The importance of sustainable space exploration in the 21st century
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
EMILY KWONG, BYLINE: You're listening to SHORT WAVE from NPR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
AARON SCOTT, HOST:
On October 4, 1957, the Space Age began. The Soviet Union launched the very first artificial satellite into space, an object about the size of a beach ball named Sputnik. In the 6 1/2 decades since, the number of objects we humans have launched into orbit has skyrocketed.
DANIELLE WOOD: It's an important year, 2023, to ask this question of, how many objects have humans put into space?
SCOTT: Danielle Wood is a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We talked with her at our recent live event at the big annual science conference put on by AAAS, and she says we've now put thousands of objects into orbit today.
WOOD: And this is just the beginning of a major trend. And we are expecting to see thousands of objects, maybe tens of thousands, if everyone who's planning to do it does what they say.
SCOTT: And that's only counting objects that are still in operation. Danielle says if you include the many dead rockets and satellites, plus all the debris created from their collisions, down to the screws and tiny paint flecks - basically, if you account for all of the trash that we have dumped into space - that number is much, much higher.
WOOD: So the number of things that are hard to track but are there and are also not even operating or sending any radio signal is probably in the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions. Some we can see, and some we can't. It's a big number.
SCOTT: OK, so little bits of floating metal up in the grandness of space might not seem like a big deal. But in recent years, governments have had to move the space station and postpone a spacewalk because of the threat of collisions with this debris. You know, no one wants to end up in a real-life version of the movie "Gravity" or to have the Earth surrounded by an impenetrable cloud of speeding space junk that traps us from launching into outer space. Danielle has thought a lot about this and how we can avoid making the same mistakes up there in space that we've made down here on Earth.
WOOD: I love talking about sustainability, but I think if we can really figure out what we mean by it, then we can start to put in place practices that can make a difference.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SCOTT: Today on the show, another installment of our live series - Danielle Wood tells us what it means to extend our ideas of sustainability up into space. I'm Aaron Scott, and you're listening to SHORT WAVE, the science podcast from NPR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SCOTT: So, Danielle, one thing that you focused on, amongst a lot of different research projects, is the idea of sustainability in space. Can you just say what you actually mean by sustainability in space? 'Cause it's similar but also somewhat different from what sustainability means down here on Earth.
WOOD: So sustainability in these places means as humans have an interaction with these locations around the Earth, the moon itself, places where we send science experiments like Mars, how can we consider the same balance between opportunities for economic growth and well-being but also social and cultural and environmental health and finding a blend of those things through innovation? The very practical version right now is that around the Earth, we already have so many pieces of trash that were not sustainable - meaning we don't have a long-term ability for all countries to equally participate in operating safely in space without worry of collisions and risk.
SCOTT: So tell us then about the Space Sustainability Rating that you've worked to develop and how it fits into hopefully making space more accessible for a lot more people for a long time to come.
WOOD: The Space Sustainability Rating is an incentive system designed by an international team. They want to make sure that space is a place where countries from around the world have equal opportunity to operate their science and business missions for years to come. It was actually called for by the World Economic Forum, and so I appreciate their leadership to call for volunteers, like me, who are willing to help design a system that would be an incentive. And it's in many ways similar to what we see in buildings. If you walk around in the D.C. area and you see a sign on a building that says, this building is LEED certified, that means that the organization who owns that building paid some money to have an expert follow up checklists and see how many things they did for that building to make it lower impact for climate change here on Earth.
We want to have the same kind of positive incentive for companies who operate space systems. We know there's going to be more and more large constellations or groups of satellites operating, and there's going to be a need for both governments but also private sector pressure. So we have a nice checklist. And there are things like, how do you share data with the world and with other operators? How do you make sure that you're ready when someone gives you that call that says there might be a collision? Are you ready to respond? And in the future, will you be ready when there's companies who are able to help reduce your debris by actually disposing of your mission in a safe way at the end of life?
SCOTT: And the rating launched last June of 2022. Can you tell us a little bit how it's gone so far and what sort of interest or participation you've gotten from different companies?
WOOD: Thank you. We were so happy to celebrate going from an academic study on the rating into operations of the nonprofit. So...
SCOTT: Oh, that must feel real good. Yes (laughter).
WOOD: It's wonderful to move something out of the university. And we're so happy to have transitioned it to leadership by a nonprofit that we spun out of the EPFL Space Center in Switzerland. Both space operators and non-operators can pay to be members to help keep the overall organization afloat. And if a group wants a membership and they want a rating as well, they pay a fee, and it gives them not just a one-time number, but it's a relationship with our team. It means that we can talk to them repeatedly, and they can show us their design, and we can then give them advice on how they can improve their design to get a better rating. We don't just want to give a sort of punishment or a celebration. We want to actually influence the design going forward.
So this first example was from a company that's going to be thinking about ways to use constellations of satellites to support transportation. And to be honest, when they celebrated their being the first rating, they actually got the lowest rating you can get, which is a bronze.
SCOTT: Oh, no (laughter).
WOOD: But in some ways, it was beautiful actually because they got a low rating, and they did what we asked, which was to share that rating publicly, which means that they were saying, we're participating. So actually, in some ways, I was pleased that our first rating was low because it means we were all saying there's more work to do to grow.
SCOTT: And I feel like it means that people are going to put faith in it, and with greenwashing being such an issue, they're going to take it seriously that you're using a metric that not everybody's going to pass.
WOOD: We're very conscious of the fact that we need to be transparent, so we published in academic papers our methodology, and we know that there needs to be faith that when we're giving a rating, it's based on real information. The other key idea is that the rating isn't a one-time thing. Your rating can change. So if a mission changes something about what they're doing that reduces their score, that will have an updated rating.
SCOTT: And is the goal that these ratings are something that consumers will look at? Tell us a little bit about, I guess, what are the incentives for a company to participate?
WOOD: I actually, in some ways, think it may not be a direct issue of consumer buy-in. I think the reality is that a few of the companies that are really going to put a lot of satellites in space have major public images, and so because of that, we hope and we expect that they care about how people view them as a player 'cause they're not just in space; they're also in other important technology sectors. So this is one way they can demonstrate their responsibility 'cause they're not just a company operating infrastructure. They're also major global players that influence many parts of our society.
SCOTT: How do we go about exploring and using this space without repeating kind of the exploitative colonial history of exploration here on Earth? How do we go about not mucking up space the way that we've kind of mucked up our Earth ecosystems around us?
WOOD: I spend a lot of my time asking how we can pursue positive activities in space in a way that doesn't leave us regretting what we're leaving to future generations. And to be honest, I think it requires some basic rethinking of a few assumptions. The first is the idea that we have to ask what kind of legacy are we leaving to future generations - hopefully of the kind of beauty and celebration that we see like in a national park, right? When you think of a national park, the reason we don't allow malls to be built there is because we consider those locations as places that are beautiful and valued. Of course, many Native tribes have been doing that for generations, right? But we - the government then comes along and says, we're supporting this idea and making sure that it can be celebrated and enjoyed for years to come because, as international law says, outer space is not just sort of one country's domain; it's something that belongs to all humankind.
I also look at this from a point of view of just cultural awareness. I'm so privileged to actually work with several Native American collaborators. For example, I collaborate with the Yurok Tribe. They're based in the California region. And they're very interested in using satellite data to monitor their own forest. So they tell me, hey, it's so important, first, that we can use today's technology to address our local needs, but second, there's a broader dialogue, whether it's in a Native American context or traditional Indigenous astronomy and regions in Africa or Chile, places where we do a lot of astronomy.
I love to realize that astronomy is a very old art, and humans' link to the space and to the cosmos is not a modern technology thing. It's just a human thing. How can we enjoy space in a way that respects these ancient astronomies? And I think the first step is to realize that space is a public forum, not just for the private gain of an entity.
SCOTT: And something that can be said about space becoming more accessible is it's more affordable for a wider range of countries and a wider range of scientists and a lot of people to be able to put satellites up there and to be able to conduct research. Can you talk a little bit about some of those experiments that you're excited about?
WOOD: So what's great is I would argue every country is already a space country - meaning they all use satellite services for remote sensing to observe the Earth, as well as communication and positioning. And they're all stakeholders in the future activities we might do. Even today. For example, I'm collaborating closely with the United Arab Emirates, just celebrating the opportunity for one of their astronauts to travel to the ISS with NASA.
SCOTT: I was going to ask about that. Can you tell us about what experiment you are going to potentially put on their rover as it heads to the moon?
WOOD: They're traveling already with a rover called Rashid, which is traveling inside of a lander carried by a Japanese company called ispace, which was launched inside of a rocket from SpaceX. So we had a U.S. rocket, a Japanese lander and a UAE rover.
On top of the wheel of this tiny rover is a very small experiment from my team. We have three small trays. We're trying to study both dust and passive or low-cost ways to study temperature on the moon. One of our mantras is asking, what kind of space missions can we do that are, like, low impact on the environment and also affordable that could really be built by countries around the world? So here we're going to be asking, can we collect dust in a low-cost way? Helps to help us understand the engineering impacts of dust on space missions. But it's all done with no electronics beyond the camera that's taking pictures of our mission.
SCOTT: How do you think all of this increased human activity up in space is changing our relationship to the Earth below us?
WOOD: I hope that humans pause and note that the actions we're taking now in the next 10 years really are going to be decisive in the relationship between humans and our planet and humans and other locations, like the moon. We've been dreaming for years of things like space robots being able to build space stations that humans can go visit. Such things are going from the dreaming stage to the venture capital stage, where there's companies that are planning to build the next generation of stations after the current International Space Station is retired very soon. So it's a time period where some science fiction will become science fact. But I want to do a call for action to all of you, to everyone who's listening, to say that as we make these dreams a reality, let's be so thoughtful about the possible long-term implications of our actions.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
WOOD: Let's treat everything like a national park, not like a place where you're just doing experiments and throwing away trash.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SCOTT: Danielle Wood, it has been an utter joy to talk with you. Thank you so much for taking some time with us here at the conference.
WOOD: Thank you so much, Aaron. It's been a pleasure.
(APPLAUSE)
WOOD: And thank you all for joining.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SCOTT: We talked with Danielle Wood before a live audience at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Special thanks to all the folks at AAAS for the invitation and for making space for us on their stage. This episode was produced by Berly McCoy, edited by our managing producer Rebecca Ramirez and fact-checked by Brit Hanson. Our audio engineers were Carleigh Strange and Josh Newell. Brendan Crump is our podcast coordinator. Beth Donovan is our senior director of programming. And Anya Grundmann is our senior vice president of programming. I'm Aaron Scott. Thanks for listening to SHORT WAVE from NPR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
Copyright © 2023 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.