The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space

There’s been a lot about space junk in the news lately, mainly because of the Chinese rocket debris that re-entered the atmosphere in an out-of-control fashion before falling into the Indian Ocean. But this isn’t a one-off, there are thousands of tons of space debris orbiting our planet, and with the regular launch of satellites by SpaceX, this will continue to be a pressing problem. The title story of my collection ‘The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space’ considers the possible consequences of all this debris, and I thought it would be timely to republish it here:

 

The GPS was the first clue – for us at least – that something had gone wrong. Day after day on the school run it insisted we were somewhere else. Snarled up in traffic in Saigon, stuck outside a checkpoint in East Jerusalem, or battling our way through the waves to St Kilda. We took the GPS back to the shop, but they said there was a problem with all the satellites now and they suggested we buy an A to Z.
That was the same day we tried to watch the cup match on Sky, but the pitch was covered in echoes of past games all piled up on each other like pages torn out of an old book. Electric ghosts of players scored goals against themselves over and over again, at least until the TV burst into flames. It just couldn’t cope with all that information.
Then the satellites started crashing into each other like celestial dodgems and all the astronauts in the space stations were trapped, waiting for help that could never reach them. It got to the point where we could go and sit outside at night, reading our books by the light of the debris catching fire as it slammed around above our heads.
Some of this debris was large enough to survive the atmosphere and reach us on the patio, and we wondered why it had been so important to launch a coffee cup or a retractable pencil into outer space in the first place, and whether the astronauts had been a bit too ambitious in their choice of poetry anthologies. And exactly how much the dead millionaire had paid to have his ashes launched into space, complete with a brass plaque engraved ‘for all eternity’.
We could use the coffee cups, but the poetry was a bit charred around the edges and frankly second rate stuff, so it went to Oxfam.  The ashes sit on the mantelpiece and glow as if they’re being resurrected in heaven. That’s ok, but the body of an astronaut still strapped to its ejector seat was too much. It only just missed our greenhouse and made a crater in the lawn.
Now there’s no more night and the sky’s turned into grey junk, so we’re having our summer holiday in the living room. We’re pretending it’s Glastonbury under the dining table, converted into a shelter in case any more debris rains down.

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