The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 (51 page)

But three of the plans seemed to hold real promise. The first came from seventy-two-year-old Jerome Pearson, an engineer best known for imagining the space elevator concept in the 1970s. Pearson showed up with an animated demo that looked remarkably like the old
Space Invaders
video game. Now president of the South Carolina–based Star Technology and Research, he proposed a seven-year mission in which a dozen suitcase-sized spacecraft would piggyback on other launches. Every vehicle would hold one hundred lightweight nets, each as big as a house. Onboard video cameras would allow ground crews to drape the nets over hunks of junk by remote control. The craft would drag the debris out of orbit, then return to search for more. Pearson claimed his system could capture 2,500 or so objects in the most crowded and dangerous bands of low Earth orbit. The estimated price tag: $240 million.

The second plan came from NASA's Bacon, who outlined a scheme to launch a ten-ton mother ship that would hold ten additional tons of mass-produced nanosatellites, stored like larvae in a honeycombed nest. Once released, the nanosats would approach objects, toss lightweight nets over them, and then tow the debris into the atmosphere. Bacon's plan is suitable mainly for pieces of junk lighter than two pounds in low Earth orbit. Heavier items—rocket stages, satellites—would remain. He estimates that each launch of a mother ship would cost $100 million, with as many as twelve missions needed.

The third concept was from Rob Hoyt, the CEO of Tethers Unlimited, a Seattle-area space contractor. For the past fifteen years, Hoyt has been developing a system called Rustler, to "round up space trash [for] low Earth orbit remediation." He envisions mid-size space vehicles—four hundred pounds or so—piggybacking on satellite launches. Once in orbit, such a craft would sidle up to junk and attach an electrodynamic tether—a wire-mesh kite tail up to six miles long—then send an amp of current through the material. The current would interact with Earth's magnetic field, producing a drag effect and lowering the debris into the atmosphere. Hoyt's approach drew praise from Kessler and others for its simplicity and relatively low price. According to Hoyt, a test mission to take out a few tons of trash could cost just tens of millions of dollars.

Which brings up the problem of how to pay for deploying any of these technologies. One idea would be to assess a fee on commercial satellite companies—which would benefit, after all, from safer skies. Eventually, aerospace firms may equip their satellites with built-in disposal devices so that they can be pulled out of orbit when their missions are complete. Hoyt has just such a product, called Terminator Tape, a three-pound package containing a tether that can be unfurled automatically using the spacecraft's own electronics.

By the end of the conference, there was a sense that removing the junk is actually possible. "I've gone from being totally skeptical to thinking maybe something will work," Kessler says. "We can bring things down; it's just going to cost a lot."

 

Eric Christiansen knows just how damaging space junk can be. From his office at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, he directs a team that studies what happens when orbiting objects get whacked, slammed, pierced, and pummeled. His lab has a wonderfully badass name: the Hypervelocity Impact Technology Facility. The impacting actually happens a few hundred miles away, at NASA's testing range near White Sands, New Mexico. There technicians operate a cannon that uses gunpowder and pressurized hydrogen to fire plastic slugs at shields and panels. Just like real space junk, the projectiles can approach speeds of five miles per second.

Christiansen and his colleagues study the results and use their findings to help develop stronger materials and designs for spacecraft. They're also working on shields that might provide protection from stray projectiles. "This is the lightest shield that will stop a two-centimeter projectile," he says, pointing to a multilayer Kevlar and ceramic panel for the ISS.

Some of the mangled hardware is on display at the space center. The most treasured of these objects is a piece of window glass from a 1983
Challenger
mission. Dinged by debris, it entered the collection when Kessler worked at NASA. "Don gave this to me," Christiansen says, "and he said, 'You protect this and leave it to the next guy."

Christiansen collaborates with the Orbital Debris Program Office, which does much of its work in a corrugated metal building. The office—run by Kessler's successor, Nicholas L. Johnson—is improving its ability to forecast crashes and spot some of the smallest space bits using a huge telescope on a Chilean mountaintop, which will be joined in 2011 by a new scope on a Pacific atoll.

This happens to be the day after the Obama administration announced it was canceling Constellation, NASA's grand plan to return astronauts to the moon by 2020. Along with the final phaseout of the Space Shuttle Program and the move to privatize launches, it all seems to represent a massive resetting of NASA's priorities. Perhaps that makes it the opportune time to get serious about tidying up the skies. The main obstacle, of course, is funding. But included in NASA's proposed 2011 budget is a first-ever provision to award $400,000 research grants for orbital-debris removal and other projects. The allocation would be part of a new "mission directorate" called Space Technology, funded to the tune of almost $5 billion over the next five years. "We're hoping NASA will be able to take charge," Star Technology's Pearson says.

For Donald Kessler, now seventy, that would be welcome news. Standing on his back porch, he doesn't need his telescope to spot the man-made spacecraft whizzing overhead. "Anyone can see satellites with the naked eye," he says. "Several pass by every hour." Sooner or later, he says, word will arrive that another one has been smashed and shattered, and the fragments will escalate the danger to all space missions. The man with the syndrome named after him will keep watch and wait for the next call.

FROM
Orion

I
HAVE COME
to believe that extracting natural gas from shale using the newish technique called hydrofracking is
the
environmental issue of our time. And I think you should, too.

Saying so represents two points of departure for me. One: I primarily study toxic chemicals, not energy issues. I have heretofore ceded that topic to others, such as Bill McKibben, with whom I share this column space in
Orion.

Two: I'm on record averring that I never tell people what to do. If you are a mother who wants to lead the charge against vinyl shower curtains, then you should. If the most important thing to you is organic golf courses, then they are. So said I.

But high-volume slick-water hydrofracturing of shale gas—fracking—is way bigger than PVC and synthetic fertilizer. In fact, it makes them both cheaply available. Fracking is linked to every part of the environmental crisis—from radiation exposure to habitat loss—and contravenes every principle of environmental thinking. It's the tornado on the horizon that is poised to wreck ongoing efforts to create green economies, local agriculture, investments in renewable energy, and the ability to ride your bike along country roads. It's worth setting down your fork, pen, cellular phone—whatever instrument you're holding—and looking out the window.

 

The environmental crisis can be viewed as a tree with two trunks. One trunk represents what we are doing to the planet through atmospheric accumulation of heat-trapping gasses. Follow this trunk along and you find droughts, floods, acidification of oceans, dissolving coral reefs, and species extinctions.

The other trunk represents what we are doing to ourselves and other animals through the chemical adulteration of the planet with inherently toxic synthetic pollutants. Follow this trunk along and you find asthma, infertility, cancer, and male fish in the Potomac River whose testicles have eggs inside them.

At the base of both these trunks is an economic dependency on fossil fuels, primarily coal (plant fossils) and petroleum (animal fossils). When we light them on fire, we threaten the global ecosystem. When we use them as feedstocks for making stuff, we create substances—pesticides, solvents, plastics—that can tinker with our subcellular machinery and the various signaling pathways that make it run.

Natural gas is the vaporous form of petroleum. It's the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of fossil fuels: when burned, natural gas generates only half the greenhouse gases of coal, but when it escapes into the atmosphere as unburned methane, it's one of the most powerful greenhouse gases of them all—twenty times more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping heat and with the stamina to persist for nine to fifteen years. You can also make petrochemicals from it. Natural gas is the starting point for anhydrous ammonia (synthetic fertilizer) and PVC plastic (those shower curtains).

Until a few years ago, much of the natural gas trapped underground was considered unrecoverable because it is scattered throughout vast sheets of shale, like a fizz of bubbles in a petrified spill of champagne. But that all changed with the rollout of a drilling technique (pioneered by Halliburton) that bores horizontally through the bedrock, blasts it with explosives, and forces into the cracks, under enormous pressure, millions of gallons of water laced with a proprietary mix of poisonous chemicals that further fracture the rock. Up the borehole flows the gas. In 2000 only 1 percent of natural gas was shale gas. Ten years later almost 20 percent is.

International investors began viewing shale gas as a paradigm-shifting innovation. Energy companies are now looking at shale plays in Poland and Turkey. Fracking is underway in Canada. But nowhere has the technology been as rapidly deployed as in the United States, where a gas rush is underway. Gas extraction now goes on in thirty-two states, with half a million new gas wells drilled in the last ten years alone. We are literally shattering the bedrock of our nation and pumping it full of carcinogens in order to bring methane out of the earth.

And nowhere in the United States is fracking proceeding more manically than Appalachia, which is underlain by the formation called the Marcellus Shale, otherwise referred to by the
Intelligent Investor Report
as "the Saudi Arabia of natural gas" and by the Toronto
Globe and Mail
as a "prolific monster" with the potential to "rearrange the continent's energy flow."

In the sense of "abnormal to the point of inspiring horror,"
monster
is not an inappropriate term here. With every well drilled—and 32,000 wells per year are planned—a couple million gallons of fresh water are transformed into toxic fracking fluid. Some of that fluid will remain underground. Some will come flying back out of the hole, bringing with it other monsters: benzene, brine, radioactivity, and heavy metals that for the past 400 million years had been safely locked up a mile below us, estranged from the surface world of living creatures. No one knows what to do with this lethal flowback—a million or more gallons of it for every wellhead. Too caustic for reuse as is, it sloshes around in open pits and sometimes is hauled away in fleets of trucks to be forced under pressure down a disposal well. And it is sometimes clandestinely dumped.

By 2012, 100 billion gallons per year of fresh water will be turned into toxic fracking fluid. The technology to transform it back to drinkable water does not exist. And even if it did, where would we put all the noxious, radioactive substances we capture from it?

 

Here, then, are the environmental precepts violated by hydrofracking. 1. Environmental degradation of the commons should be factored into the price structure of the product (full-cost accounting), whose true carbon footprint—inclusive of all those diesel truck trips, blowouts, and methane leaks—requires calculation (life-cycle analysis). 2. Benefit of the doubt goes to public health, not the things that threaten it, especially in situations where catastrophic harm—aquifer contamination with carcinogens—is unremediable (the Precautionary Principle). 3. There is no away.

This year I've attended scientific conferences and community forums on fracking. I've heard a PhD geologist worry about the thousands of unmapped, abandoned wells scattered across New York from long-ago drilling operations. (What if pressurized fracking fluid, to be entombed in the shale beneath our aquifers, found an old borehole? Could it come squirting back up to the surface? Could it rise as vapor through hairline cracks?) I've heard a hazardous-materials specialist describe to a crowd of people living in fracked communities how many parts per million of benzene will raise risks for leukemia and sperm abnormalities linked to birth deformities. I've heard a woman who lives by a fracking operation in Pennsylvania—whose pond bubbles with methane and whose kids have nosebleeds at night—ask how she could keep her children safe. She was asking me. And I had no answer. Thirty-seven percent of the land in the township where I live with my own kids is already leased to the frackers. There is no away.

FROM
Smithsonian

O
N THE NIGHT
of December 10, 1999, the Philippine island of Luzon, home to the capital, Manila, and some 40 million people, abruptly lost power, sparking fears that a long-rumored military coup d'état was underway. Malls full of Christmas shoppers plunged into darkness. Holiday parties ground to a halt. President Joseph Estrada, meeting with senators at the time, endured a tense ten minutes before a generator restored the lights, while the public remained in the dark until the cause of the crisis was announced, and dealt with, the next day. Disgruntled generals had not engineered the blackout. It was wrought by jellyfish. Some fifty dump trucks' worth had been sucked into the cooling pipes of a coal-fired power plant, causing a cascading power failure. "Here we are at the dawn of a new millennium, in the age of cyberspace," fumed an editorial in the
Philippine Star,
"and we are at the mercy of jellyfish."