Human beings certainly have a single, and single-minded, excellence at one thing ,
They certainly can screw things up in terms of how they live. They have practically despoiled their home planet — water and air are polluted, and getting worse. Crops are loaded with chemicals; fish and animals are being destroyed. And now we're busy ruining our last frontier. Humans have traveled outside their atmosphere for less than a half-century, and they are busy filling the skies with waste, circling the earth at some 17,000 miles an hour. .
"Space Junk," a film that looks at the debris that is pouring into our skies, is having its world premiere run at the St. Louis Science Center. It's fascinating, and it's scary. Coincidentally, and providing a link between the movie and real life, a chunk of space waste is threatening the International Space Station this very weekend, forcing it to take evasive action to avoid a possible collision.
Only 38 minutes long, "Space Junk" looks at the dead satellites called zombies, meteorites that were there first, pieces broken off a variety of rockets and other things that have fallen off existing satellites. Thousands are up there in low earth orbit, and the odds of a collision are shortening every day.
Director Melissa Butts, a Minneapolis filmmaker, worked with Don Kessler, retired as the head of NASA's Orbital Debris Office, using interviews, photography from outer space and animation of various types to create a fascinating and potentially very scary tale. There have already been a few collisions, and a few aging satellites have been destroyed, ironically creating that much more junk, but in smaller pieces. The cinematography is delightful, and the result is frightening. Even bits of matter as tiny as a paint chip, traveling at those supersonic speeds, can do mighty damage.
Tom Wilkinson narrates, and Kessler talks about his career as the "Father of Space Junk," trying to keep up with a sky rapidly filling with challengers to the stars. They begin with a helicopter journey to Meteor Crater, near Flagstaff, Ariz.. where a meteorite slammed into the Earth some 50,000 years ago. The crater, about 4000 feet in diameter and 570 feet deep,is an awe-inspiring site, clear evidence of a collision from outer space. I visited it about 30 years ago in conjunction with a junket for "Meteor," an awful film starring Sean Connery, but flying via helicopter into the crater and walking around on the bottom was a gripping experience. Being so close-up and personal to something like that is unusual and memorable.
"Space Junk" is a frightening tale of what we are doing to our universe, and the IMAX pictures and animation are exciting. If Kessler's predictions are accurate, and if Butts' film looks at all like what might happen, the results will be less exciting, but far more frightening.
Space Junk opens today at the St. Louis Science Center
— Joe