Falling space junk poses a growing risk to air travel safety — and could harm the economy too, experts warn
Talk about a potentially explosive issue.
The risk of rogue rocket debris and other man-made space junk colliding with planes is a growing challenge that's only going to get worse as interplanetary traffic and commercial airline flights increase, experts warn.
New research published in Scientific Reports suggests that the problem is now notching up from a sci-fi movie-worthy, probably not in a million lightyears scenario to a real world matter of concern.
'In short, there is a 26 percent chance of an uncontrolled space debris reentry in busy airspaces such as the Northeastern United States or Northern Europe each year,' said Ewan Wright at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
Wright is co-author of the paper, titled 'Airspace closures due to reentering space objects.'
Analysis of the academic work posted by Space.com cited an example from as recently as last month, when a SpaceX spacecraft erupted into a ball of flames over the North Atlantic Ocean, near Turks and Caicos.
During the so-called 'destructive event,' the FAA activated what is known as a Debris Response Area, holding aircraft back from the affected zone for a short time.
Earlier in January, a separation ring from a rocket reportedly weighing about 1,000 lbs. crash-landed in the middle of a village in Kenya, authorities said.
Study authors pointed out that a growing number of ground stops — and other measures already taken to ensure airline safety during common weather events, including summer thunderstorms — could harm the economy.
'This situation puts national authorities in a dilemma — to close airspace or not — with safety and economic implications either way,' Wright and peers wrote.
Their suggestion — require 'controlled re-entries into the ocean' for all future missions.
The interplanetary cat appears to already be out of its earthly bag, however.
Currently, more than 2,300 rocket bodies are floating up there somewhere — and are eventually expected to drop down wherever they feel like doing so, Space.com reported.
'Airspace authorities will face the challenge of uncontrolled reentries for decades to come,' researchers concluded.
Earlier, scientists warned that the rate at which space junk was increasing was coming dangerously close to ruining our view of the stars from down below.
'We can see the fingerprint of human space traffic on stratospheric aerosol,' Troy Thornberry, a research physicist at NOAA's Chemical Sciences Laboratory, said last year.
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