Space Junk

As someone who is going to be an aerospace engineer at least until June (though hopefully not after that), I think I can claim that the problem of space debris is one that touches my life.

This is an interesting issue both because of the direct problems it poses (What are we going to do with all this junk orbiting the Earth? What is going to happen when there’s too much of it to launch any more satellites? What happens to dead satellites? Could any of them ever lose momentum and come crashing down on someone’s head or house?), but also because it raises questions about what an environmental issue is.

What are the boundaries of that vague space that we define as “our environment”? Do they extend past the Earth’s atmosphere? Is there a line we can draw around ourselves, and are we allowed to do whatever we want outside that line? Also, if such a line does exist, is it constantly moving outward in the ongoing narrative of “human exploration” (which comes dangerously close to the narrative of conquest and colonization).

But I’m going a bit too far into outer space now (sorry about the bad pun). Time to get back to the issue of space debris (or space junk, the less polite term).

Here are a few links that offer some background information. NASA monitors closely the amount of space debris orbiting the Earth, and you can follow along yourself here. I find the maps of space debris particularly interesting.



Also, the Wikipedia article on space debris has some fun facts and outlines some of the proposed solutions.

Another item of note: the space shuttle flies “upside down and backwards” from the point of view of the Earth. The “upside down” part is because its dark underside protects the crew from radiation, the “backwards” part is so the thrusters can scoop up and deflect any space junk that could potentially damage the space shuttle. When hurtling at tens of thousands of kilometers an hour, even something a centimeter in diameter can be destructive.

All right, so why should your average person care about space junk? It’s so far away, right? The bits of dead satellites and trash dumped from Mir are potentially the most damaging to other satellites, the International Space Station, and space telescopes, not a normal person walking around on Earth. So maybe this points to another broader question, which is how does the space program fit into environmentalism (if it fits at all)? Should we completely abandon exploring other worlds in favor of fixing the myriad problems on our own planet? I don’t think the two have to be mutually exclusive, but I’m sure there are some that make that argument. There are even people who claim that it doesn’t matter what we do to the Earth because we’ll be able to colonize Mars or live in a space station or something. People that say that don’t realize how far we are from actually being able to do it.

In any case, although I’ll be giving up my connection with the space industry when I graduate (at least for the near future), and I think that more money should be spent on environmental issues, I’m not advocating choosing Earth over space or vice versa.

Ok...maybe I am just a little…

Blog number two: the natural in the unnatural

Our steed: A green, lumbering, Ford truck, wired to run on diesel and vegetable oil. It fits six comfortable in the two front bench seats, but countless bodies could be piled into the truck bed if we wanted.
Our destination: The local Odwalla Juice shipping center.
Our goal: Infiltrate and pilfer dumpsters, returning home with sweet blended juices for the reasonable price of the soiled soles of our shoes.

I’m no expert at dumpster diving. I’ve only been twice, accompanying a friend of mine who recently made what most would call an eccentricity at best (at worst a perversion) a hobby over the past six months or so. He and his friends go dumpster diving nearly every weekend, even two or three times a week, keeping charts and maps of the best locations and tracking the quality of the refuse around the Boston metropolitan area.

Pulling behind the Odwalla Juice shipping center at around 1 am, my friend tells me “You can look at the expiration dates, but as long as they aren’t bloated they should be ok.” We putter through a large parking lot—more accurately, a series of parking lots connected with asphalt canals and dikes—houses row upon row of slumbering beasts, large semis waiting for the sun to rise.

We park about 400 meters from the target so as not to arouse suspicion. Nonetheless, when we get there, linked chains snake around the width and length of the rusted green box. The dumpster has been padlocked.

Using our headlamps, we search along each edge for a way inside. “I can see a ton of juice in there!” someone says futilely. But we can’t access it without doing any damage, so we lope back to our green monster and ride on to the next site.

After turning the car to vegetable oil (which permeated the cab with the distinct smell of potato chips) and stalling out in the middle of a U-turn, we finally made it to the Trader Joe’s dumpster in Needham. This dumpster was far more hospitable. My friends jumped inside while I hesitated next to the dumpster, turning over all the items they handed to me in various states of disrepair. Pears, open packages of pasta, dented boxes of cereal, crates of muffins, soggy heads of lettuce, tubs of cheese (mozzarella, brie, muenster) and even a whole egg were lifted over the metal precipice and into my waiting hands as I carefully piled them into a plastic crate.



Last Friday, for the first time in my life, I spent nearly my entire day around whirring, slicing, boring machines and hot, flying shards and shavings of metal. Constructing parts for my senior thesis (a model of an tidal-current-driven turbine) has been a chore I’d been putting off for a few weeks, not so much because of laziness of apathy, but because the machine shop scares me half to death. But, after spending a few hours coaching myself and mustering up my courage, I finally tackled the task.

The work I had to do would have gone a lot faster if Todd, the machinist in the Aero/Astro machine shop, had just taken over and done everything for me, instead of standing behind me as I flinched every time I touched a tool to the spinning cylinder of aluminum on the lathe. I jumped the first time the metal shavings flew off in long spirals, fluidly accumulating in large piles of metallic curls.

Inanimate machines, once again, have taken on a life-like form in my eyes. The machines in the shop scare me because to me they seem uncontrollable; they have their own agenda and their own guiding laws that I don’t have authority over or understand. Todd, however, (to use a cliché) speaks the language of the machines; he has command over them.

So when Todd stepped in to take over for a particularly difficult maneuver, and told me that what he was doing made him very nervous, I just about ran for my life.

The machines humans have created, designed to assist them in the process of engineering, manufacturing, and production, are not even completely under our control. This may be a stretch (and entering the realm of the sci-fi), but the machine shop makes me feel like the control we think we have over the machines we construct is only as illusory as the control we think we have over nature. Lathes and drills and saws can just as easily wrench themselves out of our grip, just as the dams we build can burst and the volcanoes on whose flanks we build cities erupt.

In one of our first classes I defined “nature” as that which is beyond our control. So are the machines that scare me so much (and rightly so…Todd likes to tell stories during his safety training sessions of gruesome accidents that have occurred in the machine shop) part of nature?

For some less reflective blogging, here are a few quotes that are relevant to my essay (and that I might use in my revision):

From Bruce and Young, In the Eye of the Beholder
p.4
“There is an almost universal face blueprint across different species of animal.
One fundamental similarity across all animals which is reflected in their faces is symmetry. …there is nothing in the environment to force a distinction between right and left, and that is why…features such as eyes and legs developed equally on either side of the animal. Intriguingly…these same considerations would mean that any animals evolving on other plants would share this same basic feature of bilateral symmetry.”

p.244-247
“Dadd had been an artist of great promise, but he spent most of his life in Bethlem and Broadmoor hospitals after he killed his father in 1843. When he killed him, Dadd thought his father was someone else (the devil). This is a form of delusional misidentification—a psychiatric symptom which involves thinking that other people are not who they appear to be.

“One of the most extensively investigated forms of delusional mis-identification has been the Capgras delusion; the claim that one or more close relatives has been replaced by near-identical impostors.

“Capgras delusion patients can be otherwise rational and lucid, able to appreciate that they are making an extraordinary claim. If you ask ‘what would you think if I told you my family had been replaced by impostors?’, you will often get answers to the effect that it would be unbelievable, absurd, an indication that you had gone mad. Yet the same patients will claim that, none the less, this is exactly what has happened to their own relatives. If you ask for evidence that it is an impostor, the patients often tell you they can see the difference, yet they find it hard to express this difference in words. Further probing will sometimes reveal more pervasive feelings that many things seem strange, unfamiliar, almost unreal.

“All of us find things we like and things we dislike in our loved ones, but acknowledging the existence of the things we dislike about them can make us feel uneasy. A much discussed possibility has therefore been that the Capgras delusion is a pathological way of resolving chronic uneasiness: by splitting the relative into a good original and a bad double, the double can be hated without guilt.

“Like many psychodynamic hypotheses, this is ingenious but not grounded in evidence.
When we look at faces of people we know, we recognize who they are and parts of our brains set up preparatory reactions for the type of interaction that is likely to follow. Russian psychologists named these preparatory reactions the orienting response…Capgras delusion can happen when the pathway responsible for the orienting response is affected. The consequence will be that faces can be recognized, but seem somehow odd because they do not provoke the usual reactions. The impostor claim is a rationalization of this highly disquieting sense of strangeness.”

From Mary Roach, Stiff
p.65 (during her trip to the Body Farm in Tennessee)
“Something else is going on. Squirming grains of rice are crowded into the man’s belly button. It’s a rice grain mosh pit. But rice grains do not move. These cannot be grains of rice. They are not. They are young flies. Entomologists have a name for young flies, but it is an ugly name, an insult. Let’s not use the word ‘maggot.’ Let’s use a pretty word. Let’s use ‘hacienda.’

“I see them. They are spaced out, moving slowly. It’s kind of beautiful, this man’s skin with these tiny white slivers embedded just beneath its surface. It looks like expensive Japanese rice paper. You tell yourself these things.”

p. 67
“Bacteria-generated gas bloats the lips and tongue, the latter often to the point of making it protrude from the mouth: In real life as it is in cartoons. The eyes do not bloat because the liquid has long ago leached out. They are gone. Xs. In read life as it is in cartoons.”

Oddly enough, I find all of this morbidity, well, morbidly fascinating. I also realized that I won’t be able to describe decay to this level of detail (or interest) because I’ve never seen it. So I am going to try some amateur empiricism that will come no where near to the type of decay Roach observed:

I will buy a piece of fruit (maybe two) and put it in an open Ziploc bag in my room. I will observe it for the next week, and perhaps write about what I see in my final draft.

Simple as a grade-school science experiment, but something that I think is worth doing.