Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
PARIS — In news guaranteed to give anxious flyers one more thing to catastrophize about during turbulence, researchers have confirmed that space debris occasionally falls through the same airspace occupied by commercial aircraft. The odds of impact by 2030 “could be” approximately 1 in 1,000 according to numbers pulled out of someone’s ass, which sounds terrifying until you remember that’s roughly the same probability as your checked bag arriving at the same airport you do.
Just some good ol' fashioned space debris waiting to ruin your flight to Iceland. (EvgeniyShkolenko/depositphotos)
The findings come from a University of British Columbia study that probably could have gone unpublished, but scientists wanting free media coverage aren’t in the business of keeping reassuring news to themselves. They say there’s a 26% chance this year that falling spacecraft parts will intersect with busy airspace during an “uncontrolled re-entry,” which is also something your mom and I experienced last night.
“Aircraft can be affected by much smaller pieces of debris,” explained European Space Agency engineer Benjamin Virgili Bastida, presumably while standing next to a chart showing hundreds of other things that could also kill you but statistically won’t. “Kind of a similar thing could happen with re-entering debris,” they continued, which is a phrase doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
For context, you are more likely to die from a bee sting, a vending machine falling on you, or simply being in Florida during any given day. You are substantially more likely to choke on your complimentary airline pretzels than be struck by a defunct satellite. However, the important distinction here is that bees, vending machines, Florida, and pretzels don’t get research grants or breathless, unquestioning media coverage.
The poster child for falling space junk remains China’s Long March 5B rocket. During its 2022 swan dive over Spain, aviation authorities closed a 62-mile-wide strip of airspace for 40 minutes, even though the debris spent approximately five minutes in the affected zone. More than 300 flights were delayed, canceled, or rerouted. To put this in perspective, a disruption of this magnitude is usually reserved for light rain or a single air traffic controller calling in sick.
The fundamental problem, researchers note, is that predicting where a dying satellite will land is astonishingly difficult. Even during a spacecraft’s final orbits, the margin of error allows for “several hours,” which at orbital speeds translates to “thousands of miles.” This presents air traffic controllers with an inelegant choice: do nothing and accept infinitesimal risk, or close half the sky.
“If we react at every risk, half of the world will be impacted every now and then,” Virgili Bastida noted, articulating the central tension between theoretical safety and planes actually going places. “Do we react to everything that has a chance to reach the ground? Or do we react only to very large objects?”
Space is a pretty junky place. (NASA ODPO)
The answer, for now, is “we’ll form more committees.” The Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee, which is apparently real, conducts annual exercises where 13 space agencies pool predictions about which dead satellites will fall where, then compare notes afterward to see how wrong everyone was.
The good news, experts insist, is that average travelers should continue worrying about things more likely to kill them, which is essentially everything. Car accidents on the way to the airport. The sodium content of airport food. Heart disease. Your own inability to hydrate adequately. Meanwhile, space debris ranks as less likely than “struck by lightning while holding a winning lottery ticket” on the probability scale.
This story is based on fully factual news, but if we got it wrong, blame these guys, we’re just here to make it funny.
