Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Credit: NASA

With increasingly regularity, Earth’s ocean waters are the drop zones for incoming leftovers from space. For decades, Russian Progress spaceships loaded with tons of waste from the International Space Station are purposely augured into what’s labeled as the Pacific Ocean’s “spacecraft cemetery.” Similarly, there’s the Cygnus cargo supply vehicles, filled with rubbish from the space station crew that’s ditched over the South Pacific Ocean

In the past, other discarded orbiting facilities – such as Russia’s Mir space station and China’s Tiangong-1 prototype outpost came to full-stop in ocean waters. Then there’s the saga of America’s Skylab experimental station that fell to Earth in 1979, with odds and ends scattering across the southern Australian coast.

Splash down zone for the International Space Station, an area around Point Nemo, formally dubbed “the oceanic pole of inaccessibility.”
Credit: Google/Public Domain

Mega-hunk of junk

But more to the point, in future years, get ready for a mega-hunk of falling space junk. It will be the nearly 500-ton, abandoned-in-place, International Space Station (ISS). The plan is control the ISS to a splash down within the South Pacific Oceanic Uninhabited Area. That’s an area around Point Nemo, formally dubbed “the oceanic pole of inaccessibility.”

Is this a good idea or merely another human dumping ground available? Simply put, an “out of sight, out of mind” disposal spot for surplus space clutter? 

Go to my new Space.com story – “Watery graves: Should we be ditching big spacecraft over Earth’s oceans? It’s a form of pollution, after all” – at:

https://www.space.com/spacecraft-deorbiting-over-earth-oceans-ethical-concerns