{"id":5019,"date":"2013-04-23T06:00:29","date_gmt":"2013-04-23T10:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allandouglas.com\/blog\/?p=5019"},"modified":"2025-04-21T01:56:40","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T05:56:40","slug":"space-dangerous-place-to-live","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/space-dangerous-place-to-live\/","title":{"rendered":"Space: a Really Dangerous Place to Live"},"content":{"rendered":"

We often think of outer space as being a great big empty nothing littered with trillions of stars and their attendant planets.\u00a0 All big enough to avoid and with lots and lots of empty void between them.\u00a0 Other than having to traverse the vast distances, empty space offers few dangers, right?\u00a0 Very wrong!\u00a0 In this episode of my on-going series about the fact and fancy of science fiction<\/a> we\u2019re going to take a look at what life for human beings would be like in outer space.<\/p>\n

Orbital Space Dangers<\/h1>\n

First, let\u2019s look at the area of space with which we are most familiar: that shell of space immediately surrounding our own planet.\u00a0 The most prominent problem here, or in any part of outer space, is the awesome destructive force of a near perfect vacuum.\u00a0 Any craft sent into space must be built to resist the forces of the interior atmosphere wanting to rush out into the vacuum surrounding it.\u00a0 Even a pinhole in the hull can turn into disaster if the material is not strong enough to resist the erosive, tearing forces of hydrodynamics as the air screams out the hole.<\/p>\n

Orbital space has another main issue: space junk.\u00a0 Human beings have become experts at trashing virtually every environment they can get to, including the space around our planet.\u00a0 NASA says that currently there are approximately 6,300 tons of man-made debris orbiting the earth; some as small as a fleck of paint, some as large as the defunct Vanguard 1 satellite.<\/p>\n

\"space<\/a>What harm can a fleck of paint do?\u00a0 When it\u2019s traveling at 17,000 miles an hour, even a paint fleck can do serious damage.\u00a0 Early in the space shuttle program, during the STS-7<\/a> mission,\u00a0a tiny paint fleck hurtling through space hit a shuttle window, causing so much damage the entire window had to be replaced.\u00a0 There are tens of thousands of junk bits in Earth orbit, some just flakes of paint, but some are nuts or bolts, tools lost by space walkers, discarded fuel tanks or rocket stages of previous space craft, even whole satellites.<\/p>\n

Physical shielding can help deflect the smallest bits, and the biggest ones can be steered around, but most of them are too small to detect in time to maneuver away from and too large to be deflected with current materials.\u00a0 This poses an ever-increasing risk to the ISS and to any spacecraft passing through our orbital space.<\/p>\n

Earth is the worst (that we know of) because of our propensity to litter, but any planet will have captured in its gravity well some cosmic souvenirs in the way of small asteroids and micrometeorites.\u00a0 Any place that you encounter something larger than a marble, this can happen:<\/p>\n