Sept. 15, 2006 — It's a junkyard out there in space and sometimes astronauts accidentally contribute to the litter. In 1965, the first American spacewalker, Ed White, lost a spare glove when he went outside for the first time. From that time on, astronauts have accidentally added some of the more unusual items to the 100,000 pieces of space trash that circle Earth.
Last July, spacewalker Piers Sellers sheepishly reported that he lost a spatula. Nicknamed "spatsat" by space junk watchers, it returns to Earth in a fireball early next month.
This week the Atlantis astronauts made their own contributions to the space debris in low orbit: a couple of bolts that escaped from the addition they were connecting to the International Space Station.
To engineers, this isn't funny. Many of those pieces of space junk can kill astronauts, puncture satellites or at the very least scratch up expensive space shuttle windows.
"It's one of these problems that is growing in seriousness," said William Ailor, director of the Center for Orbital and Re-entry Debris Studies at the Aerospace Corp. in Los Angeles. "It's really the small things that will get you."
Using radar and telescope sensors, NASA and the Air Force track objects bigger than about 4 inches. The official "box score" of that space debris as of Thursday was 9,925. But the 90,000 objects smaller than that can be as dangerous, zipping around Earth at more than 15,000 mph. They are just harder to track.
NASA has even seen debris bits of dried-up urine, toothpaste, and shaving cream — all from space shuttle waste dumps — in an experiment placed outside of the Russian space station Mir, said officials at the NASA orbital debris program lab. An Indonesian satellite was struck by urine and fecal matter. Now NASA doesn't dump human waste outside much anymore.
Of all the items followed by the Air Force, the more unusual ones are those "that aren't necessarily meant to drop," said Air Force Space Protection Officer David Ward of the First Space Control Squadron in Cheyenne Mountain. "The astronauts didn't necessarily mean to let go of the bolts the last couple days, but that happens."
