What goes up must come down, for the immutable law of gravity does tend to suck. Most of the space junk in Earth orbit burns up on reentry into the atmosphere. But some of it makes it to the planetary surface, including to countries with no ability to launch things into space in the first place. Such “unglamorous, inevitable” disasters of decay are what made the “Space Age truly global,” writes historian Lisa Ruth Rand in her argument for an environmental history of outer space.
Even the word “reentry” suggests the foundational connections between Earth and space. Human objects hoisted into orbit were coming back as trash…from what the 1967 Outer Space Treaty called the “province of all mankind.” During the 1970s, writes Rand, reentry “collapsed geographical boundaries and brought far-flung states, communities, and environments on either side of the Iron Curtain into dangerous proximity.” Reentry “reinforced alliances, tested inchoate international legal regimes, and brought new voices into Space Age discourse.”
Rand details the case of Kosmos 954, a satellite launched from the USSR in September 1977. After the satellite started behaving erratically in December of that year, normally secretive Soviet officials admitted that the device was nuclear-powered. They insisted that the on-board reactor would completely disintegrate on reentry into the upper atmosphere. When it came down on January 24, 1978, it scattered radioactive debris over a wide swath of Canada’s Northwest Territories.
A joint Canada–US team set up a search and containment project called Operation Morning Light, collecting debris from extreme space in the extreme Arctic.
“After eight-and-a-half months of work, often under survival conditions in subfreezing temperatures,” Rand writes, “the Morning Light team recovered approximately sixty-five kilograms of debris from a 600-kilometer path.”
Additionally, some 4,000 tiny particles of nuclear fuel were collected from a 100,000-square-kilometer area. Some of these pepper-grain-sized particles had negligible amounts of radioactivity, others were dangerously “hot.”
“The particles had spread into Alberta and Saskatchewan as well as into regions where the 1978 Arctic Winter Games were shortly to be held,” Rand explains. She also notes that mainstream media coverage largely ignored the threat to Dene and Inuit First Nations communities.
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“Indigenous citizens stood to suffer the most from exposure to radioactive debris delivered by a foreign power,” she writes. Canada’s north was called the Barren Lands by some, but “like many regions historically subjected to conquest by virtue of their supposed emptiness, the foreign satellite fell into a place where people were not just visitors but also permanent residents.” Critics charged that simple translations into Chipewyan and Inuktitut “did not do enough to convey the danger in a culture in which legible ideas of satellites, radiation, and nuclear energy and their associated risks did not exist.”
Kosmos 954 illustrates what Rand calls the “peculiar reality of the industrial age…namely, that those lacking access to the benefits of technology often bear disproportionate risks when those technologies fail.”
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Meanwhile, under 1972’s space Liability Convention, Canada sued the Soviet Union for $6 million in cleanup costs. Morning Light ultimately cost $14 million. The USSR eventually forked up $3 million—“the first, and, to date, only invocation of the Liability Convention by two signatory nations.”
Before Sputnik’s 1957 launch, outer space had been seen as a “region of emptiness.” Humans found instead a “topography of magnetism, radiation, energy, dust, and transiting plasmas, alongside atmospheric and trapped solar particles, extending tens of thousands of kilometers into space.” Near-Earth space became “a natural environment inextricably entwined with events on Earth…[which has] mutually shaped, and been shaped by, human activity since the beginning of the Space Age.”
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