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Space

What Was the First Piece of Man-Made Space Junk? 34

Posted by Cliff from the flying-out-of-the-atmo dept.
Splynn asks: "I was wondering about what the very first man made object to leave Earth's atmosphere was. We all know that Sputnik was the first man made satellite, but there must have been something that actually made it out there befor Sputnik." For those who are curious, Sputnik was launched on October 4, 1957. Sputnik may have been the first satellite to orbit the earth, but was it really the first successful launch into space?
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What Was the First Piece of Man-Made Space Junk? More

What Was the First Piece of Man-Made Space Junk?

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  • ...at least according to this page [stemnet.nf.ca].
  • Sputnik means "We beat the Americans!"

  • Define atmosphere (Score:2, Insightful)

    by PD ( 9577 )
    When you say leave the atmosphere, you're not saying much. Even low earth orbit satellites such as the shuttle are in the atmosphere, just a very thin part of it.

    If you set some altitude then you can figure out easily which rocket was first.

    One of the V2 rockets fired by the United States in 1949 reached an altitude of about 250 miles. This was a modified configuration from the way it was originally built by the Germans.

  • Trinity (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Henry V .009 ( 518000 ) on Tuesday December 24, 2002 @02:58PM (#4953500) Journal
    "What was the first-piece of man-made space junk?"

    I'd imagine that is asking what the first thing we put into orbit was. If no screws came off experimental V2's, then I'd imagine that the first real "space junk" was put up with the atomic bomb detonation at Trinity.

    There is actually an interesting story in regards to this. When the SR-71 was first built, they were surprised to find little black impact crators on the wind-shield--apparently received while the bird was flying at maximum altitude. Of course, that is far too high for debris. Later, after analysis, they came to the conclusion that the SR-71 had collided with insects thrown up by nuclear detonations. You can think of it as our first problem with space (high-altitude anyway) junk.
  • If we're defining "space junk" as "piece(s) of equipment no longer needed, and left in orbit," then the first piece was the upper stage of the rocket that launched Sputnik. This upper stage remained briefly in a lower orbit than Sputnik itself, and re-entered the atmosphere some time (a few weeks?) later.

    If we define "space junk" as "equipment brought into space for some other purpose but which unintentionally ended up being left, unusable, in orbit" then the honor would go to the camera that one of the Gemini astronauts (Ed White?) accidentally let go of during his spacewalk.

    Note: I read all this when I was in elementary school, so I may not have the details right.

  • Manhole covers in space...or not. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Mick D. ( 89018 ) on Tuesday December 24, 2002 @03:03PM (#4953533) Homepage Journal
    Check the following link out. He did a good job trying to collect from primary sources, and actual known values to get the the answer. Read the article to find out, but it aint likely to be sputnick. http://www.strangehorizons.com/2002/20021021/manho le.shtml
    • Here is an account from Dr. Brownlee himself about the manhole cover. He is highly doubtful it actually entered space.

      Link [enviroweb.org]
    • I know it is quite common to not actually make a clickable link to a referenced pages on /., and I have been meaning to complain for a while now. I for one read /. on my PDA while I am riding the bus to work and the software I use cannot follow non href links so any article mentioned but not linked-to does not get downloaded. I know there are good reasons for not making clickable links for referenced material but I believe there are more reasons to actualy give clickable links. Besides I think most ppl dont because of laziness.

      Just 2 extra cents I had laying around,

      Jason

  • Written on the subway walls... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Tuesday December 24, 2002 @03:19PM (#4953640) Journal
    The MIT subway stop has murals describing the history of science in the 19th and 20th centuries. This is the second time this week I've cited them here -- there were earlier launches of the SS-6 vehicle used to launch Sputnik. I don't feel like wasting a token to check the details, though.

    Here's a link [go.com] about a test launch a few months before Sputnik. The US was testing Vanguards at the same time, though, and there were other ballistic missiles on both sides.

    Come on, someone must know the answer!

  • Other space junk (Score:3, Interesting)

    by linuxwrangler ( 582055 ) on Tuesday December 24, 2002 @03:36PM (#4953733)
    In it's heyday the U.S. Navy's Naval Ordnance Test Station at China Lake (NOTS) was known for outstanding engineering and a just-get-it-done attitude. The guys were real hackers (analog circuits and machinery but they had the knowhow and the facilities to hack together all sorts of stuff). Perhaps the most famouse is the Sidewinder [amazon.com] (good read by the way) missile.

    Less known is that just after Sputnik was launched a bunch of the engineers grabbed whatever they could lay their hands on and attempted to orbit their own satellite dubbed NOTSnik [navy.mil]. They made six launches and while they were unable to prove a successful orbit many believe that one launch did make it all the way around. Doubt any remain as space junk, though.

  • A bit of googling will result in a number of articles and lectures on this subject. It appears that a manhole cover actually made it due to a nuclear test blast.

    See here [strangehorizons.com] for one article, but others exist (try searching for: manhole nuclear space object).

    The article ponders whether it is myth or not and provides a number of links to other sites *documenting* the situation.

    But realistically, it depends on what you define as man made. Byproducts from many industrial products will certainly (at least some of them) escape the bounds of our planet due to issues such as wind, volcanos, etc... I'm certain that on a daily basis we throw off quite a bit of dna etc...

    But somehow, a manhole cover seems fitting.

    • I think that the friction of the atmosphere would have played a role and would have prevented an orbiting manhole cover (it was four inches thick too). Also, that could have affected the trajectory too so that the manhole cover didn't go straight up but had a parabolic course.

      It's understandable that they wouldn't find the object though. They should have put a direction finding transmitter on it though.
      • It's understandable that they wouldn't find the object though. They should have put a direction finding transmitter on it though.

        I doubt they could have done that ca. 45 years ago.

    • Do you honestly believe a man hole cover is in orbit? Come on fella, use some common sense here.

      I'm sure his definition of space junk is "human manufactured parts or materials which are currently orbiting the earth".

      I'm fairly certain that you must be in orbit if you think that DNA is "space junk". Sheesh.

  • anecdotal (Score:3, Interesting)

    by zogger ( 617870 ) on Tuesday December 24, 2002 @04:00PM (#4953876) Homepage Journal
    --I was a gradeschool kid then and I remember that night it was announced. It scared the crap out of the adults. That's really the biggest thing I remember about it, got a sense they were all going "ohh 5|-|!7" and wondering when atomic ww3 was gonna start, because the russians were "so much ahead". I don't recall a lot of "cool-science" talk, nope, it was a lot more along the lines of "dang, russkies got the high ground, this sucks". The awarness of airpower and having the high ground was still pretty much in adults consciousness then, all of them remembered the tremendous advantage the allies had after establishing air superiority in ww2 and to a lesser extent korea, because before that, the outcome of the war was in MAJOR serious doubt.

    My pet peeve was the government abandoning the x-series projects, going to the dumb capsule idea. I think if we had just kept developing the "space plane" concept then, we'd be 20 years further down the road to space travel being even more normal than it is now, and a lot cheaper. I also think that yaeger was technically the first guy in "space", certainly close enough.
    • Was there really a belief that Sputnik was full of nuclear bombs? (As opposed to the reality... full of a little radio transmitter that went beeeep... beeep... beeeeep... FROM OUTER SPACE!)

      Tim
      • --no, not sputnik, it was just the realization that they had gotten "up there" first, and 'space nukes" might be soon forthcoming. Was a serious blow to national prestige and thoughts of "invincibility" I guess. Like I said I was just a grade school kid then but it was a BIG DEAL in conversations I overheard. As kids we just looked at pictures and 'artists impressions' drawings, etc. We all went out tried to see it as the newspapers had a track, but I never saw it. I DID see "echo", our satellite, with some binoculars, that was cool.

        Neat young geekatroid story. Had one of the first "transistor radios", was also one of the school sliderule and busted briefcase nerds. During one of the earlier geminis, I got to monitor the "news" out on the playground with the radio,where the reception actually "received" -heh- then come in and get on the school PA system and give "updates" every 15 minutes. Nice assignment. Manned launches were always constant tv and radio coverage back then, pre-empted most all other programming. cool beans and stuff.

  • I have heard specualation that some World War 1 (or maybe 2) planes flew too high and accidently entered orbit. Maybe there is a big updraft in the Burmuda Triangle! ;-)

    • Orbital velocity is just a few miles per hour short of 18,000 MPH. Fail to reach orbital velocity and you'll fall back to Earth, no matter how high you go.

      No WW 2, much less WW 1, aircraft were capable of reching even a fraction of orbital veleocity.

      • You might want to relearn your fractions...

        Anything that is capable of movement can travel at a fraction of orbital velocity. Take me for example. If we suppose that orbital velocity for me is 18,000 MPH, and that I can walk briskly at 3 miles per hour, then that means that I can walk at 3/18000 of my orbital velocity, which translates to 1/6000.

        My car travels at approximately 80 MPH on the freeway, which works out to 1/225 of orbital velocity for a Honda Civic. Put in hi-octane and a good downhill stretch, and we might me able to get that up to 1/150th of orbital velocity.

        See how easy math is?....
        • A figure of speech, OK? The meaning of the sentence is clear as it stands. It would have been unnecessarily pedantic to point out that smaller numbers are, by defintion, fractions of larger number.
  • The NOTS story and etc are interesting, but I think a more careful definition of "junk" would involve the first thing that was launched and did not come back down (stayed up longer than the actual satellite/whatever). Maybe Sputnik had a housing/shell of some kind; if not, at what point did rocket technology advance enough so that extraneous mass of any kind traveled along with the actual payload?

    And for that matter, when did Sputnik de-orbit? Presumably it would have been due to traces of atmospheric drag, since there wouldn't have been anything resembling thrusters.
  • How about This? [enviroweb.org]

    (Look for 'Thunderwell').

    Maybe not, but makes for a neat story, though!

  • If you want to define space junk as any useless object that leaves the earth's atmosphere, then you can say that the first piece of man made space junk was created by the first cave man who knocked two rocks together outside on a clear day and got a spark. Photons, after all, can be considered "objects".
  • I'm not sure whether this is true, hopefully someone here with more knowledge about that subject could clarify this. As most of you might know, the germans did some early rocket science in WWII, with the famous V2 rocket on which both the russians and americans based their first rockets being only one of many attempts. So I guess the first space junk may result from those experiments, perhaps around 1944. And whatever the first piece of space-junk was, I guess it wasn't space-junk for a long time because they couldn't get very high with those early rockets. I guess Wernher von Braun could have answered that question, but my guess is the first piece of space-junk was some screw that got loose ;-)
    • It's the speed, not the altitude, that allows something to achieve orbit. The maximum speed of the V-2 was, I think, about 3600 MPH. That's about 20 percent of the velocity needed to put something in orbit. The entire rocket followed a ballistic trajectory back to the surface; no space junk was left behind.
  • What information would we need to calculate the amount of energy needed to lift a "300 pound" steel cap into orbit? We "know" it left the earth traveling at six times escape velocity. So with this information, can't we calculate the amount of energy generated at the bottom of this 500 foot vertical shaft?

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