Toolbags, a spatula and rocket debris: the space junk orbiting the Earth is almost at tipping point

It started with a glove. When Nasa astronaut Ed White lost one of his in space after stepping out of his Gemini 4 capsule in June 1965, he made history in more than one way. Not only was White the first American spacewalker; he was also the first to leave space debris behind.

Since then, more than 170 million pieces of such debris are estimated to have floated off into the universe, proving that litter is not only a terrestrial problem. These pieces range from small flecks of paint from spacecraft to old satellites, plus a number of more prosaic items.

The latest eye-catching piece of space debris to disappear into the thermosphere is a tool bag. Lost by Nasa astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara during a spacewalk last week, the kit was deemed a low risk to the space station and so was left behind in the darkness.

So what happens to it now? “It’s going to drift,” says Rory Holmes, the managing director of ClearSpace, a firm developing technology to remove debris from space. “It will slowly come back down to Earth, but this will take many hundreds of years and it will be a risk for that time.” 

This doesn’t mean it will be discovered in a field several centuries from now and end up in a museum. “Given the tool[bag]’s size, it would probably burn up in the atmosphere eventually.”

Larger objects will eventually come down to Earth too – though without fully burning up. “You do sometimes see bits of rocket or satellite land on the ground,” says Holmes. “But Earth is quite big, so unless you’re unlucky, one won’t land on your head.”

This is not the first set of tools to be set adrift in space. During a spacewalk in November 2008, astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper lost a tool bag while trying to repair a jammed gear on a space station solar panel. The bag and its contents were worth about $100,000 (£81,000). 

“I thought, ‘Maybe I can jump for it and grab it,’” Stefanyshyn-Piper said later. “But then we would have two floating objects, and one of them would be me. So the best thing was [to] just let it go, and it was very disheartening to watch it float away.” The bag was later spotted in orbit by amateur astronomers. 

Perhaps the most unusual item of space debris was the spatula lost by the late astronaut Piers Sellers in 2006. Following its sudden and unexpected fame, the spatula was nicknamed “spatsat”. It was tracked through space by Nasa as it whizzed towards Earth.

There’s a serious side to all this – and a major industry now working to clean up the galaxy. Space debris can be dangerous to astronauts. “The International Space Station has to be moved every so often to avoid it getting hit by debris,” says Holmes. “We’re pretty good at tracking all these bits in space.”

Debris also poses a risk to the roughly 10,000 satellites in space, which provide us with everything from television channels to GPS and internet in remote locations. “The objects we have in orbit criss-cross each other’s paths very quickly,” Holmes explains. “If they collide, something small can still do a huge amount of damage. It could easily destroy your satellite.” 

Little wonder the issue of space debris is taken seriously by authorities. Last year, the UK Space Agency awarded ClearSpace and another company, Astroscale, £4 million to design missions to remove existing pieces of space debris. Announcing the funding, the Agency described orbital congestion and space debris as one of the biggest challenges facing the global space sector. It has committed £102 million up to 2025 to technology that can track objects in space and reduce debris. 

ClearSpace and other companies are developing satellites able to grab big pieces of space debris and safely dispose of them. “We have a giant claw, basically,” says Holmes. “We go and grab the bits and pull them down… into the top of the atmosphere so they can safely burn up.”

So far, this technology is yet to be put into action. The first ClearSpace satellites for space debris removal are expected to launch in 2026, from the UK and French Guiana. 

Experts, meanwhile, talk of the need to make space activities more sustainable. “As humanity we’ve done what we’ve done in every other environment and lost a lot of rubbish and pollutants [in space],” says Holmes. “We’ve been launching stuff into space for 70 years now and not thinking about what happens to it at the end of life. Things smash into each other and can break up into lots of little pieces that smash into each other. If we’re not careful, we get to a point where we’ve left parts of space unusable because they are full of debris.” 

This debris does not just preoccupy scientists but has also seeped into popular consciousness, notably in the 2013 science fiction film Gravity. Spoiler alert, but what would have happened to George Clooney’s character when he floated off into the darkness? 

“I don’t think [he’d] live very long,” says Holmes. “You’d run out of oxygen and energy to heat yourself and probably turn into an iceberg.”