Fallen Skies: Near-Earth Space as Global Environment During the Long 1970s

• In Event: The Final Frontier (of Environmental History): Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Environments Beyond Earth

Abstract

What goes up must come down: Gravity brings everything from flying baseballs to orbiting satellites back to Earth. The technologies that humankind launches into space continuously collide with atmospheric particles and eventually fall, breaking apart in the intense friction and pressure of the upper atmosphere. Sometimes fragments of these objects survive and land in unexpected places. In the 1970s, uncontrolled reentering artifacts—colloquially known as “space junk”—became perilous boundary objects, bringing states, legal regimes, and environments into unexpected and dangerous proximity. The outer space environment itself became a power player in Cold War geopolitics.

During this time, the Sun entered a particularly active peak of the eleven-year solar cycle, heating and expanding Earth’s upper atmosphere. This period of stormy space weather resulted in a spike in the number of space junk reentries at the end of the decade. Satellites containing radioactive materials and other large spacecraft fell to Earth, fragments of which survived atmospheric reentry to land far from the launching state—occasionally on terra firma. Falling space junk inspired legal and cultural redefinitions of waste and liability, and the expansion of a burgeoning international discourse of global pollution and environmental protection to include the nearest regions of outer space.

This research draws from archival and published materials documenting the anticipation, landing, and negotiation of responsibility for falling space junk, as well as representations of reentry anxiety in popular culture. Concurrent with the rise of mainstream environmentalism and capping two decades of scientific and popular proto-environmentalist debate about the safe use of space, the reentry of out-of-control space artifacts factored into a broader rethinking of the environmental in the late 1970s—what qualifies as a natural environment, which environments require protection against new and illegible forms of pollution, and how transnational environmental crises ought to be managed.

Author

• Lisa Ruth Rand, University of Pennsylvania