A Spacecraft Graveyard

A Spacecraft Graveyard

Edward Li, Writer

The most remote spot on the planet earth is ,at a coordinate of 48 degrees 52.6 minutes south latitude and 123 degrees 23.6 minutes west longitude, call the Point Nemo, or latin for “no one”. This place is 1400 miles away from any existing land or island, which makes it the perfect location to dump just about anything over here, and it just so happened to be used as the home of NASA’s dead or dying spacecraft – also call the “spacecraft cemetery”.

From 1971 to 2016, the space agencies around the globe dropped at least 260 spacecrafts into this region, and acceding to Popular Science, the number of spacecraft dropped in this location was just 161 in 2015. Meanwhile, people are still expecting more of the spacecrafts to come here from all the nations on earth.

However, there is a threat of overwhelming space junk at this place. There are around 4000 satellites which are currently orbiting around the Earth. Since there are space for more spacecraft in the university, it is likely we are looking at a number around 4425 more satellites to be put into the space. But as the number of spacecraft that would become uncontrolled rocket bodies around the earth upper atmosphere, the likelihood of them starting to drop into the earth ocean to becoming more and more possible. And if the spacecraft junk yard runs out of space, there are no where else for us to dump the space junk. It is quite reasonably for the government officers to take a look into this potential issue.