Around 3pm on New Year’s Eve 2024 the people of Mukuku village (110km southeast of Nairobi in Kenya) were astonished when a 500-kg metallic ring 2.5m in diameter crashed into their village. Luckily, no one was injured and there was no property damage. The Kenya Space Agency is now determining the origin of the space rocket debris.
In an earlier incident, around 3:30PM on 27 April 2000, three pieces of a Delta II rocket slammed into the Western Cape near Durbanville, Robertson and Worcester. Again, no one was hurt. The chances in 2025 of your being hit by space debris are about 1 in a trillion, so don’t worry about that.
However, there are now 40,000 known objects orbiting the Earth, including 12,000 active satellites, ranging in size from 2cm to 110m for the International Space Station (ISS). Concern is increasing about collisions in space and crashes into inhabited areas.
The ISS currently has 7 astronauts aboard, including Sunita Williams and Butch Willmore, the two who are “stranded”. They have been up for months, instead of the 8 days they were intended to be there. A SpaceX Dragon crew capsule should bring them back early this year.
The ISS orbits 400km above the Earth at a speed of 28,000kph. When two objects in orbit collide, the average collision speed is 40,000kph! At that tremendous speed a 2cm piece of junk hits with an energy more than a 1000 times that of a 357-magnum bullet right out of the muzzle. So, the ISS has shields for the crew compartments to protect the astronauts from being killed by space junk.
Satellites in low Earth orbit, like the ISS, experience drag from the thin atmosphere that exists at high altitude, so eventually they have a fiery re-entry. About 60-90% burns up in the atmosphere, but some of the bigger bits come crashing down. The space agencies do try to control where the pieces fall.
Nemo is the Latin word for no one, or nobody. In the famous novel 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1870) by Jules Verne, the anti-imperialist Captain Nemo commands the submarine, Nautilus. When asked his name, he replies, “I have no name”. Hence Nemo.
The loneliest, most remote place on Earth is in the Pacific Ocean 2700km from the nearest land about half-way between Chile and New Zealand and south of Easter Island and north of Antarctica. It is known as a “pole of inaccessibility”, with storms and thundering seas. Some commercial flights between Auckland, New Zealand, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, pass over Point Nemo, and, on rare occasions, extreme ocean races have passed that way. But few people have ever been there. It is in a biological desert where there is little life due to few nutrients. The sea is 4000m deep.
This pole of inaccessibility is called Point Nemo after the Captain of the Nautilus. The humans who regularly come closest to Point Nemo are, in fact, the astronauts in the ISS.
For safety, at the ends of their working lives, many satellites are intentionally de-orbited at just the right time to send their blazing remains crashing down at Point Nemo – the satellite graveyard. Since the 1970s almost 300 satellites have been “buried” there. When a satellite is scheduled to impact, the governments of New Zealand and Chile must be informed, and all ships and planes are warned off.
In 2030 the ISS will be retired and NASA has announced it will be brought down at Point Nemo. For a year after the ISS mission ends the spacecraft will be allowed to drift down to an orbital altitude of only 220 km from where it will be de-orbited. In June 2024 a contract was issued to SpaceX for a US De-orbit Vehicle (USDV), at a cost of $843 million, plus an additional launch cost of $62 million.
The USDV will be a modified Dragon crew capsule, such as the one the stranded astronauts are now awaiting to bring them home. The USDV capsule will be modified to have additional tanks of propellant, engines, avionics, and generators. Sometime in 2031 the USDV engines will fire, and the ISS will be forced into a fall that will crash it at Point Nemo.
There will be a spectacular burst of fireballs over the Pacific Ocean as the space station breaks into pieces and much of it burns up on the descent. Some ships may position themselves to view the spectacle, but no one will be at Point Nemo, the loneliest place on Earth, and briefly a most dangerous place.
- Donald Kurtz is an Extraordinary Professor at North-West University in Mahikeng. He has an A-1 rating from the South African National Research Foundation, its highest rating.
- This article was first published in Talk of the Town, January 16, 2025. The newspaper serving the communities of Ndlambe and the Sunshine Coast, with a weekly wrap of Makhanda news, is available at stores from early on Thursdays.
