Chris Hadfield mentioned, while explaining how dirty laundry is handled in space, that trash is sometimes disposed of by sending it into the atmosphere. Does this process have any impact on life here on Earth? Could any of the material or gases be harmful, or is it essentially harmless compared to natural atmospheric events like meteors or wildfires?
by Medical_Key_7370
6 Comments
Not a heavy impact, more of a light shower.
The quantity is far too small to have any effect on the global environment. A single trash can being knocked over on the earth would be more damaging.
Imagine the amount of garbage that humans are already burning inside the atmosphere.
The amount of waste the ISS produces is beyond negligible, even if they dumped a thousand times the waste it would still be a thousands of percentile of the amount of waste it would have to be before it stopped being a negligible amount.
Hundreds of millions of people dump their trash and raw sewage directly into the sea every day (though it would be better if they didnt). 10 people dumping their trash (to be mostly incinerated on re-entry) will not have a substantial effect.
There are a few things that are particularly problematic when introduced into the upper atmosphere in particular (ex. aluminum oxide from satellite re-entry may disrupt the ozone layer), but as far as I know astronaut waste does not contain such things in large quantities. And organic compounds find their way into the upper atmosphere on a regular basis, so those are not a concern.
If the entire International Space Station were somehow vaporized and dispersed, it would still account for approximately 0.00000000000874% of the mass of the atmosphere. Nothing we’re doing on that small of a scale is going to have a measurable impact.
This stuff burns up and leaves a cloud of dust in the higher atmosphere. Just another meteor hit.
But the Starlink satellites burning up daily leave a lot of aluminium in the stratosphere. And that diminishes the ozone layer, which just was on the way to be fixed after the Freon disaster of the last century.