Space junk problem may need more than just a commitment to sustainability
Over 100 million pieces of space junk orbit Earth, sparking concern from some engineers and scientists.
Space junk is any object in orbit that no longer functions. The most common removal method for defunct equipment is to set it on a course to burn up in the atmosphere. Otherwise, it is moved into a “graveyard orbit” where it is unlikely to collide with anything. Very few are removed from orbit manually.
Moriba Jah, professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the co-founder and chief scientist of GaiaVerse, said this status quo for space junk removal isn’t good enough.
“When people are talking about sustainability, many of them are just saying, ‘Hey, can we find ways to just not make things worse?’” Jah said. “That kind of comes with having to learn how to live in our own filthy bath water kind of thing. There's already a bunch of junk. Not making it worse is necessary, but it's insufficient, because what we need to do is we need to be restorative.”
Jahs’s spiritual outlook informs the way he sees sustainability. He has led his work in aerospace and with stewardship of the Earth and space.
“This idea of seeing the environment not separate from ourselves, but part of ourselves, [...] and having a sense of not just gratitude, but respect.” Jah said. “When we utilize that environment for our own existence, that's a gift. Approaching space in a very similar way,instead of looking at space as just something to dominate, something to own, something to exploit and extract from, to looking at it from space is an environment that is a gift. When we utilize it in this kind of perspective, we get great benefits from it.”
Space junk can damage spacecraft and satellites. Jah said there's not only an environmental incentive to remove the junk, but also an economic one.
“Right now, everything that we launch into orbit is the equivalent of a single-use plastic. When we shift and actually design satellites that are reusable and recyclable, that will be creating jobs,” Jah said. “It will allow us to continue making profit from satellites in the long term, dare I say, in perpetuity. The financial gain of doing this circularity is infinite. Not doing it is certain doom.”
Plants are the key to living off the planet. They can also tell us more about how humans react to space travel
If we want humans to live and work in space for longer periods of time, plants are a necessity.
Plus, plants and humans are somewhat similar – especially in the way they react to leaving the planet.

One scientist is working to understand how space flight impacts plant life, going so far as to launch himself and his plants into space. Rob Ferl, a distinguished professor of Horticultural Sciences and the Inaugural Director of the Space Institute at the University of Florida, said we can learn a lot about how space impacts the human body from plants.
“Some of the very same gene categories that humans change in space, especially long-term in space on the space station, are also activated, changed and repressed in plants when they make the journey into space,” Ferl said. “So, when you ask the question ‘Are there correlations between what happened to me in my flight and what happened to plants on their flight?’ Yes, there are.”
In his own experiment, Ferl confirmed that his plants reacted to the various stages of launching on Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spacecraft -- from driving to the launch pad to experiencing microgravity. He said scientists have studied how life reacts on the space station, but not as much when it comes to quick exposure to spaceflight.
“We know that from roots, signals move up to the shoots and to the leaves during launch,” Ferl said. “Everything then settles down once they get into space, and it gets reactivated when they have to go through high G's and return to the earth.”
Looking towards the future and the idea of humans living on the moon or Mars, Ferl said a lot still needs to be done before life here on Earth can move elsewhere. Before we further explore our universe and potentially create permanent settlements off our planet, Ferl said other organisms, plants and even people have to be tested in repeated ways.
“From a very personal perspective, during my flight, samples were taking from me in the flight and back,” Ferl said. “We need more of that kind of not exactly replication, but the same experiment done on different genotypes of people. Different people that are taller, shorter than me, people that eat different stuff than me. We need to know as much about biology making the trip as we can learn. We're scratching the surface, and we're getting there, but there's a lot more science like that to be done.”