CHINA IS ASSHOE: Analyst on China’s spent rocket stages: ‘Things only continue to get worse.’
In the early decades of spaceflight, the Soviet Union, the United States, and other spacefaring species paid little heed to these upper stages, also known as “rocket bodies.” They were ejected into all manner of orbits, there to remain for decades before ultimately succumbing to the slow pull of Earth’s gravity at higher altitudes.
But in the last 20 years or so, most countries (and the private companies operating within their borders) have taken a more responsible attitude toward disposing of these upper stages. This is because, as it turns out, having large, multi-ton blocks of metal spinning uncontrollably around low-Earth orbit becomes a problem over time.
The Soviet Union, and later Russia, is the biggest offender, with about 800 metric tons of rocket bodies in long-lived orbits between 600 km and 2,000 km above the Earth’s surface, according to data from the European Space Agency’s Space Debris Office as well as Jonathan McDowell’s General Catalog of Artificial Space Objects. The United States, by comparison, has about 57 metric tons of spent upper stages in these orbits. However these numbers are more or less holding steady or, in the case of Russia, slowly declining as stages fall out of orbit.
By contrast there is striking growth in China’s rocket body mass. In the past five years, the mass of Chinese rocket bodies in long-lived orbits has risen from less than 100 metric tons to 252, according to a new analysis by Space Domain Awareness expert Jim Shell.
“China… continues to abandon many rocket bodies in high low-Earth orbit,” Shell wrote on LinkedIn early Monday. “The total mass of orbital debris is a key variable influencing the long-term sustainment of space. There is broad agreement that abandoning rocket body upper stages in long-lived orbits is not a best practice. In fact, all the major space-faring nations have acknowledged this.”
That’s an awfully expensive junkyard Beijing is putting up there.