# Chilbolton Observatory Tracks the Growing Threat of Space Junk

An episode of [Bedtime Astronomy](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1736397134), 25 Aug 2026, 39 min.

Audio: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/73661190/junkp.mp3

Chilbolton Observatory is helping protect Earth’s increasingly crowded orbital environment. Using powerful radar, scientists track thousands of pieces of space debris, monitor satellite collision risks, and support warnings that protect critical space infrastructure. The observatory also contributes to planetary defense by tracking near-Earth asteroids and assessing potential threats. As satellite constellations rapidly expand, continuous monitoring is becoming essential for keeping space safe and sustainable. Thank you for listening to Bedtime Astronomy — your guide to the cosmos. New episodes on space exploration, NASA missions & the latest astronomy breakthroughs. This episode includes AI-generated content.

## Transcript

[0:03] Speaker 1: Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
[0:07] Speaker 1: with our soothing Bedtime Astronomie podcast. Each episode offers a
[0:12] Speaker 1: gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
[0:16] Speaker 1: unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries
[0:20] Speaker 1: of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful
[0:22] Speaker 1: slumber under the night sky.
[0:26] Speaker 2: So I want you to imagine taking a standard steel bolt,
[0:31] Speaker 2: just a regular hardware store bolt, maybe over the size
[0:34] Speaker 2: of your thumb, and you accelerate that bolt to say,
[0:38] Speaker 2: seventeen five hundred miles per hour.
[0:40] Speaker 3: Which is roughly orbital velocity.
[0:42] Speaker 2: Yeah, right, exactly. So the physics of what happens next
[0:45] Speaker 2: are just while they're terrifying, honestly, at that kind of speed,
[0:49] Speaker 2: if that little bolt hits a solid surface, it doesn't
[0:52] Speaker 2: just punch an neat hole in it like a bullet would.
[0:54] Speaker 3: No, not at all. The energy involved.
[0:56] Speaker 2: Is it hits with the explosive kinetic energy of a
[0:59] Speaker 2: literal handg.
[1:00] Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a really good way to visualize it.
[1:03] Speaker 2: And right now, sitting here today, there are millions of
[1:06] Speaker 2: these invisible grenades basically orbiting in the absolute darkness right above.
[1:10] Speaker 3: Your head, which fundamentally changes how we have to think
[1:13] Speaker 3: about the space immediately surrounding our planet. I mean, we
[1:16] Speaker 3: have this very pervasive cultural idea of space as this,
[1:21] Speaker 3: you know, infinite, pristine, empty void.
[1:25] Speaker 2: Right the final frontier totally ampy exactly, But that is
[1:28] Speaker 2: purely an illusion of distance.
[1:30] Speaker 3: If human eyes could actually resolve what is happening in
[1:33] Speaker 3: lowerth orbit, say, you know, between two hundred and thousand
[1:37] Speaker 3: miles up, you wouldn't see a peaceful black canopy at all.
[1:41] Speaker 2: You'd see a mess.
[1:42] Speaker 3: Right, You'd see a frantic, highly congested, swirling swarm of metal, glass,
[1:48] Speaker 3: composites and frozen coolant, just all moving at velocities that
[1:53] Speaker 3: the human brain really isn't evolved to comprehend.
[1:55] Speaker 2: And that's the exact reality we're unpacking today, because the
[1:58] Speaker 2: orbital environment isn't an empty canvas anymore. It's a sprawling,
[2:01] Speaker 2: high speed and frankly incredibly dangerous junk yard.
[2:05] Speaker 3: Yeah, it really is.
[2:06] Speaker 2: So today we're exploring the unprecedented boon and satellite launches
[2:09] Speaker 2: happening right now, which is straining this fragile environment to
[2:13] Speaker 2: its breaking point. And we're also going to get deep
[2:15] Speaker 2: into the weeds of how defense systems, tracking stations and
[2:19] Speaker 2: orbital analyts are working around the clock to manage this chaos.
[2:22] Speaker 3: Because it is entirely an operational, high stakes, daily reality.
[2:26] Speaker 3: I mean, space sustainability has transitioned entirely out of the
[2:29] Speaker 3: realm of you know, theoretical academic papers.
[2:32] Speaker 2: It's not just sci fi anymore, No.
[2:34] Speaker 3: Not at all. It's strictly in the realm of national
[2:36] Speaker 3: security and global economics.
[2:38] Speaker 2: Now.
[2:39] Speaker 3: The invisible infrastructure we've built up in orbit is completely
[2:42] Speaker 3: load bearing for the visible infrastructure we have down here
[2:45] Speaker 3: on the ground, Oh absolutely, and keeping it from basically
[2:48] Speaker 3: tearing itself apart requires constant, incredibly complex mathematical surveillance, right.
[2:53] Speaker 2: And to understand how we actually do that surveillance, I
[2:56] Speaker 2: want to take you to a place called the Chilboltson Observatory.
[2:59] Speaker 3: Ah. Yeah, done in southern England exactly.
[3:02] Speaker 2: It's operated by the UK's National Space Laboratory ral Space.
[3:07] Speaker 2: And I want you to picture this massive twenty five
[3:09] Speaker 2: meter wide radar dish. I mean, this thing is so
[3:13] Speaker 2: hulking that as it pivots to track objects across the sky,
[3:17] Speaker 2: it casts these giant, sweeping shadows all across the facility grounds.
[3:20] Speaker 3: It's an imposing piece of hardware, it really is.
[3:23] Speaker 2: And inside the control building there you have this room
[3:25] Speaker 2: full of operators and screens that are just constantly lighting
[3:28] Speaker 2: up with detections, just ping after pin.
[3:30] Speaker 3: And what's crucial to understand about what they're looking at
[3:32] Speaker 3: on those screens. What they're actually doing is that they
[3:35] Speaker 3: are actively searching for needles in a global haystack. Yeah,
[3:40] Speaker 3: the dish at Chilbolton is pumping radio waves up into
[3:43] Speaker 3: the exosphere and listening for the faint echoes that bounce back.
[3:48] Speaker 3: And sure they are picking up some natural objects, but
[3:51] Speaker 3: the bulk of the effort is cataloging a staggering amount of.
[3:54] Speaker 2: Artificial debris right the space junk right.
[3:56] Speaker 3: They are essentially serving as the sharp end of the
[3:59] Speaker 3: sphere Britain space domain awareness watching this totally dynamic environment
[4:04] Speaker 3: unfold in real time.
[4:06] Speaker 2: And the scale of the problem they're tracking is just wild.
[4:09] Speaker 2: I mean, currently they're tracking more than forty six thousand
[4:12] Speaker 2: distinct pieces of debris and.
[4:14] Speaker 3: Orbit, and we need to be very clear about that
[4:15] Speaker 3: number because it's the big stuff, right exactly. That forty
[4:18] Speaker 3: six thousand is just what is large enough to be
[4:20] Speaker 3: reliably tracked with our current radar and optical networks.
[4:24] Speaker 2: Like things larger than a softball.
[4:26] Speaker 3: Basically, yeah, roughly softball sized and up. And if you
[4:29] Speaker 3: take all that tracked space junk and weigh it out,
[4:32] Speaker 3: we are looking at roughly seventeen thousand tons of material,
[4:36] Speaker 3: which is.
[4:37] Speaker 2: Just I mean, it's hard to wrap your head around
[4:39] Speaker 2: seventeen thousand tons of garbage floating above us.
[4:42] Speaker 3: Well, let's break down that seventeen thousand tons, because the
[4:44] Speaker 3: composition of it is like a literal museum of our
[4:47] Speaker 3: spacefaring history.
[4:48] Speaker 2: Oh wow.
[4:49] Speaker 3: Yeah, A huge percentage of that mass consists of perfectly intact,
[4:54] Speaker 3: school bus size dead satellites that simply, you know, ran
[4:58] Speaker 3: out of the propellant needed to maintain their orientation or
[5:01] Speaker 3: push themselves into a safe graveyard orbit.
[5:04] Speaker 2: So they're just dead weight up there.
[5:05] Speaker 3: Just tumbling, and then you have the upper stages of
[5:08] Speaker 3: the rockets themselves. For decades, the standard operating procedure for
[5:12] Speaker 3: launching a payload was to use a massive booster to
[5:14] Speaker 3: get to orbit, release the satellite, and just leave the
[5:18] Speaker 3: empty two ton metal cylinder up there forever.
[5:22] Speaker 2: Right, It's like, Okay, imagine you're managing one of the
[5:24] Speaker 2: busiest cargo shipping lanes on Earth, right, like the Strait
[5:27] Speaker 2: of Malacca. Okay, I'm with you, but instead of just
[5:30] Speaker 2: active cargo ships passing through the water is permanently cluttered
[5:33] Speaker 2: with tens of thousands of abandoned, rusted out ghost ships,
[5:37] Speaker 2: thousands of loose outboard motors, and millions of chunks of
[5:40] Speaker 2: jagged scrap metal.
[5:42] Speaker 3: And no one is cleaning.
[5:43] Speaker 2: It up exactly. And on top of that, all this
[5:46] Speaker 2: junk is zooming around entirely autonomously.
[5:49] Speaker 3: It's a really vivid picture. But we actually have to
[5:51] Speaker 3: correct the physics of that analogy a bit to really
[5:55] Speaker 3: grasp the nightmare here.
[5:56] Speaker 2: Oh how so.
[5:58] Speaker 3: Well, in a shipping lane, have water resistance, right, If
[6:02] Speaker 3: a ship loses power, it eventually drifts to a halt.
[6:05] Speaker 2: Friction stops it, right, the water slows it down.
[6:08] Speaker 3: But in orbit there is virtually zero atmospheric drag at
[6:12] Speaker 3: those altitudes. When you leave a rocket booster at say
[6:16] Speaker 3: eight hundred kilometers altitude, it doesn't slow down. It maintains
[6:20] Speaker 3: that seventeen five hundred mile per hour velocity for centuries.
[6:23] Speaker 2: Right, of course, because there's nowhere to stop it.
[6:25] Speaker 3: Exactly, And Furthermore, shipping lanes are two dimensional. The ocean
[6:28] Speaker 3: is flat. Orbit is a three dimensional shell where trajectories
[6:31] Speaker 3: intersect from every conceivable angle.
[6:34] Speaker 2: Right, They're not just going back and forth.
[6:35] Speaker 3: No, you have polar orbits crossing equatorial orbits, objects coming
[6:39] Speaker 3: at each other head on from the side or catching
[6:42] Speaker 3: up from behind.
[6:43] Speaker 2: And when those intersecting paths actually meet, you get the fragments,
[6:47] Speaker 2: which to me is the most terrifying part of that
[6:50] Speaker 2: seventeen thousand tons. It's not just whole intact satellites. Things
[6:53] Speaker 2: explode up there.
[6:54] Speaker 3: They do, and often not even from collisions initially, which
[6:57] Speaker 3: is wild.
[6:58] Speaker 2: Wait, really, they just blow up on their own. Yeah.
[7:00] Speaker 3: For a long time, rocket bodies were left in orbit
[7:02] Speaker 3: with unspent fuel and pressurized gas still sitting in their tanks.
[7:06] Speaker 2: Oh, that sounds like a bad idea.
[7:07] Speaker 3: It was because they undergo extreme thermal cycling, you know,
[7:12] Speaker 3: baking in the unfiltered sun for forty five minutes, then
[7:15] Speaker 3: plunging into the freezing shadow of the Earth for forty
[7:18] Speaker 3: five minutes over and over.
[7:20] Speaker 2: Man expanding and contracting.
[7:21] Speaker 3: Exactly decades of that causes the metal tanks to fatigue
[7:25] Speaker 3: and eventually rupture. A single pressure vessel exploding inside a
[7:30] Speaker 3: dead rocket can instantly create three thousand new pieces of shrapnel.
[7:34] Speaker 2: Wow. Which brings up a quote I saw from Matthew Archer.
[7:37] Speaker 2: He's the Deputy Director for Launch in Space Domain Awareness
[7:40] Speaker 2: at the UK Space Agency. He was touring the Chilbolton
[7:43] Speaker 2: Observatory and he pointed out something that really stuck with me.
[7:47] Speaker 2: He said, and I'm paraphrasing a bit, but he basically
[7:49] Speaker 2: noted that most of those objects don't collide with anything
[7:53] Speaker 2: most of the time, but any of them can cause
[7:56] Speaker 2: significant damage or even destroy potential satellites.
[7:59] Speaker 3: It's it's the truth of the environment right now.
[8:02] Speaker 2: It's that phrase most of the time that gets me.
[8:04] Speaker 2: Though it implies we're basically just relying on the sheer
[8:08] Speaker 2: volume of space to bail us out of a catastrophe.
[8:11] Speaker 3: That is exactly the gamble we've been taking. We rely
[8:14] Speaker 3: on the concept of the big sky theory, the idea
[8:17] Speaker 3: that space is so incredibly vast that the odds of
[8:20] Speaker 3: two specific objects occupying the exact same physical coordinates at
[8:24] Speaker 3: the exact same microsecond are infinitesimally small.
[8:27] Speaker 2: Right, The sky is big, the satellites are small.
[8:30] Speaker 3: Right, And for a long time. The math actually supported that,
[8:33] Speaker 3: but the math is changing because the density of the
[8:35] Speaker 3: debris field is increasing.
[8:37] Speaker 2: We keep launching more stuff.
[8:39] Speaker 3: Exactly, Orbital space is not infinite. The specific altitudes that
[8:43] Speaker 3: are useful to us, like the narrow bands where we
[8:45] Speaker 3: put communications or Earth observation satellites, those are highly finite,
[8:50] Speaker 3: scarce resources.
[8:51] Speaker 2: Okay, so let's get into the mechanics of what happens
[8:53] Speaker 2: when that. Most of the time luck eventually runs out,
[8:56] Speaker 2: because we know collisions do happen, they absolutely do. A while,
[9:00] Speaker 2: a piece of space hardware made massive headlines. It was
[9:04] Speaker 2: a defunct upper stage of a SpaceX rocket, roughly the
[9:07] Speaker 2: size of a city bus, and it slammed into the
[9:10] Speaker 2: far side of the Moon. Just this rogue piece of
[9:12] Speaker 2: metal tumbling out there for years.
[9:14] Speaker 3: Yeah, it was a fascinating orbital mechanics problem to watch unfold. Actually,
[9:19] Speaker 3: I bet the object was in a highly chaotic orbit.
[9:22] Speaker 3: It was interacting with the gravitational pulls of both the
[9:24] Speaker 3: Earth and the Moon, which is the classic n body.
[9:27] Speaker 2: Problem right where the math just gets crazy.
[9:29] Speaker 3: Complicated exactly its exact trajectory becomes highly sensitive and incredibly
[9:34] Speaker 3: difficult to predict over long time frames, and eventually its
[9:37] Speaker 3: path intersected the lunar service, creating a new crater and
[9:40] Speaker 3: throwing up this massive plume of lunar regolith and metallic shrapnel.
[9:45] Speaker 2: Okay, hold on, let me stop you there, because I
[9:48] Speaker 2: have to push back a bit on why this specific
[9:50] Speaker 2: event actually matters. Sure, when I first read about a
[9:54] Speaker 2: bus sized rocket smashing into the Moon, my initial reaction was, well,
[9:58] Speaker 2: so what, right?
[10:00] Speaker 3: Just hidden dirt?
[10:01] Speaker 2: Exactly? The Moon is a barren, geologically dead rock. There's
[10:05] Speaker 2: no atmosphere to pollute, Nobody lives there. If a dead
[10:09] Speaker 2: piece of metal craters into the lunar dirt hundreds of
[10:12] Speaker 2: thousands of miles away, why is that being treated as
[10:15] Speaker 2: an alarming event?
[10:16] Speaker 3: It's a fair question.
[10:17] Speaker 2: I mean, doesn't the Moon's gravity just crap all that shrapnel? Anyway? Yeah?
[10:21] Speaker 2: What is the actual danger to us on the ground
[10:24] Speaker 2: from something happening that far away?
[10:26] Speaker 3: It's a great question, And you're totally right that the
[10:28] Speaker 3: physical shrapnel from that specific lunar impact isn't going to
[10:32] Speaker 3: fall on your house, right, The Moon's gravity does capture
[10:35] Speaker 3: the vast majority of that ejecta. But the reason orbital
[10:38] Speaker 3: analysts view events like that with men's anxiety is basically twofold.
[10:42] Speaker 2: Okay, what's the first reason.
[10:43] Speaker 3: First, it highlights our lack of absolute control and awareness
[10:47] Speaker 3: in cis lunar space, which is the area between Earth
[10:50] Speaker 3: and the Moon.
[10:50] Speaker 2: Ah, gotcha.
[10:51] Speaker 3: As nations prepare to build lunar gateways and you establish
[10:55] Speaker 3: permanent presences on the Moon, uncontrolled bus sized objects for
[11:00] Speaker 3: reading through that environment suddenly become massive liabilities.
[11:03] Speaker 2: Right because it's no longer just empty space out there.
[11:06] Speaker 2: We are actively turning it into a transit corridor precisely.
[11:10] Speaker 3: But the second and a much neeper reason they worry
[11:14] Speaker 3: is that it demonstrates the terrifying physics of hypervelocity.
[11:17] Speaker 2: Impacts hypervelocity meaning just crazy fast, very fast.
[11:22] Speaker 3: Whether it happens on the Moon or four hundred miles
[11:24] Speaker 3: above Earth, the mechanics of the collision are exactly the same.
[11:27] Speaker 3: When an object moving at several kilometers per second strikes
[11:30] Speaker 3: another surface, it does not behave like a car crash.
[11:33] Speaker 2: It doesn't just crumple up.
[11:34] Speaker 3: No, the kinetic energies are so extreme that the metals
[11:37] Speaker 3: don't just bend or break, They actually undergo a phase change.
[11:41] Speaker 2: Wait, what do you mean a phase change like.
[11:42] Speaker 3: Melting beyond melting. At the point of impact, the material
[11:46] Speaker 3: instantly vaporizes into a superheated plasma.
[11:49] Speaker 2: Oh wow.
[11:49] Speaker 3: And then that plasma rapidly cools and solidifies into thousands
[11:53] Speaker 3: of tiny, jagged fragments that spread out like a shotgun blast.
[11:57] Speaker 2: Good lord. And if that happens in Earth or instead
[12:00] Speaker 2: of on the Moon, all of that shotgun shrapnel doesn't
[12:04] Speaker 2: hit the dirt, No, it doesn't. It just gets trapped
[12:07] Speaker 2: by Earth's gravity and continues zooming around the planet at
[12:10] Speaker 2: seventeen thousand miles per.
[12:11] Speaker 3: Hour, which brings us to the theoretical threshold that literally
[12:15] Speaker 3: keeps aerospace engineers.
[12:16] Speaker 2: Awake at night, the Kessler syndrome.
[12:18] Speaker 3: The Kessler syndrome exactly proposed by NASA astrophysicist Donald Kessler
[12:23] Speaker 3: in nineteen seventy eight. The core idea is that once
[12:27] Speaker 3: the density of objects in lowerth orbit reaches a certain
[12:30] Speaker 3: critical mass, a single collision will no longer be an
[12:33] Speaker 3: isolated event. It will be the catalyst for a runaway
[12:36] Speaker 3: chain reaction.
[12:37] Speaker 2: It's the ultimate domino effect right now, right, but the
[12:39] Speaker 2: math is way worse than domino.
[12:41] Speaker 3: That's ponentially worse. I mean, if you knock over a
[12:43] Speaker 3: domino knocks over one or two others, it's linear. In
[12:46] Speaker 3: a Kessler cascade, say satellite A accidentally strikes a defunct
[12:50] Speaker 3: rocket body. The hypervelocity impact vaporizes the collision point and generates,
[12:56] Speaker 3: let's just say, ten thousand trackable pieces of.
[12:59] Speaker 2: Shrapnel, ten thousand new bullets.
[13:01] Speaker 3: Right, And because of orbital dynamics, that cloud of shrapnel
[13:05] Speaker 3: doesn't just stay clumped together. It spreads out over time,
[13:08] Speaker 3: effectively encasing the entire planet in a ring of.
[13:12] Speaker 2: Debris, a ring of DeBras. Wow.
[13:14] Speaker 3: And now that newly formed ring intersects the orbits of
[13:17] Speaker 3: satellites B, C and D.
[13:19] Speaker 2: So instead of one localized threat, you now have a
[13:21] Speaker 2: massive minefield moving it what Marck.
[13:23] Speaker 3: Twenty three exactly. And when just one piece of shrapnel
[13:27] Speaker 3: from that first collision hits satellite B, it shreds it,
[13:30] Speaker 3: creating another five thousand pieces of.
[13:32] Speaker 2: Debris which then drift and intersect satellites E and F.
[13:36] Speaker 3: You've got it. The mathematical modeling shows that once this
[13:39] Speaker 3: cascade begins, it is entirely self sustaining.
[13:43] Speaker 2: Meaning we couldn't stop it even if we wanted to.
[13:45] Speaker 3: No, even if humanity universally agreed to never launch another
[13:49] Speaker 3: rocket ever again. A severe Kessler event would continue grinding
[13:53] Speaker 3: up everything in orbit for decades, maybe centuries, driven entirely
[13:57] Speaker 3: by the kinetic energy already stored up there.
[13:59] Speaker 2: The phrase grinding up is what makes it so visceral
[14:01] Speaker 2: to me. The orbit literally becomes a meat grinder, it
[14:04] Speaker 2: really does. And the ultimate consequence isn't just that we
[14:08] Speaker 2: lose some expensive weather satellites or have a bad day
[14:10] Speaker 2: for satellite television. The consequence is that entire orbital altitudes
[14:15] Speaker 2: become completely.
[14:17] Speaker 3: Impassable, impassable and unusable.
[14:19] Speaker 2: We would effectively lock ourselves in a cage of our
[14:22] Speaker 2: own making.
[14:23] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[14:23] Speaker 2: I mean, if you want to launch a crude mission
[14:25] Speaker 2: to Mars or build a new space station, you wouldn't
[14:28] Speaker 2: be able to punch through that shell of high speed
[14:30] Speaker 2: shrapnel without your spacecraft being torn to shreds.
[14:32] Speaker 3: It is an existential threat to our future as a
[14:36] Speaker 3: spacefaring species.
[14:37] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[14:38] Speaker 3: And what makes this so intensely relevant right now, like today,
[14:43] Speaker 3: is that the probability of triggering that first catastrophic collision
[14:48] Speaker 3: is directly proportional to how much material is occupying the space.
[14:52] Speaker 2: Which brings us back to what we're launching now.
[14:54] Speaker 3: Which leads us directly to what those radar operators at
[14:57] Speaker 3: Chilbolton are watching on their screens right now. They aren't
[15:00] Speaker 3: just tracking the legacy junk of the Cold War anymore.
[15:03] Speaker 3: They are watching a fundamental, unprecedented transformation of the orbital environment.
[15:07] Speaker 2: The numbers are just staggering. I mean, while Matthew Archer
[15:11] Speaker 2: was speaking in that control room, operators could physically see
[15:15] Speaker 2: multiple Starlink devices drifting across their telemetry screens.
[15:18] Speaker 3: Oh yeah, they're everywhere.
[15:20] Speaker 2: Starlink obviously being the massive Internet mega constellation being built
[15:24] Speaker 2: by SpaceX. And you know, just a few years ago
[15:28] Speaker 2: the number of active satellites was in the low.
[15:30] Speaker 3: Thousands, barely a blip relatively speaking.
[15:33] Speaker 2: Right and right now there are roughly fourteen thousand satellites
[15:36] Speaker 2: orbiting the Earth.
[15:37] Speaker 3: And we really have to pause and contextualize that number.
[15:40] Speaker 3: Fourteen thousand.
[15:41] Speaker 2: Put it in perspective for us.
[15:42] Speaker 3: For the first fifty years of space exploration, space was
[15:45] Speaker 3: the exclusive domain of a handful of heavily funded national.
[15:49] Speaker 2: Governments US, Russia, China exactly, and.
[15:52] Speaker 3: They were launching very specific, highly bespoke satellites on careful schedules.
[15:57] Speaker 3: Getting to a few thousand took half a century. Wow,
[16:00] Speaker 3: we have added ten thousand more in just the blink
[16:02] Speaker 3: of an eye. Fourteen thousand objects in low Earth orbit
[16:06] Speaker 3: is already a historically crowded, deeply complex environment to manage safely.
[16:11] Speaker 2: But wait, because fourteen thousand is literally a rounding error
[16:14] Speaker 2: compared to what is coming next.
[16:16] Speaker 3: Oh, I know it is frightening.
[16:17] Speaker 2: The projections for the near future are just jaw dropping.
[16:21] Speaker 2: If you look at filings with international telecommunications regulators, there
[16:25] Speaker 2: are plans for up to one point seven million new
[16:28] Speaker 2: satellites in the coming years.
[16:30] Speaker 3: It's hard to even picture.
[16:31] Speaker 2: SpaceX alone has unveiled concepts where they could launch more
[16:35] Speaker 2: than a million satellites by twenty twenty eight a million.
[16:39] Speaker 3: The geometry of trying to fit one point seven million
[16:42] Speaker 3: objects into the narrow bands of low Earth orbit is
[16:46] Speaker 3: a mathematical nightmare.
[16:48] Speaker 2: Why do they all have to be in that specific
[16:49] Speaker 2: band anyway?
[16:50] Speaker 3: Well, the reason these companies all want to be in
[16:53] Speaker 3: lowerth orbit as opposed to geostationary orbit much further out
[16:56] Speaker 3: is latency.
[16:57] Speaker 2: Latency like internet lags.
[16:59] Speaker 3: Exactly if you want to provide high speed internet to
[17:01] Speaker 3: the globe. The satellite needs to be close to the
[17:03] Speaker 3: ground so the radio signal doesn't take too long to
[17:06] Speaker 3: travel back and forth.
[17:07] Speaker 2: Okay, that makes sense.
[17:08] Speaker 3: Because it's closer to Earth, gravity pulls on.
[17:10] Speaker 2: It harder, so it has to go faster.
[17:12] Speaker 3: Right, It has to travel much faster to stay in orbit,
[17:15] Speaker 3: and the physical volume of space available at that low
[17:18] Speaker 3: altitude is much much smaller than further out.
[17:22] Speaker 2: I was trying to picture what's scaling from fourteen thousand
[17:24] Speaker 2: to one point seven million actually looks like. And it's
[17:28] Speaker 2: like taking a quiet, rural, two lane country highway, right,
[17:34] Speaker 2: the kind where you might pass a tractor every couple
[17:37] Speaker 2: of hours. Okay, yeah, and then overnight you route the
[17:40] Speaker 2: entire daily rush hour traffic of Tokyo directly through that
[17:45] Speaker 2: same two lane road.
[17:46] Speaker 3: That's a good analogy, but I'd modify it slightly. Okay,
[17:48] Speaker 3: how So, because on a highway in Tokyo, people have brakes,
[17:51] Speaker 3: they have lanes, and they are generally traveling in the
[17:53] Speaker 3: same direction. Right, imagine that Tokyo rush hour, but half
[17:56] Speaker 3: the cars are driving the wrong way. There are no lanes,
[17:59] Speaker 3: no one has breaks. Every vehicle is traveling at twenty
[18:01] Speaker 3: times the speed of sound.
[18:02] Speaker 2: Oh my god.
[18:03] Speaker 3: And if even two of them screep paint, they explode
[18:06] Speaker 3: into a million deadly ninja stars that take out the
[18:08] Speaker 3: rest of the highway.
[18:09] Speaker 2: Okay, yes, that is significantly more terrifying.
[18:12] Speaker 3: It's a very unforgiving environment.
[18:14] Speaker 2: And when you put it like that, it raises a
[18:17] Speaker 2: huge question about control. If we are putting one point
[18:20] Speaker 2: seven million objects up there, who is actually driving them?
[18:25] Speaker 2: It's not NASA or the European Space Agency tightly controlling
[18:29] Speaker 2: everything anymore, not at all.
[18:30] Speaker 3: We have transitioned into a commercial wild west. Space is
[18:34] Speaker 3: now a heavily commercialized, mass market frontier.
[18:37] Speaker 2: That's mostly private companies.
[18:39] Speaker 3: Know, you have private mega corporations, sure, but also small
[18:42] Speaker 3: university research teams, international consortions, and dozens of emerging spacefaring
[18:48] Speaker 3: nations all throwing hardware into the sky.
[18:50] Speaker 2: It's a free for all exactly.
[18:53] Speaker 3: Sarah Nash, the facility leader at Chilbolton, summarized the shift perfectly.
[18:57] Speaker 3: She noted that the whole environment is changing. It really
[19:00] Speaker 3: is a multinational environment and there are so many objects
[19:03] Speaker 3: that are not controllable.
[19:04] Speaker 2: That specific phrase objects that are not controllable. That is
[19:08] Speaker 2: chilling to me. It should be because if you have
[19:10] Speaker 2: a dead Russian weather satellite from nineteen eighty three creening
[19:14] Speaker 2: toward a brand new commercial Internet satellite, you can't exactly
[19:18] Speaker 2: ask the dead satellite to poltely steer out of the.
[19:20] Speaker 3: Way, exactly, it's inert. Your only option is to move
[19:23] Speaker 3: the act of satellite. Right, But moving a satellite is
[19:28] Speaker 3: not like turning a steering wheel on a car. Satellites
[19:31] Speaker 3: operate on incredibly strict fuel budgets, measured in terms of
[19:34] Speaker 3: delta V or change in velocity.
[19:36] Speaker 2: So they only have so much gas in the tank. Right.
[19:39] Speaker 3: Every single time you fire thrusters to dodge a piece
[19:42] Speaker 3: of debris, you are burning fuel that was meant to
[19:45] Speaker 3: keep that satellite in orbit for its intended ten year lifespan.
[19:49] Speaker 2: Oh.
[19:50] Speaker 3: I think if a commercial operator has to dodge debris
[19:52] Speaker 3: three times a week, their billion dollar satellite might run
[19:56] Speaker 3: out of fuel in two years instead of ten, rendering
[19:59] Speaker 3: it completely useless.
[20:00] Speaker 2: And then it just becomes yet another piece of uncontrollable
[20:02] Speaker 2: junk itself.
[20:03] Speaker 3: Exactly. The cycle just feeds itself.
[20:06] Speaker 2: And as Sarah Nash pointed out, the only way all
[20:08] Speaker 2: of this can continue to operate without triggering that Kessler
[20:11] Speaker 2: meat grinder is by keeping track of where absolutely everything is,
[20:15] Speaker 2: all the time.
[20:16] Speaker 3: Right, which brings us to the data problem.
[20:18] Speaker 2: Yeah, because scaling the tracking from fourteen thousand objects to
[20:21] Speaker 2: one point seven million requires a leap in computational power
[20:24] Speaker 2: that just seems almost impossible to me.
[20:26] Speaker 3: It absolutely requires an entirely new paradigm of orbital mechanics software.
[20:31] Speaker 3: Because right now, when tracking centers look at an object,
[20:34] Speaker 3: they don't just see a crisp, tiny dot on a map.
[20:37] Speaker 2: They don't what do they see?
[20:39] Speaker 3: They calculate what's called a covariance ellipsoid.
[20:42] Speaker 2: A covariance ellipsoid. Okay, what is that? In plain English?
[20:45] Speaker 3: It's essentially a three D bubble of mathematical uncertainty around
[20:50] Speaker 3: the object.
[20:51] Speaker 2: Okay, bubble Because.
[20:52] Speaker 3: Radar isn't perfect and atmospheric drag fluctuates. We don't know
[20:56] Speaker 3: exactly where a satellite is down to the millimeter. We
[20:59] Speaker 3: just know it's somewhere in that bubble.
[21:00] Speaker 2: Got it.
[21:01] Speaker 3: When two bubbles intersect, the software flags of probability of collision.
[21:06] Speaker 3: But if you scale to one point seven million objects,
[21:09] Speaker 3: you have billions of intersecting covariance bubbles every single day.
[21:14] Speaker 2: Oh, Wow, the system would just be screaming constable exactly.
[21:17] Speaker 3: The signal to noise ratio of collision warnings will become overwhelming.
[21:21] Speaker 3: Operators will suffer from severe alert fatigue.
[21:24] Speaker 2: So if the tracking is this difficult and the risk
[21:27] Speaker 2: of catastrophic failure is this high, why are we doing it?
[21:31] Speaker 2: Why are regulators allowing companies to throw a million satellites
[21:36] Speaker 2: into such a fragile environment.
[21:38] Speaker 3: Well, it ultimately comes down to the sheer economic gravity
[21:41] Speaker 3: of space.
[21:42] Speaker 2: It's always about money, right, it is.
[21:44] Speaker 3: The economic stakes are astronomical. We have reached a point
[21:47] Speaker 3: where space infrastructure is no longer a luxury, and it's
[21:51] Speaker 3: no longer just about pure scientific exploration. It is the
[21:55] Speaker 3: invisible load bearing backbone of the modern global economy. Matthew
[21:59] Speaker 3: Arch pointed out that space infrastructure underpins roughly twenty percent
[22:03] Speaker 3: of the entire UK economy.
[22:05] Speaker 2: Twenty percent. Let's really dig into that figure, because it's
[22:08] Speaker 2: easy for people listening to think, well, you know, I
[22:10] Speaker 2: don't have satellite TV and my internet comes through a
[22:13] Speaker 2: fiber optic cable in the ground, so a Kessler syndrome
[22:15] Speaker 2: wouldn't really impact my daily life.
[22:16] Speaker 3: That's a very common misconception.
[22:18] Speaker 2: Right, But that completely ignores what satellites are actually doing
[22:21] Speaker 2: for us behind the scenes.
[22:22] Speaker 3: The most critical, yet least understood dependency we have is
[22:26] Speaker 3: on the Global Positioning System or GPS and its international
[22:29] Speaker 3: equivalents like Galileo.
[22:31] Speaker 2: Right, the maps in our phones.
[22:32] Speaker 3: Well, everyone knows GPS tells your phone's map app where
[22:35] Speaker 3: you are. But GPS satellites are essentially just highly precise
[22:39] Speaker 3: atomic clocks broadcasting the exact time down to the nanosecond.
[22:44] Speaker 2: Okay, And why does the exact time matter so much?
[22:47] Speaker 3: Because time's money, literally literally. The global financial system relies
[22:53] Speaker 3: entirely on those nanosecond timing signals from space to timestamp
[22:57] Speaker 3: and synchronize billions of high frequency trading transactions, wire transfers,
[23:02] Speaker 3: and ATM withdrawals every single day.
[23:04] Speaker 2: Wow. So if the satellites go down, the banking system
[23:06] Speaker 2: goes down.
[23:07] Speaker 3: It freezes almost instantly. And it's not just banking. The
[23:10] Speaker 3: global power grid uses GPS timing to synchronize the flow
[23:13] Speaker 3: of electricity across thousands of miles of transmission lines.
[23:17] Speaker 2: Seriously, the power grid too.
[23:18] Speaker 3: Oh yeah, and cellular networks use it to hand off
[23:21] Speaker 3: your phone call from one cell tower to the next
[23:23] Speaker 3: without dropping.
[23:24] Speaker 2: I had no idea was that deeply integrated.
[23:26] Speaker 3: It's everywhere. If you lose those specific orbital altitudes to
[23:29] Speaker 3: a debris cascade, you don't just lose your map. The
[23:32] Speaker 3: banking system freezes, the power grid destabilizes, global logistics, and
[23:37] Speaker 3: shipping routes effectively go blind.
[23:39] Speaker 2: The economic paralysis would be immediate. It would be devastating,
[23:43] Speaker 2: It really would be, which perfectly explains why national governments
[23:47] Speaker 2: aren't just treating this as a scientific curiosity anymore, right.
[23:50] Speaker 2: They are treating it as a critical defense imperative absolutely.
[23:54] Speaker 2: In the UK, they've recently pledged eighty five million, which
[23:57] Speaker 2: is about one hundred and fourteen million US dollars, to
[24:00] Speaker 2: fund the National Space Operation Center or NSPOC, and this
[24:05] Speaker 2: facility physically brings together civilian analysts from the UK Space
[24:09] Speaker 2: Agency and military personnel from UK Space Command into one unified,
[24:14] Speaker 2: heavily monitored room.
[24:15] Speaker 3: And their operational tempo is just relentless. They aren't just
[24:18] Speaker 3: passively watching screens all day. They're actively issuing around three
[24:21] Speaker 3: thousand formal collision warnings to satellite operators every single month.
[24:25] Speaker 2: Think about the logistics of that. For a second, three
[24:28] Speaker 2: thousand warnings a month means these analysts are acting like
[24:32] Speaker 2: heavily armed, incredibly stressed air traffic controllers.
[24:35] Speaker 3: That's exactly what it's like calling.
[24:37] Speaker 2: Up commercial companies one hundred times a day saying your
[24:41] Speaker 2: billion dollar asset is on a collision course with a
[24:43] Speaker 2: defunct Soviet booster. You need to execute an avoidance maneuver
[24:47] Speaker 2: by fourteen hundred hours or you're both going to vaporize.
[24:50] Speaker 3: It is very much like air traffic control, but with
[24:53] Speaker 3: a massive geopolitical dimension added on top of it.
[24:56] Speaker 2: The military aspect you.
[24:57] Speaker 3: Mean, right, because the military personnel sitting in that room
[25:00] Speaker 3: at NSPOC aren't just looking for inert pieces of scrap metal.
[25:04] Speaker 3: Space has always been a dual use environment. They are
[25:07] Speaker 3: actively tracking the deliberate movements of foreign military hardware.
[25:11] Speaker 2: Right, Because when a blip on the radar suddenly changes
[25:14] Speaker 2: its trajectory, it's not the wind blowing it off course.
[25:17] Speaker 2: Someone fired a thruster exactly.
[25:19] Speaker 3: Matthew Archer explicitly noted that they must regularly track threats
[25:23] Speaker 3: from a military perspective. Certain nations have developed and demonstrated
[25:27] Speaker 3: the capability to perform what are known in military parlance
[25:31] Speaker 3: as rendezvous and proximity operations or.
[25:34] Speaker 2: RPOs rendezvous and proximity operations. What does that actually look like?
[25:38] Speaker 2: In practice?
[25:39] Speaker 3: This is where a highly maneuverable inspector satellite deliberately alters
[25:44] Speaker 3: its orbit to closely tail another nation's satellite.
[25:48] Speaker 2: Oh wow, basically tailgating in space.
[25:50] Speaker 3: Precisely tailgating at seventeen thousand miles per hour. And if
[25:54] Speaker 3: a foreign satellite suddenly citles up a few kilometers away
[25:57] Speaker 3: from one of your highly classified, multi bill million dollar
[26:00] Speaker 3: secure communications relays, you have to.
[26:02] Speaker 2: Know immediately because they could be doing anything.
[26:04] Speaker 3: Exactly are they intercepting your signals? Are they taking high
[26:07] Speaker 3: resolution optical photographs of your classified sensors, or worst case scenario,
[26:11] Speaker 3: are they positioning themselves for sabotage. The tracking algorithms that
[26:15] Speaker 3: NSPOC are designed to instantly flag those anomalist maneuvers. The
[26:20] Speaker 3: radar network is essentially acting as an active geopolitical trip wire.
[26:24] Speaker 2: And that geopolitical tension doesn't just stay in orbit because
[26:28] Speaker 2: of atmospheric drag. What goes up must eventually come down always,
[26:33] Speaker 2: and when a massive piece of hardware comes down uncontrolled,
[26:36] Speaker 2: the geopolitical anxiety skyrockets.
[26:38] Speaker 3: Uncontrolled re entries are arguably the most stressful events for
[26:42] Speaker 3: these monitoring stations.
[26:43] Speaker 2: Oh I remember vividly back in January, the entire world
[26:46] Speaker 2: and particularly Britain in Europe, was obsessively tracking the re
[26:50] Speaker 2: entry of a massive Chinese rocket body.
[26:53] Speaker 3: Yes, that was a tense few days.
[26:54] Speaker 2: There were genuine, mathematically backed fears that massive titanium engine,
[26:59] Speaker 2: bells and structural fragments from this rocket could survive re
[27:03] Speaker 2: entry and impact populated areas. It turned into this intense
[27:06] Speaker 2: hour by our Global Death.
[27:08] Speaker 3: Watch, and the underlying physics of predicting a re entry
[27:11] Speaker 3: are diabolically complex.
[27:13] Speaker 2: Why is it so hard? I mean, shouldn't gravity just
[27:15] Speaker 2: pull it down in a predictable arc.
[27:17] Speaker 3: You'd think so, but no, you have a chaotic, tumbling
[27:20] Speaker 3: cylinder of metal skipping across the upper layers of the
[27:23] Speaker 3: Earth's atmosphere. The friction of the atmosphere is what slows
[27:26] Speaker 3: it down and pulls it in. But the Earth's atmosphere
[27:28] Speaker 3: isn't static, It's.
[27:29] Speaker 2: Not No, it breathes, breathes. What do you mean?
[27:32] Speaker 3: When the Sun releases a solar flare or a coronal
[27:35] Speaker 3: mass ejection, the burst of ultraviolet radiation actually heats up
[27:40] Speaker 3: the Earth's thermosphere, and when it heats up, the atmosphere
[27:44] Speaker 3: physically expands outward, puffing up like a bloom.
[27:47] Speaker 2: Oh wow, I never realized that.
[27:49] Speaker 3: So a satellite or a rocket body that thought it
[27:52] Speaker 3: was safely flying above the atmosphere suddenly finds itself plowing
[27:56] Speaker 3: through thicker air, experiencing massive drag.
[27:59] Speaker 2: Ah, which totally changes its trajectory exactly.
[28:02] Speaker 3: And because space weather is highly volatile, the exact density
[28:06] Speaker 3: of the atmosphere changes by the minute.
[28:08] Speaker 2: That sounds impossible to model.
[28:10] Speaker 3: It's incredibly hard when you are trying to calculate where
[28:13] Speaker 3: a rocket traveling at five miles per second is going
[28:15] Speaker 3: to land. A miscalculation in its re entry time of
[28:18] Speaker 3: just ten minutes shifts the impact zone by three thousand miles.
[28:22] Speaker 2: Ten minutes equals three thousand miles.
[28:24] Speaker 3: Yes, it is the difference between splashing down harmlessly in
[28:27] Speaker 3: the middle of the Pacific Ocean or raining debris down
[28:30] Speaker 3: on London.
[28:32] Speaker 2: Thankfully, in the case of that January event, the rocket
[28:35] Speaker 2: did eventually splash down safely in the Pacific.
[28:37] Speaker 3: Fortunately. Yeah.
[28:38] Speaker 2: And it's crucial to point out that the physics of
[28:40] Speaker 2: atmospheric drag and the threat of uncontrolled re entries apply
[28:45] Speaker 2: universally to every single space faring nation.
[28:48] Speaker 3: Absolutely. Gravity is completely impartial.
[28:50] Speaker 2: Right, whether it's a massive Chinese booster falling back to
[28:53] Speaker 2: Earth's or a piece of SpaceX debris hitting the Moon,
[28:57] Speaker 2: or early American satellites cluttering up lower orbit, gravity does
[29:01] Speaker 2: not care whose flag is painted on the metal.
[29:04] Speaker 3: No, it doesn't.
[29:05] Speaker 2: A piece of shrapnel from a European satellite will vaporize
[29:09] Speaker 2: an American satellite without prejudice. The terror of space debris
[29:14] Speaker 2: is an inherently shared global vulnerability.
[29:17] Speaker 3: It is a purely operational hazard that the teams at
[29:20] Speaker 3: NSPOC and Chilbolton are forced to manage daily, regardless of
[29:24] Speaker 3: the political origins of the hardware. The math of survival
[29:27] Speaker 3: in orbit is completely apolitical.
[29:29] Speaker 2: But the math of survival isn't just about avoiding our
[29:32] Speaker 2: own garbage, is it? No, not at all, Because we
[29:34] Speaker 2: have spent this entire time dissecting the threats that humanity
[29:37] Speaker 2: has manufactured for itself, right the dead rockets, the mega constellations,
[29:41] Speaker 2: and military tailgating.
[29:42] Speaker 3: The stuff we put up there exactly, But.
[29:45] Speaker 2: The universe itself is inherently hostile, and humanity isn't the
[29:49] Speaker 2: only thing hurling heavy rocks through the void. We have
[29:52] Speaker 2: to look at the natural invaders too, comets and asteroids.
[29:56] Speaker 1: Right.
[29:56] Speaker 3: Planetary defense it is handled by different teams using different sets,
[30:00] Speaker 3: but the underlying core competency tracking an object, determining its
[30:04] Speaker 3: mass and velocity, and predicting its future intersection with Earth
[30:08] Speaker 3: remains exactly the same.
[30:10] Speaker 2: And just like with base junk, planetary defense requires massive
[30:14] Speaker 2: global collaboration because no single country can watch the entire
[30:18] Speaker 2: sky exactly.
[30:19] Speaker 3: You need eyes everywhere, which is why.
[30:21] Speaker 2: The UK Space Agency recently formalized its role in this
[30:24] Speaker 2: by joining the International Asteroid Warning Network or IWN. And
[30:28] Speaker 2: this is a global coalition that partners directly with NASA.
[30:32] Speaker 2: Their mandate is to aggregate data from optical observatories all
[30:36] Speaker 2: over the planet to calculate the exact percentage chance and
[30:39] Speaker 2: the precise timing of a potentially civilization ending impact.
[30:42] Speaker 3: And we aren't just sitting passively on Earth waiting to
[30:45] Speaker 3: see what the math says either.
[30:46] Speaker 2: We're taking action.
[30:47] Speaker 3: Space agencies are actively designing missions to go out into
[30:50] Speaker 3: the deep Solar System to physically characterize these threats. For instance,
[30:55] Speaker 3: the UK is heavily supporting the European Space agencies upcoming
[30:58] Speaker 3: twenty twenty nine mission to study a highly specific asteroid
[31:03] Speaker 3: named Apofus.
[31:04] Speaker 2: Apofas is a monster. I mean, we were talking about
[31:07] Speaker 2: a space rock that is roughly three hundred and seventy
[31:09] Speaker 2: five meters wide.
[31:10] Speaker 3: It's massive.
[31:11] Speaker 2: That is over twelve hundred feet across. For scale, that
[31:15] Speaker 2: is essentially the Empire State building flying through the Solar System.
[31:18] Speaker 3: It's hard to even comprehend something that big, moving that fast.
[31:21] Speaker 2: And the reason everyone is hyper focused on Apofas is
[31:23] Speaker 2: that in twenty twenty nine, this mountain of rock is
[31:26] Speaker 2: going to pass incredibly close to Earth. I read it's
[31:29] Speaker 2: going to come closer than our own geostationary weather satellites.
[31:32] Speaker 3: It will, and the challenge of tracking something like a
[31:34] Speaker 3: Pofas reveals the fundamental differences between managing space junk and
[31:38] Speaker 3: planetary defense. How so well, Sarah n Ash pointed this
[31:42] Speaker 3: out quite profoundly. She said, asteroids are a really interesting
[31:46] Speaker 3: challenge in many ways. It's unusual for an asteroid to
[31:48] Speaker 3: come out of nowhere.
[31:49] Speaker 2: Right because space junk is constantly swirling just a few
[31:52] Speaker 2: hundred miles above our heads. It's an immediate localized swarm exactly.
[31:56] Speaker 2: But asteroids are out there in the deep black, traveling
[31:59] Speaker 2: on these massive of elongated elliptical orbits around the Sun
[32:02] Speaker 2: that take years or decades to complete.
[32:05] Speaker 3: Right, we are constantly being bombarded by tiny pieces of
[32:09] Speaker 3: space dust and small meteorites. They hit the atmosphere and
[32:12] Speaker 3: burn up harmlessly every single day, creating shooting stars. Sure,
[32:16] Speaker 3: But the massive objects, the ones with enough mass to
[32:19] Speaker 3: punch through the atmosphere intact and wipe out a city
[32:22] Speaker 3: or all to the global climate, are much rarer.
[32:25] Speaker 2: But when they do come.
[32:26] Speaker 3: Exactly, the severity of the threat is orders of magnitude
[32:30] Speaker 3: higher than a satellite collision. Losing a GPS satellite hurts
[32:33] Speaker 3: the economy, Taking a direct hit from a twelve hundred
[32:36] Speaker 3: foot asteroid resets civilization.
[32:39] Speaker 2: But here's where the technology tracking these threats has to
[32:42] Speaker 2: fundamentally shift. We spent the first half of this discussion
[32:45] Speaker 2: talking about how the operators at Chilbolton use their massive
[32:49] Speaker 2: twenty five meter radar dish to track space junk with
[32:52] Speaker 2: incredible precision.
[32:53] Speaker 3: Right the active radar.
[32:54] Speaker 2: But when it comes to tracking a twelve hundred foot
[32:57] Speaker 2: asteroid out in the Solar System, the massive radar dish
[33:01] Speaker 2: is basically useless, isn't it It is.
[33:03] Speaker 3: It's entirely constrained by the laws of physics, specifically how
[33:06] Speaker 3: electromagnetic radiation propagates through space.
[33:09] Speaker 2: Why doesn't it work for asteroids?
[33:11] Speaker 3: Well, radar is active tracking. You fire a pulse of
[33:14] Speaker 3: radio energy into space, It hits the target, bounces off,
[33:18] Speaker 3: and the fraction of the energy that reflects back is
[33:20] Speaker 3: collected by your antenna. In low earth orbit, radar is king.
[33:24] Speaker 3: It can track a tumbling wrench in complete darkness because
[33:27] Speaker 3: the distance is only a few hundred miles. But radar
[33:30] Speaker 3: energy dissipates at an astonishing rate over long distances.
[33:33] Speaker 2: Because it has to travel all the way out to
[33:35] Speaker 2: the asteroid, and then the faint echo has to survive
[33:38] Speaker 2: the journey all the way.
[33:39] Speaker 3: Back to Earth. Exactly. It follows what is known as
[33:41] Speaker 3: the inverse fourth power law.
[33:43] Speaker 2: The inverse fourth power law. Okay, break that down for me.
[33:46] Speaker 3: It means if an object is twice as far away,
[33:49] Speaker 3: the returning radar signal isn't twice as weak, it is
[33:53] Speaker 3: sixteen times weaker.
[33:54] Speaker 2: Oh wow, that drops off incredibly fast.
[33:57] Speaker 3: It does. By the time you get out to the
[33:59] Speaker 3: distances where you need to spot an incoming asteroid millions
[34:02] Speaker 3: of miles away. The returning radar signal is so infinitesimally
[34:07] Speaker 3: small it is just completely drowned out by the background
[34:10] Speaker 3: noise of the universe.
[34:11] Speaker 2: So for the d space threats, you can't use radar.
[34:14] Speaker 2: You have to use optical sensors exactly, which are essentially
[34:17] Speaker 2: just incredibly powerful telescopes staring into the blackness, looking for
[34:21] Speaker 2: the sunlight reflecting off the rock as it moves against
[34:24] Speaker 2: the background.
[34:25] Speaker 3: Stars, staring and waiting.
[34:26] Speaker 2: Yes, I was trying to think of an analogy for this.
[34:28] Speaker 2: It's like, imagine you are standing on a set of
[34:31] Speaker 2: train tracks in the pitch black of night, and you
[34:35] Speaker 2: know a massive freight train is speeding towards you. Okay,
[34:39] Speaker 2: using radar to find the asteroid is like trying to
[34:41] Speaker 2: use a tiny keychain flashlight to spot the train.
[34:44] Speaker 3: I see where you're going with this. The flashlight beam
[34:46] Speaker 3: is the radar pulse, right, and.
[34:48] Speaker 2: The flashlight beam only reaches about twenty feet in front
[34:51] Speaker 2: of you. So if you wait until the train is
[34:53] Speaker 2: close enough to be illuminated by your little flashlight, you
[34:56] Speaker 2: are already standing on the tracks. The train is right
[34:58] Speaker 2: in front of you, and you are totally out of time.
[35:00] Speaker 2: To move your hit exactly, you need someone miles down
[35:04] Speaker 2: the track with binoculars looking for the train's headlight.
[35:08] Speaker 3: That is a remarkably accurate way to describe the sensor handoff.
[35:12] Speaker 3: The optical telescopes are the binoculars miles down the track.
[35:17] Speaker 3: They spot the asteroid years in advance, map its orbit
[35:20] Speaker 3: using sunlight, and calculate its.
[35:22] Speaker 2: Trajectory long before it's a threat.
[35:24] Speaker 3: Right, And by the time the asteroid gets close enough
[35:26] Speaker 3: to Earth to actually be pinged by a terrestrial radar
[35:29] Speaker 3: system like the one at Chilbolton, the object is basically
[35:33] Speaker 3: in our upper atmosphere, which is way too late, way
[35:35] Speaker 3: too late. The radar is fantastic for getting a high
[35:39] Speaker 3: resolution three D map of the asteroid as it flies by,
[35:42] Speaker 3: but it cannot be your early warning system.
[35:44] Speaker 2: That makes sense.
[35:45] Speaker 3: Graham Marshall, the station manager at Chilbolton, summed up this
[35:49] Speaker 3: limitation with a brilliant piece of dark humor.
[35:52] Speaker 2: Oh what did he say?
[35:53] Speaker 3: He noted that if they are relying on the radar
[35:55] Speaker 3: dish to spot asteroids, He said, if they're close enough
[35:58] Speaker 3: for the antenna to see them, then we have bigger problems.
[36:01] Speaker 2: Bigger problems. Yeah, I'll say, if the operators at Chilbolton
[36:04] Speaker 2: suddenly get a surprise radar ping from a twelve hundred
[36:07] Speaker 2: foot rock, the bigger problem is that they only have
[36:10] Speaker 2: about four seconds to dive under their desks.
[36:13] Speaker 3: It perfectly underscores why space domain awareness requires a layered,
[36:18] Speaker 3: overlapping network of completely different technologies.
[36:21] Speaker 2: You can't just rely on one system.
[36:22] Speaker 3: No, you need the optical telescopes aggressively scanning the deep
[36:26] Speaker 3: Solar system to predict the natural threats decades in advance,
[36:30] Speaker 3: and simultaneously, you need the massive radar arrays actively managing
[36:35] Speaker 3: the immediate chaotic orbital environment to protect against the human
[36:39] Speaker 3: made threats happening right now.
[36:41] Speaker 2: It's a huge undertaking.
[36:42] Speaker 3: It's a highly coordinated, incredibly stressful global surveillance operation designed
[36:47] Speaker 3: to protect the planet from the universe and increasingly from ourselves.
[36:51] Speaker 2: When you pull all of this together, it is just
[36:53] Speaker 2: staggering to think about what the people at these observatories
[36:57] Speaker 2: and operation centers are holding on their shoulders every single day.
[37:00] Speaker 3: The stress must be immense.
[37:02] Speaker 2: Humanity is currently attempting the most complex balancing act in
[37:05] Speaker 2: our history. We are desperately trying to dodge the lethal
[37:09] Speaker 2: debris of our past space endeavors while simultaneously bracing for
[37:13] Speaker 2: this unprecedented wave of one point seven million new commercial satellites.
[37:18] Speaker 3: It's a traffic gem like no other.
[37:20] Speaker 2: The analysts are tracking high stakes military inspector satellites in
[37:23] Speaker 2: the dark. They are sweating over massive rocket boosters tumbling
[37:27] Speaker 2: out of control toward the atmosphere, and all the while
[37:30] Speaker 2: they're keeping a paranoid watchful eye out from mountain sized
[37:33] Speaker 2: rocks hurtling in from the deep Solar System.
[37:36] Speaker 3: It is a profound responsibility that really gets very little
[37:39] Speaker 3: public recognition. I mean, we have effectively wrapped our planet
[37:42] Speaker 3: in a fragile, chaotic, yet incredibly valuable nervous system of technology.
[37:47] Speaker 2: Nervous system I.
[37:48] Speaker 3: Like that our economies, our communications, and our physical safety
[37:52] Speaker 3: completely depend on it. And the operators at facilities like
[37:56] Speaker 3: Chilbolton and the NSPOC are the only ones working around
[37:59] Speaker 3: the clubs to ensure that nervous system doesn't sever itself.
[38:03] Speaker 3: They are the silent guardians of the orbital Highway.
[38:06] Speaker 2: It fundamentally changes how you look at the sky. It's
[38:08] Speaker 2: no longer just a canvas for poetry. It's an active
[38:11] Speaker 2: contested and dangerous frontier, very much so, which brings me
[38:15] Speaker 2: to a final thought I want to leave you with Today,
[38:17] Speaker 2: we constantly talk about the future of humanity as a species.
[38:21] Speaker 2: We dream of returning to the Moon, establishing colonies on Mars,
[38:25] Speaker 2: and eventually expanding our civilization out into the wider Solar System.
[38:29] Speaker 2: It's the ultimate goal, and we always view gravity as
[38:32] Speaker 2: the main hurdle right escaping Earth's gravity. Well, but as
[38:35] Speaker 2: we continue to launch thousands upon thousands of objects into orbit,
[38:39] Speaker 2: creating a denser and denser minefield of debris, we really
[38:43] Speaker 2: have to ask ourselves a difficult, uncomfortable question. When the
[38:46] Speaker 2: time finally comes for humanity to truly leave this planet,
[38:50] Speaker 2: will our biggest barrier to exploring the universe be gravity?
[38:54] Speaker 2: Or will it be the impenetrable high speed cage of
[38:57] Speaker 2: our own debris that we've built around ourselves. One thing
[39:00] Speaker 2: to think about the next time you look up at
[39:01] Speaker 2: that pristine, quiet night sky.

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