Keep Space Tidy

Another in a series of reports on junk in space.

Apparently it's cluttered up there. What with all the bits of old booster rocket, the remains of satellites hit by meteors, left-over rubbish from the making of The Clangers and unsold copies of John Prescott's autobiography. And I've a nasty suspicion, now I think of it, about astronauts' sanitary arrangements. In short, it's increasingly dangerous to anything or anyone else coming up to join them, what with spanners and fuel pods and positron drives whizzing around at high speed. A bit like driving through Dunstable on a Friday night, is where I'm trying to go here.

And it makes me think. What is it about this species that we can't leave anything as we found it? Our roadsides littered with McDonalds cartons (other fast-food litter is also available): plastic floating round in circles in the North Pacific; guillemots covered in oil: hedgehogs trapped in beer can plastic collars - we just trash the place. And given all the mess we've made on earth, we're doing it to the sky now.

I know that Original Sin, like Papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy, isn't actually in the Bible. Although of course the first two Laws of Thermodynamics are. But even so, you sometimes wonder if there's just a grain of truth in old St Augustine (of Hippo, not the other one) and his pessimistic view of the world. But then I remember that on some measures the good ol' USA is one of the most Christian of countries, and it can't be that only the unredeemed are involved in blasting stuff into space and then leaving it up there.

So I despair. In good scientific manner, a solution is of course proposed - in the same way that we had to invent lung cancer treatments because we invented smoking, and some scientists want to chuck iron filings in the ocean to counter global warming. And we invented cars so we had to build the M25 and invent the Congestion Charge. So a giant space-net is suggested, to catch all the orbital debris. Sounds like another excuse to build some cool stuff and make whizzy-bang noises. But knowing the way this species behaves, we'd probably end up accidentally catching Space Dolphins as well.