17 "Russian And Chinese Perspectives On Non-Nuclear Weapons And Nuclear Risks" Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Publications, https://www.russiamatters.org/sites/default/files/media/files/Entanglement_interior_FNL.pdf
Against this background, Russian military and technical experts are currently engaged in efforts to elaborate strategies for fighting an air-space war. The following is an attempt to frame such an integrated doctrine by one of its main theoreticians, Colonel Yuri Krinitsky from the Military Air-Space Defense Academy: "The integration of aerial and space-based means of attack has transformed airspace and space into a specific field of armed conflict: an air-space theater of military operations. United, systematically organized actions of ~U.S.~ air-space power in this theater should be countered with united and systematically organized actions by the Russian Air-Space Defense Forces. This is required under the National Security Strategy of the Russian Federation and Air-Space Defense Plan approved by the Russian president in 2006."6 This document goes on to list the tasks of the Air-Space Defense Forces as "monitoring and reconnaissance of the airspace situation; identifying the beginning of an aerial, missile, or space attack; informing state organs and the military leadership of the Russian Federation about it; repelling air-space attacks; and defending command sites of the top levels of state and military command authorities, strategic nuclear forces' groupings, and the elements of missile warning systems."7 While picking apart in detail the organizational, operational, and technical aspects of the Air-Space Defense Forces (now part of the Air-Space Forces),8 military analysts step around the basic question of what constitutes "the means of air-space attack" (SVKN in Russian, MASA in English). This term and "air-space attack" are broadly used in official documents (including the Military Doctrine) and statements, as well as in the new names of military organizations (such as the Air-Space Forces), and in a seemingly infinite number of professional articles, books, and pamphlets. If MASA refers to aircraft and cruise missiles, then what does space have to do with it? To be sure, various military communication and intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance satellites are based in space, but these assets also serve the Navy and Ground Forces without the word "space" tacked onto their names. If MASA refers to long-range ballistic missiles, which have trajectories that pass mostly through space, then this threat is not new but has existed for more than sixty years. There was—and still is—no defense against a massive ballistic missile strike, and none is likely in the future in spite of U.S. and Russian efforts at missile defense. In the past (and possibly now), one of the possible tasks of ballistic missiles was to break "corridors" in the enemy's air-defense system to enable bombers to penetrate it. But with ballistic missiles being armed with more warheads with improved accuracy, and with the advent of longrange air-launched cruise missiles, it is increasingly unnecessary for bombers to be able to penetrate enemy air defenses. Coordination between air and notional "space" systems has apparently moved to the background of strategic planning. Anyway, this tactic was never considered as air-space warfare before now. MASA may be used in reference to potential hypersonic boost-glide weapons, which are discussed below. But their role and capabilities are not yet known, so it would clearly be premature to build the theory of air-space war on them, and even more so to start creating defenses against them. In any case, referring to those weapons as MASA is farfetched: besides a short boost phase, their entire trajectory is in the upper atmosphere at speeds greater than airplanes but lower than ballistic missiles. It is, therefore, even less apt to describe such systems as space arms than it is to refer to traditional long-range ballistic missiles as such. Finally, as for theoretically possible space-based weapons that would conduct strikes against targets on the ground, at sea, and in the air, they do not yet exist, and their future viability is far from clear. Even if the concept of air-space war is ill-defined, the military and technical experts who propound it reach a predictable conclusion with regard to the capabilities needed to fight one. They typically argue that Russia needs "to counter the air-space attack system with an air-space defense system. . . . A prospective system for destroying and suppressing MASA should be a synergy of anti-missile, anti-satellite, and air-defense missiles, and air units, and radio-electronic warfare forces. And its composition should be multilayered."9 Such calls are being translated into policy. Most notably, the air-space defense program, for which the military's top brass and industrial corporations lobbied, is the single largest component of the State Armaments Program through 2020, accounting for about 20 percent of all costs when the program was first announced in 2011—about 3.4 trillion rubles ($106 billion at the time).10 Along with the modernization of the missile early-warning system by the development and deployment of new Voronezh-type land-based radars and missile-launch detection satellites, the program envisages the deployment of twenty-eight missile regiments of S-400 Triumph air-defense systems (about 450 to 670 launchers), and thirty-eight battalions equipped with the next-generation S-500 Vityaz (recently renamed Prometey) systems (300 to 460 launchers).11 In total, the plan is to manufacture up to 3,000 missile interceptors of the two types, for which three new production plants were built. A new integrated and fully automatic command-and-control system is being created to facilitate operations by the Air-Space Defense Forces. The Moscow A-135 missile defense system (now renamed A-235) is being modernized with non-nuclear kinetic interceptors to engage incoming ballistic missiles (previously the interceptors were armed with nuclear warheads).12 The current Russian economic crisis, which has resulted in defense budget cuts in fiscal year 2017, may slow down the air-space armament programs and the scale of arms procurement, but the underlying momentum will be unaffected unless stopped or redirected by a major change in Russia's defense posture. In a sense, Russian policy may be explained by the visceral desire of the military to break out from the deadlock—the "strangulating effect"—of mutual assured nuclear destruction, which has made further arms development, high-technology competition, and supposedly fascinating global war scenarios senseless (indeed, it prompted U.S. and Soviet leaders of the 1970s and 1980s to agree that, as then U.S. president Ronald Reagan put it, "a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought."13) During the four decades of the Cold War, several generations of the Soviet military and defense industrial elite had learned and become accustomed to competing with the most powerful possible opponent, the United States, and such competition became their raison d'être. The end of the Cold War and of the nuclear arms race in the early 1990s deprived them of this supposedly glorious quest, and opposing rogue states and terrorists was not a noble substitute. U.S. and NATO operations in Yugoslavia and Iraq, however, provided a new hightechnology challenge, defined in Russia as air-space warfare, which was eagerly embraced as a new and fascinating domain of seemingly endless competition with a worthy counterpart. Besides, this new dimension of warfare doubtless gave the military and associated defense industries an opportunity to impress political leadership with newly discovered esoteric and frightening threats, justifying the prioritization of national defense, and hence arms procurement programs and large defense budgets. In any case, the Russian strategy for air-space war is directly connected to the problem of entanglement. Astonishingly—and this makes the concept look quite scholastic—its framers shed no light on the single most important question: Is the context for air-space war a global (or regional) nuclear war, or a non-nuclear war that pits Russia against the United States and NATO? If it is the former, then in the event of the large-scale use of ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads (and in the absence of effective missile defense systems), the Russian Air-Space Forces would be unlikely to function effectively. Except for issuing warnings about incoming missile attacks, they would not be able to fulfill the tasks assigned to them by Russia's Military Doctrine, including "repelling air-space attacks and defending command sites of the top levels of state and military administration, strategic nuclear forces' units, and elements of missile warning systems."14 Alternatively, if air-space war assumes a non-nuclear conflict, then the concept raises serious doubts of a different nature. Russian state and military leaders have regularly depicted terrifying scenarios of large-scale conflicts being won through non-nuclear means. Former deputy defense minister General Arkady Bakhin, for example, has described how "leading world powers are staking everything on winning supremacy in the air and in space, on carrying out massive air-space operations at the outbreak of hostilities, to conduct strikes against sites of strategic and vital importance all across the country."15 It is difficult to imagine, however, that such a conflict, in reality, would not quickly escalate to a nuclear exchange, especially as strategic forces and their C3I systems were continually attacked by conventional munitions. Right up until the mid-1980s, the military leadership of the USSR believed that a major war would likely begin in Europe with the early use by Warsaw Pact forces of hundreds of tactical nuclear weapons "as soon as ~they~ received information" that NATO was preparing to launch a nuclear strike.16 After that, Soviet armies would reach the English Channel and the Pyrenees in a few weeks, or massive nuclear strikes would be inflicted by the USSR and the United States on one another, and the war would be over in a few hours, or at most in a few days, with catastrophic consequences.17 After the end of the Cold War, the task of elaborating probable major war scenarios was practically shelved because such a war had become unthinkable in the new political environment. However, strategic thinking on the next high-technology global war apparently continued in secret (and probably not only in Russia). Now, at a time of renewed confrontation between Russia and the West, the fruits of that work are finally seeing the light of day. In all likelihood, the authors of the strategy imagine that over a relatively long period of time—days or weeks—the West would wage a campaign of air and missile strikes against Russia without using nuclear weapons. Russia, in turn, would defend against such attacks and carry out retaliatory strikes with long-range conventional weapons. Notably, in 2016, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu stated that "by 2021, it is planned to increase by four times the combat capabilities of the nation's strategic non-nuclear forces, which will provide the possibility of fully implementing the tasks of non-nuclear deterrence."18 In other words, the basic premise is that the U.S.-led campaigns against Yugoslavia in 1999 or Iraq in 1990 and 2003 (which are often cited by experts in this context) may be implemented against Russia—but with different results, thanks to the operations of the Russian Air-Space Forces, the Strategic Rocket Forces, and the Navy against the United States and its allies. The emphasis on defensive and offensive strategic non-nuclear arms does not exclude, but—on the contrary—implies the limited use of nuclear weapons at some point of the armed conflict. Sergei Sukhanov, one of the most authoritative representatives of the defense industries as the constructor general of the Vympel Corporation, which is responsible for designing strategic defense systems, has exposed the whole panorama of Russia's contemporary strategic logic on the interactions between offensive and defensive systems and between nuclear and non-nuclear systems: If we cannot exclude the possibility of the large-scale use of air-space attacks by the U.S. and other NATO countries (i.e., if we accept that the Yugoslavian strategy might be applied against Russia), then it is clearly impossible to solve the problem by fighting off air-space attacks with weapons that would neutralize them in the air-space theater, since this would require the creation of highly effective air- and missile defense systems across the country. Therefore, the strategy for solving the air-space defense tasks faced in this eventuality should be based on deterring the enemy from large-scale air-space attacks by implementing the tasks facing air-space defense in this eventuality at a scale that would avoid escalation but force the enemy to refrain from further airspace attack.19 (Emphasis added.) In other words, because of the inevitable limitations in Russia's ability to defend against air-space attacks, Sukhanov argues that Russia may have to resort to the limited use of nuclear weapons in order to compel the United States and its allies into backing down. This basic logic is widely accepted in Russia. Judging by the available information, the United States does not have—and is not expected to have for the foreseeable future—the technological means or the operational plans to wage non-nuclear air-space warfare against Russia. However, the fact that a major war with the United States and NATO is seen in contemporary Russian strategic thinking as a prolonged endeavor involving an integrated technological and operational continuum of nuclear and non-nuclear operations, defensive and offensive capabilities, and ballistic and aerodynamic weapons creates a breeding ground for entanglement. The result could be the rapid escalation of a local non-nuclear conflict to a global nuclear war. The remainder of this chapter discusses how new and emerging military technologies might contribute to such an escalation.
Edwards 17 ~(Paul N. Edwards, CISAC's William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Being interviewed by EarthSky/card is only parts of the interview directly from Paul Edwards.) "How nuclear war would affect Earth's climate," EarthSky, September 8, 2017, earthsky.org/human-world/how-nuclear-war-would-affect-earths-climate~ TDI
We are not talking enough about the climatic effects of nuclear war. The "nuclear winter" theory of the mid-1980s played a significant role in the arms reductions of that period. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reduction of U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, this aspect of nuclear war has faded from view. That's not good. In the mid-2000s, climate scientists such as Alan Robock (Rutgers) took another look at nuclear winter theory. This time around, they used much-improved and much more detailed climate models than those available 20 years earlier. They also tested the potential effects of smaller nuclear exchanges. The result: an exchange involving just 50 nuclear weapons — the kind of thing we might see in an India-Pakistan war, for example — could loft 5 billion kilograms of smoke, soot and dust high into the stratosphere. That's enough to cool the entire planet by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.25 degrees Celsius) — about where we were during the Little Ice Age of the 17th century. Growing seasons could be shortened enough to create really significant food shortages. So the climatic effects of even a relatively small nuclear war would be planet-wide. What about a larger-scale conflict? A U.S.-Russia war currently seems unlikely, but if it were to occur, hundreds or even thousands of nuclear weapons might be launched. The climatic consequences would be catastrophic: global average temperatures would drop as much as 12 degrees Fahrenheit (7 degrees Celsius) for up to several years — temperatures last seen during the great ice ages. Meanwhile, smoke and dust circulating in the stratosphere would darken the atmosphere enough to inhibit photosynthesis, causing disastrous crop failures, widespread famine and massive ecological disruption. The effect would be similar to that of the giant meteor believed to be responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. This time, we would be the dinosaurs. Many people are concerned about North Korea's advancing missile capabilities. Is nuclear war likely in your opinion? At this writing, I think we are closer to a nuclear war than we have been since the early 1960s. In the North Korea case, both Kim Jong-un and President Trump are bullies inclined to escalate confrontations. President Trump lacks impulse control, and there are precious few checks on his ability to initiate a nuclear strike. We have to hope that our generals, both inside and outside the White House, can rein him in. North Korea would most certainly "lose" a nuclear war with the United States. But many millions would die, including hundreds of thousands of Americans currently living in South Korea and Japan (probable North Korean targets). Such vast damage would be wrought in Korea, Japan and Pacific island territories (such as Guam) that any "victory" wouldn't deserve the name. Not only would that region be left with horrible suffering amongst the survivors; it would also immediately face famine and rampant disease. Radioactive fallout from such a war would spread around the world, including to the U.S. It has been more than 70 years since the last time a nuclear bomb was used in warfare. What would be the effects on the environment and on human health today? To my knowledge, most of the changes in nuclear weapons technology since the 1950s have focused on making them smaller and lighter, and making delivery systems more accurate, rather than on changing their effects on the environment or on human health. So-called "battlefield" weapons with lower explosive yields are part of some arsenals now — but it's quite unlikely that any exchange between two nuclear powers would stay limited to these smaller, less destructive bombs.
Thompson 20 ~(Clive, author of Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, a columnist for Wired magazine, and a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine) "Monetizing the Final Frontier The strange new push for space privatization," December 3, 2020 https://newrepublic.com/article/160303/monetizing-final-frontier~~ TDI
"Physics tells us that two things can't occupy the same space at the same time or else bad things happen," Jah said dryly. Indeed, there's already been one collision that produced sprawling orbital pollution. In 2009, a satellite owned by the U.S. firm Iridium slammed into a decommissioned Russian government satellite at more than 26,000 mph. The crash produced 2,300 pieces of debris, spraying off in all directions. And debris is a particularly gnarly problem in space, because when it's traveling at thousands of miles an hour, even a marble-size chunk is like a bullet, capable of rendering a damaged satellite inoperable and unsteerable—the owner can no longer fire its boosters to guide it into a higher or lower orbit. There are currently an estimated 500,000 marble-size chunks up there. Decades of space travel by governments left plenty of refuse, ranging from parts of rocket boosters to stray bits of scientific experiments. One particularly grim vision of the future that haunts astronomers is the "Kessler syndrome," proposed by the astrophysicist Donald Kessler in 1978. Kessler hypothesized that space clutter could reach a tipping point: One really bad collision could produce so much junk that it would trigger a chain reaction of collisions. This disaster scenario would leave hundreds of satellites eventually destroyed, and create a ring of debris that would make launching any new satellites impossible, forever. "Near space is finite—it's a finite resource," Jah said. "So now you have this growing trash problem that isn't being remediated.... And if we exceed the capacity of the environment to carry all this traffic safely, then it becomes unusable." That's why a growing chorus of critics are already making the case that space is the next major environmental area to protect, after the oceans and land on Earth. "People seem to really treat resources in space as being infinite," said Erika Nesvold, an astrophysicist who's the cofounder of The JustSpace Alliance. "As we've seen, people don't really intuitively understand exponential growth." That's the dilemma in a nutshell: The available room in the sky is limited, but the plans for growth are exponential. SpaceX isn't the only New Space firm looking to toss up satellites. Satellite and rocket start-ups are now lining up en masse, atop new waves of investment. There are satellites geared up to connect to "the internet of things" so companies can communicate among proprietary networks of household devices. There are floating cameras pointing down—so as to gather "geospatial intelligence," which is to say data streamed from "the vantage point you get from satellites looking down on Earth and giving us information about our planet," as the venture capitalist Anderson told me. And new forms of satellite vision are emerging all the time, such as cameras that can see at night, or are specially designed to see agriculture. Experiments abound, and so satellite launches will inevitably multiply in their wake. Part of what makes near-Earth orbit so chaotic is that it is, at the moment, remarkably unregulated—not unlike the internet of the early '90s. An American firm has to get permission from the Federal Communications Commission to launch a satellite, but once it's in orbit, there's no federal agency that can compel it to move out of the path of a collision. Satellite owners generally don't like to move if they can avoid it, because their satellites have a limited amount of fuel; any movement decreases their usable lifespan. On top of that, there are dozens of nations shooting satellites into low-Earth orbit—but no international body coordinating their flight paths. Last fall, the European Space Agency realized one of SpaceX's new Starlink satellites was on a dangerously close path to an ESA satellite. SpaceX said it had no plans to move the satellite; so the ESA decided to fire its thrusters and get clear. This high-stakes negotiation was conducted via email. What's more, space debris is extremely hard to source. If a British satellite slams into yours, you can probably figure out who hit you. But if your satellite is wrecked by a random piece of junk, nobody has any clue where that debris came from. It is, in this way, a neat parallel to the problem of C02, where a ceaseless barrage of tiny commercial decisions creates a sprawling problem—one that's all but designed to ensure that everyone who caused it can deny responsibility. And damage is asymmetric: A company with a small $60,000 satellite could smash into a wildly expensive one paid for by U.S. taxpayers. "A National Reconnaissance Office satellite is at least a billion dollars, if not more, so they have a lot more to lose if something hits a satellite," Bhavya Lal, a researcher at the IDA Science and Technology Policy Institute, noted. "As more private activity starts to happen, there's more chances of that loss of control, too." One might dismiss all this anxiety as a sort of sci-fi version of hippie environmentalism—except that even the administrator of NASA is deeply worried about the chaos and destruction likely to be sown by commercial activity in near-Earth orbit. Jim Bridenstine, the Trump-appointed head of NASA, is as pro-market as one can be. He praises SpaceX every chance he gets; he talks about privatizing the space station. But when I asked him about the looming danger of space debris, during a press-conference call, he conceded that it's a huge, unresolved issue.
Space dust wrecks satellites and debris exponentially spirals
Intagliata 17 ~(Christopher Intagliata, MA Journalism from NYU, Editor for NPRs All Things Considered, Reporter/Host for Scientific American's 60 Second Science) "The Sneaky Danger of Space Dust," Scientific American, May 11, 2017, https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/the-sneaky-danger-of-space-dust/~~ TDI
When tiny particles of space debris slam into satellites, the collision could cause the emission of hardware-frying radiation, Christopher Intagliata reports. Aside from all the satellites, and the space station orbiting the Earth, there's a lot of trash circling the planet, too. Twenty-one thousand baseball-sized chunks of debris, according to NASA. But that number's dwarfed by the number of small particles. There's hundreds of millions of those. "And those smaller particles tend to be going fast. Think of picking up a grain of sand at the beach, and that would be on the large side. But they're going 60 kilometers per second." Sigrid Close, an applied physicist and astronautical engineer at Stanford University. Close says that whereas mechanical damage—like punctures—is the worry with the bigger chunks, the dust-sized stuff might leave more insidious, invisible marks on satellites—by causing electrical damage. "We also think this phenomenon can be attributed to some of the failures and anomalies we see on orbit, that right now are basically tagged as 'unknown cause.'" Close and her colleague Alex Fletcher modeled this phenomenon mathematically, based on plasma physics behavior. And here's what they think happens. First, the dust slams into the spacecraft. Incredibly fast. It vaporizes and ionizes a bit of the ship—and itself. Which generates a cloud of ions and electrons, traveling at different speeds. And then: "It's like a spring action, the electrons are pulled back to the ions, ions are being pushed ahead a little bit. And then the electrons overshoot the ions, so they oscillate, and then they go back out again." That movement of electrons creates a pulse of electromagnetic radiation, which Close says could be the culprit for some of that electrical damage to satellites. The study is in the journal Physics of Plasmas. ~Alex C. Fletcher and Sigrid Close, Particle-in-cell simulations of an RF emission mechanism associated with hypervelocity impact plasmas~
Tehrani 4/1 ~(James, Editor in Chief of Spark Magazine) "Space Junk: A Safety and Sustainability Problem Moving at 18,000 MPH," April 1, 2021, https://sphera.com/spark/space-junk-a-safety-and-sustainability-problem-moving-at-18000-mph/~~ TDI
Most of the current debris is found in the low Earth orbit (LEO), which is about 600 to 1,200 miles (1,000 to 2,000 kilometers) above the planet. NASA calls LEO an "orbital space junkyard." The junk isn't sitting idly in a landfill; it is moving around at speeds up to 18,000 mph (29,000 kph), or 23 times the speed of sound. While the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee was designed to coordinate space debris efforts, there are currently no international laws in place regarding removing space debris. Since a single satellite can cost between $50 million and $400 million, the risk of damage from space debris to a satellite is clearly significant. And as more debris is left behind, there is obviously more risk of collisions, especially when space tourism picks up. The orbiting junk was explored in the 2013 film "Gravity," starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock; it's known as the Kessler Effect. Don Kessler, the former NASA scientist who studied space debris even told the Guardian back in 2011 in regard to formulating a plan to deal with space junk: "The longer you wait to do this, the more expensive it's going to be. … This scenario of increasing space debris will play out even if we don't put anything else in orbit," he said. On that point, the European Space Agency has contracted with a Swiss startup called ClearSpace that plans to launch its first mission to remove space debris in 2025. The Gravity of the Situation Without a doubt, space debris is an Operational Risk; even the International Space Station has to dodge space junk at times. Former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine even tweeted last September that the "Space Station has maneuvered 3 times in 2020 to avoid debris. In the last 2 weeks, there have been 3 high concern potential conjunctions. Debris is getting worse!" Some of the larger debris that doesn't burn up re-entering the atmosphere (about one object per day) even crashes back on Earth. Since most of the Earth's surface is covered in water, it's not surprisingly that most of the junk winds up in oceans, so the risk to humans is statistically very low. That doesn't mean nil though. For example, there is debris from Russian Proton rockets that has been found in Siberia, including that of old fuel tanks containing toxic fuel residue, which can be harmful to plants, animals and humans. The environmental risks of space junk need to be explored further. A piece of space junk floating through the ocean is certainly not nearly as concerning as our plastic problem, but it's nothing to ignore either. LCA Leads the Way Just as more and more companies are assessing the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of their products and services from cradle to grave on Planet Earth, it stands to reason that LCA could be just as important in outer space. That's especially true when you consider space tourism is poised to blast off to become a potential $1.5 billion industry by 2028. The more activity, the more debris.
Webb 18 ~(Amy Webb is a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business and is the chief executive of the Future Today Institute, a strategic foresight and research group in Washington, D.C.), "Space Oddities: We Need a Plan to Stop Polluting Space Before It's Too Late" WIRED Science April 12, 2018 https://www.wired.com/story/we-need-a-plan-to-stop-polluting-space-before-its-too-late/~~ TDI
Space is our next dumping ground. As many as 170 million fragments of metal and astro debris necklace Earth. That includes 20,000 pieces larger than a softball, and 500,000 about the size of a marble, according to NASA. Old satellites, like Tiangong-1, are the biggest and highest-profile lumps of rubbish, but most of it comes from rocket parts and even lost astronaut tools. Size doesn't always matter—a fleck of paint, orbiting at a high velocity, cracked the Space Shuttle's windshield. This debris will pose a navigation hazard for many centuries to come. At least 200 objects roar back into the atmosphere each year, including pieces of solar panels and antennas and fragments of metal. All of them pose dangers for future astronauts: One plum-sized piece of gnarled space trash traveling faster than a speeding bullet could rip a five-foot hole into a spacecraft. And that collision, then, would hatch its own spectacle of shrapnel, which would join the rushing river of junk already circling the planet. It's not just Americans doing the dumping. China and Russia each have dozens of decommissioned satellites overhead, though the US certainly does it with style. Like everyone, I marveled at the successful launch of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket, whose cargo included Elon Musk's Tesla Roaster and a mannequin driver named Starman. I'll admit, I teared up listening to David Bowie as the rockets separated from the payload. It was an incredible technological achievement, one proving that the system could someday transport people and goods—perhaps real cars, and real people—into space. Now that Tesla and its driver are overhead, in America's junkyard in the sky. To be sure, space is big. Really big. Most debris soars about 1,250 miles above the Earth's surface, so you have better odds scoring a seat on Virgin Galactic's maiden voyage than witnessing Starman crash into your next door neighbor's house. But it's our behavior back here on Earth—our insistence on sending things up, without really thinking how to safely contain or send them back down—that should concern you. We weren't always so short-sighted. Ancient Native Americans lived by the Seventh Generation Principal, a way of long-term thinking that considered how every decision would affect their descendants seven generations into the future. In Japan, Buddhist monks devoted part of their daily rituals and work to ensuring the longevity of their communities, even planting and tending to bamboo forests, which would eventually be harvested, treated and used to repair temple roofs many decades hence. With each new generation, we live life faster than our ancestors. As a result, we spend less time thinking about the farther future of humanity. We now have our sights set on colonizing Mars, mining asteroids for research and commerce, and venturing out to the furthest reaches of our galaxy. Space is no longer the final frontier; we're already exploring it. Our current approach is about getting there, rather than considering what "getting there" could mean for future generations of humans, not to mention other life in the universe. Where all that junk winds up isn't something we can predict accurately. We could be unintentionally wreaking havoc on civilizations far away from Earth, catalyzing future intergalactic wars. Or, we might cause far less scintillating problems. Space junk could start to behave in unpredictable ways, reflecting sunlight the wrong direction, or changing our atmosphere, or impacting the universe in ways that don't fit into our current understanding of physics. Last week—30 years after my friends and I created an imaginary net to capture space debris—SpaceX launched RemoveDEBRIS, its own prototype, an experimental net to collect junk in orbit. It's a neat idea, but even as middle schoolers, we knew it was an impractical one. Individual nets can't possibly scale to address the hundreds of millions of particles of debris already in orbit. The challenge is that all of our space agencies are inextricably tied to national governments and militaries. Seeking a global agreement on how to mitigate debris would involve each country divulging exactly what it was launching and when—an unlikely scenario. The private sector could collaborate to build grand-scale orbital cleaners, but their commercial interests are driven by immediate launches. Given all the planned launches in our near future, we don't have much time to wait. We must learn to be better stewards of our own planet—and commit to very long-term thinking—before we try to colonize any others.
Early warning satellites going dark signals attacks – causes miscalc and goes nuclear
Orwig 16 ~(Jessica, MS in science and tech journalism from Texas AandM, BS in astronomy and physics from Ohio State) "Russia says a growing problem in space could be enough to spark a war," Insider,' January 26, 2016, https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-says-space-junk-could-spark-war-2016-1~~ TDI
NASA has already warned that the large amount of space junk around our planet is growing beyond our control, but now a team of Russian scientists has cited another potentially unforeseen consequence of that debris: War. Scientists estimate that anywhere from 500,000 to 600,000 pieces of human-made space debris between 0.4 and 4 inches in size are currently orbiting the Earth and traveling at speeds over 17,000 miles per hour. If one of those pieces smashed into a military satellite it "may provoke political or even armed conflict between space-faring nations," Vitaly Adushkin, a researcher for the Institute of Geosphere Dynamics at the Russian Academy of Sciences, reported in a paper set to be published in the peer-reviewed journal Acta Astronautica, which is sponsored by the International Academy of Astronautics. Say, for example, that a satellite was destroyed or significantly damaged in orbit — something that a 4-inch hunk of space junk could easily do traveling at speeds of 17,500 miles per hour, Adushkin reported. (Even smaller pieces no bigger than size of a pea could cause enough damage to the satellite that it would no longer operate correctly, he notes.) It would be difficult for anyone to determine whether the event was accidental or deliberate. This lack of immediate proof could lead to false accusations, heated arguments and, eventually, war, according to Adushkin and his colleagues. A politically dangerous dilemma In the report, the Adushkin said that there have already been repeated "sudden failures" of military spacecraft in te last two decades that cannot be explained. "So, there are two possible explanations," he wrote. The first is "unregistered collisions with space objects." The second is "machinations" ~deliberate action~ of the space adversary. "This is a politically dangerous dilemma," he added. But these mysterious failures in the past aren't what concerns Adushkin most. It's a future threat of what experts call the cascade effect that has Adushkin and other scientists around the world extremely concerned. The Kessler Syndrome In 1978, American astrophysicist Donald Kessler predicted that the amount of space debris around Earth would begin to grow exponentially after the turn of the millennium. Kessler 's predictions rely on the fact that over time, space junk accumulates. We leave most of our defunct satellites in space, and when meteors and other man-made space debris slam into them, you get a cascade of debris. The cascade effect — also known as the Kessler Syndrome — refers to a critical point wherein the density of space junk grows so large that a single collision could set off a domino effect of increasingly more collisions. For Kessler, this is a problem because it would "create small debris faster than it can be removed," Kessler said last year. And this cloud of junk could eventually make missions to space too dangerous. For Adushkin, this would exacerbate the issue of identifying what, or who, could be behind broken satellites. The future So far, the US and Russian Space Surveillance Systems have catalogued 170,000 pieces of large space debris (between 4 and 8 inches wide) and are currently tracking them to prevent anymore dilemmas like the ones Adushkin and his colleagues cite in their paper. But it's not just the large objects that concern Adushkin, who reported that even small objects (less than 1/3 of an inch) could damage satellites to the point they can't function properly. Using mathematical models, Adushkin and his colleagues calculated what the situtation will be like in 200 years if we continue to leave satellites in space and make no effort to clean up the mess. They estimate we'll have: 1.5 times more fragments greater than 8 inches across 3.2 times more fragments between 4 and 8 inches across 13-20 times more smaller-sized fragments less than 4 inches across "The number of small-size, non-catalogued objects will grow exponentially in mutual collisions," the researchers reported.