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There's a Hidden Spacecraft Dump Deep in The Ocean - Here's What's Down There

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6 JUNE 2019

The most remote location on Earth has many names: It's called Point Nemo (Latin for 'no one') and the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility. Most precisely, its exact coordinates are 48 degrees 52.6 minutes south latitude and 123 degrees 23.6 minutes west longitude.


The spot is about 2,250 km (1,400 miles) from any spot of land - and the perfect place to dump dead or dying spacecraft, which is why it's home to what NASA calls its "spacecraft cemetery."

"It's in the Pacific Ocean and is pretty much the farthest place from any human civilisation you can find," NASA said.

Bill Ailor, an aerospace engineer and atmospheric reentry specialist, put it another way: "It's a great place you can put things down without hitting anything," he said.

To "bury" something in the cemetery, space agencies have to time a crash over that spot. Smaller satellites don't generally end up at Point Nemo, since, as NASA explains, "the heat from the friction of the air burns up the satellite as it falls toward Earth at thousands of miles per hour. Ta-da! No more satellite."

The problem is larger objects, like Tiangong-1: the first Chinese space station, which launched in September 2011 and weighed about 8.5 tons.

China lost control of the 12-metre-long orbital laboratory in March 2016, and it was doomed to crash by 2 April 2018. When it did, hundreds of pounds of the spacecraft - like titanium scaffolding and glass-fibre-wrapped fuel tanks - could have been falling at more than 180 miles per hour before slamming into the ground. (Thankfully, it splashed into the ocean.)

Since China didn't have control of Tiangong-1, it couldn't assure the space station would disintegrate over Point Nemo.


The dead-spacecraft dumping zone


This is because the ISS orbits about 360 km above Earth - and Point Nemo, when the orbital laboratory flies overhead. (The nearest island, meanwhile, is much farther away.)


Buried under more than two miles of water is the Soviet-era MIR space station, more than 140 Russian resupply vehicles, several of the European Space Agency's cargo ships (like the Jules Verne ATV), and even a SpaceX rocket, according to

These dead spacecraft aren't neatly tucked together, though.

Ailor said a large object like Tiangong-1 can break apart into an oval-shaped footprint of debris that extends 1,600 km (995 miles) long and dozens of miles wide.

Meanwhile, the land-free zone around Point Nemo stretches more than 17 million square km - so paying your respects to a specific item isn't easy.



"It's not impossible, but since the beginning of the space age …. a woman who was brushed on the shoulder in Oklahoma is the only one we're aware of who's been touched by a piece of space debris," he said.

A bigger risk is leaving dead spacecraft in orbit.

The pernicious threat of space junk

Some 5,000 satellites currently orbit Earth at various altitudes. There's space for more - even the network of up to 12,000 new internet-providing satellites that Elon Musk and SpaceX wish to launch in the near future.

But it's getting crowded up there when considering the threat of space junk.

In addition to all those satellites, there are thousands of uncontrolled rocket bodies orbiting earth, along with more than 12,000 artificial objects larger than a fist, according to That's not to mention countless screws, bolts, flecks of paint, and bits of metal.


"Countries have learned over the years that when they create debris, it presents a risk to their own systems just as it does for everybody else," Ailor said.



These accidents - along with the intentional destruction of space satellites - have generated countless pieces of space debris that can threaten satellites in nearby orbits years later, leading to a kind of runaway effect.

"We've figured out that this debris can stay up there for hundreds of years," Ailor said.


But Ailor and others are pushing for the development of new technologies and methods that can lasso, bag, tug, and otherwise remove the old, uncontrolled stuff that's already up there and continues to pose a threat.

"I've proposed something like an XPRIZE or a Grand Challenge, where would you identify three spacecraft and give a prize to an entity to remove those things," he said.


"It's not just a technical issue. This idea of ownership gets to be a real player here," Ailor said. "No other nation has permission to touch a US satellite, for instance. And if we went after a satellite … it could even be deemed an act of war."


"There needs to be something where nations and commercial [companies] have some authority to go after something," he said.

A version of this article was first published in October 2017.

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

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