Space Junk as a Practical Dilemma in Art. (part 1) by John Cat

What is Space?

 Space. What is it? 
Space seems to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. No thing or body can ever be outside space but only inside space.  Reach out your hands to touch it or look inside to grasp it and nothing is there.























Space is everything and all encompassing yet seems invisible at the same time. 
Space  is all encompassing  in our lives and is boundless. 
We as human life forms occupy space just like everything else that is physical. A house inhabits space yet at the same time there is emptiness in the form.
       Yes space also means emptiness and nothing. Form and emptiness are inseparable and they cannot be understood in isolation from each other.
               “Form is empty yet emptiness is also form.” – Avalokiteshvara
             Emptiness is Form refers to a Buddhist text called the Heart Sutra on the fullness of emptiness. The Heart Sutra is the distillation of all teachings on Emptiness. Emptiness in Buddhism refers to the interdependence of all phenomena, both mental and physical.
               Yet ultimately all phenomena are emptiness as space & nothingness are the same thing.  During Meditations, one is taught to try and focus on "nothing" in order to relax in the openness and clarity of space. A daily meditation practice has many healthy benefits & has actually been proven to open up untapped areas in our brains.
Emptiness is not a negative condition but a positive one.  Emptiness is inseparable from Luminosity, the creative power of the awakened mind.
Yet for something that is nothing, we all exist our whole lives encapsulated in this space. There is no outside space.

           What we call the sky marks the boundary of our physical vision looking, the limit our sight can reach. It is space (emptiness) in front of our outstretched hand as well as the endless space all around us emanating forth forever, above, below and inside even us.

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          Around 150 years ago, as we know it, human travel began to include going farther up into our space.  First balloons & crude airplanes then rockets.
 
         In the year 1919, a treatise was published titled, A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, by Dr. Robert Goddard, an American engineer, professor, physicist, and inventor. This is the first practical treatise on the use of rockets for space travel as we know it.
           In 1926, Dr. Goddard, launched a rocket up 41 feet high for 2.5 seconds that traveled at the speed of 60 mph. This feat ushered in an era of space flight and innovation that continued on into the following decades.
Goddard is now widely considered the Father of Modern Rocketry & Space Flight.


        Starting about the 1940’s, rockets by different countries have carried all manner of things up into space, even live ones. Dogs, cats, earthworms, amoeba, chimpanzees and only God knows what else besides humans themselves, has traveled into space. This has all created a new form of pollution and what is now known as Space Junk ( aka space debris, space garbage ) which did not exist for us before. Pieces of space junk also often crash land on earth and are usually described as Fireballs or mistaken for meteorites.


     Derelict objects left in orbit and other disintegrating objects can cause catastrophic collisions above our atmosphere and potentially wreak great havoc.

         A 1978 paper by Donald Kessler and Burton Cour-Palais, “The Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites: The Creation of a Debris Belt" reference this idea. The scenario suggests that if the past growth rate in the catalogued population continued, around the year 2000 a more hazardous population of small debris would be generated as a result of fragments from random collisions between catalogued objects. This new source of debris would quickly produce a hazard that exceeds the hazard from natural meteoroids.
      This potential multiplying space junk cascade effect (the so called  Kessler Syndrome) would be considered a threat to human space travel at the very least. Estimates show that there are already more than 100 trillion untracked pieces of old satellites circling the planet at the speed of 17,000 miles per hour.
    Imagine a ricochet of self propagating Space-junk collisions creating even more debris over and over in a cumulative effect of multiplications.   This could destroy communication systems, setting modern society back decades and also making it difficult to venture beyond earth past debris fields.

Artful depictions of Space Junk

        There is a legitimate concern that just as the world’s oceans have been polluted with plastics, oil, trash etc & no country is held accountable to clean it up, that these same type state entities are doing the same thing to our space but with possible much more dire effects for humanity.
 
        Several recent examples of this is when in 2007 the rocket scientists in China decided it was a good idea to destroy one of their defunct aging satellites still orbiting earth and this was the largest creation of space debris in history, with more than 2,000 pieces of trackable size space trash (golf ball size and larger) officially catalogued in the immediate aftermath, and an estimated 150,000 debris particles.
        Not to be outdone and more recently in 2021, the brain trust in Russia blew up one of their own satellites & created a new cloud of their very own orbital space junk debris spinning over us in the heavens. More equals more.

         Closer to home is Space X with their Starlink satellites currently taking over Lower Earth Orbit ( LEO).
Half of all active satellites in LEO are now from SpaceX , which all orbit at a similar distance from Earth, just above 500 kilometers. All of them launched in the last 4 years (since 2019 with tens of thousands more coming soon), resulting in the massive industrialization of low earth orbit.  
      As smug Tesla drivers finance this space proliferation with each purchase of their electric vehicles, they are in fact enabling the destruction of the skies above.

    Space X also shipped a Tesla roadster up into space which now endlessly orbits the earth in a sort of creepy ego gratification for it's main owner.  This “littering of the cosmos” by one of the richest people in the world is labeled as “ready made” art by some, while others question that the launching of a non-sterile object to interplanetary space may risk biological contamination of a foreign world.  

             Though artists have been making art with astronomical elements for a long time, the genre of Space Art aka Astronomical Art, is still in its infancy, Whatever the stylistic path, the artist is generally attempting to communicate ideas somehow related to space, often including an appreciation of the infinite variety and vastness which surrounds us.

Yama Space Junk and friends meditating to help combat stress and promote happiness.

       Since humans currently lack the technology to clean up this Space Debris issue, then it is left to future creative minds to come up with answers and methods to deal with it. We at ARTtoGO.com think art is the answer to inform and foster dialogue about this new method of  trashing the beautiful environment of earth.  We feel that ART is the answer to this pollution and this would benefit all of mankind.
     Over 10 years ago, between 2012 & 2013, we created a series of unique illustrated stories and art about the aspect of space junk polluting our lives & published them as 3 children's (adults too) books for entertainment purposes.
Called Space Junk, Space Junkers and Space Junks, these original art creations are one of the first if not The first environmental children's books about the pollution issue of Space Junk. 

More will be interpreted in this blog as part 2 - Space Junk as a Practical Ideal in Art.