In the middle of the South Pacific, about 2,688 km from the nearest land, there is a nameless stretch of sea that is very cold, where stormy winds blow, and it is constantly rough. It is a deadly place where the sky is seen changing its colors.
British seafaring record holder De Caffari is among the few to have traveled to this remote ocean.
“There are many shades of gray in the Southern Ocean and there can be storm surges,” he says. This place is very spacious but also a little scary.
In this remote location where there is no soul, and in such a place there is very little chance of survival if you get into trouble. If you’re lucky enough to be stuck there during ‘The Ocean Race’, the only signs of life you might see are the triangular shark fin-like sails just above the surface of the water in the distance. And if it is not, then understand that your luck has left you.
The area is not used for any normal human activities such as shipping or fishing. In fact, the closest humans there are often explorers of an entirely different kind, and those are astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) who may be 415 kilometers above your head.
This point in the middle of the ocean is known as the Pole of Inaccessibility or simply as ‘Point Nemo’.
If you look for Point Nemo on a world map, you’ll find it in the middle of a continuous stretch of blue water between New Zealand and Chile. More precisely, it lies between an uninhabited atoll of Dussey Island, which is part of the Pitcairn Islands, to the north. While to the south is the Myr Island of Antarctica, to the west is the Chatham Islands and to the east is Chile.
It is a place that is the most isolated and lonely in the ocean. Here are the least signs of life. Even the sea floor is some 13 thousand feet or two and a half miles below its surface.
However, in this empty wasteland between the icy, empty waters and the ISS, there is also a graveyard known as the ‘Spaceship Graveyard’, a vast region where the debris of defunct spacecraft orbiting the Earth is buried.
Between 1971 and 2018, global space powers including the United States, Russia, Japan and Europe have launched more than 263 spacecraft in the uninhabited area of the ocean around Point Nemo. The list includes a Soviet-era space station and six aircraft from the country’s Selyut program, as well as 140 Russian resupply vehicles, six cargo transfer vehicles launched by Japan, and five European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft. Vehicles are included.
SpaceX’s capsule rockets are believed to have landed in this ocean trash recently. And coincidentally, its nearest neighbor, the ISS, is also going to be buried in this remote location in eight years.
How does the spaceship end up going to Point Nemo? What broken, twisted remains lie in its immense depths at this time? And what will future archaeologists make of it all?
A hidden record
At 8:59 a.m. Moscow time on March 23, 2001, a group of Russian cosmonauts began looking into the sky from the island of Fiji in the South Pacific. It was a moment the country’s space agency had been preparing for for more than a year.
But it was soon over as for a few seconds a series of golden lights were seen flashing from the sky with a streak of smoke trailing behind. The scene was accompanied by a sonic boom or sound explosion. It occurs when objects travel faster than the speed of sound, creating shock waves.
It was the day the Mir space station died after traveling 1.9 billion kilometers around the world. The world’s first modular space station re-entered Earth’s atmosphere with all of its 134-ton payload.
It initially crossed the threshold from outer space over Japan, then hit the uninhabited region (Sapoa) of the South Pacific Ocean. The area of Point Nemo is 34 times larger than France.
Soon after, rumors began to circulate on the Internet that pieces of it had started floating and had been found elsewhere. All these things are lies and not a single part of it has been found anywhere. It has been swallowed by the Pacific Ocean and its fragments are lying for several kilometers around it.
The question is, how will these and other defunct spacecraft that have made similar journeys survive the Earth’s atmosphere and sudden ocean landings due to their radiation?
When objects travel back from outer space, they are hit by the gas molecules that surround our planet. Space debris falling at about 28,164 km/h, whether it’s a meteorite or an old spacecraft or a plane carrying human passengers, all push the air out of its path with such force that it causes chemical The bonds break and form an electrically charged plasma.
This causes them to burn up, and in the case of smaller objects they cease to exist and evaporate before they hit the ground, but this does not happen with the more massive remnants.
Alice Gorman, associate professor of space archeology at the University of Flanders in Australia, says the parts of the spacecraft that re-enter Earth’s confines are the most intact. Usually they are designed to withstand extremes of heat or pressure to serve their intended purpose.
“Often it’s fuel tanks or rocket boosters that survive because they either contain cryogenic fuel (a gas propellant that cools and condenses until it liquefies) or they’re burning at really high temperatures,” he said. are, so the fuel tanks have to be really strong to withstand them. These typically represent the largest solid objects on a spacecraft or rocket and are protected with additional insulation. She says, ‘They have a lot of stainless steel, aluminum alloys, titanium alloys.’
Insulation is often made from carbon compounds such as carbon fiber that do not burn when heated. Even its earliest specimens could withstand temperatures of up to 287 degrees Celsius.
Guzman says that in most cases, once spacecraft re-enter Earth’s atmosphere, we don’t know their ultimate fate, only guesses. “All we know is where they are, but we haven’t seen them.” “No one went there (around Point Nemo) with a research vessel or went down to the bottom to see their condition.”
Scattering of debris
The Sperans Museum in Western Australia offers some evidence of this. Located in the coastal town of the same name, this antiques museum of obscure regional appeal is a collection of odd and seemingly random objects, including vintage motorbikes, a 19th-century train car, and a variety of agricultural machinery. But not much known for these things.
There people go more for plexiglass cabinets and metal pens carefully labeled with laminated paper.
There’s a crushed water tank made of cylindrical steel, a mysterious titanium spheroid that once held nitrogen, a steel food freezer, and various oddly shaped pieces of rusted metal, a handful of sponges. are among the scraps of
The biggest thing is the metal oxygen tank, wrapped in clear plastic. It is about 6 feet long (1.8 meters). These are among the largest pieces ever made by the first US space station, Skylab.
It was launched into Earth orbit on May 14, 1973. And it returned to its home planet after only six years. NASA had initially hoped that SkyLab would continue its mission longer, but its orbit began to degenerate faster than expected, and by early 1979 it was clear that the 77-ton station Space cannot exist whether people like it or not.
As with all large space objects, it was deemed necessary to control the SkyLab as much as possible in order to land it in the ocean, far away from human activity.
However, no one had thought of disposing of it, and there was little NASA engineers could do to get the space station on its way back to Earth.
On its final day, Skylab was ‘de-orbited’ under which its engines were fired to slow itself down so that it would fall from the sky and hopefully disappear into the Indian Ocean, just south-west of Australia. But it didn’t go according to plan.
In the early morning hours of July 11, 1979, central Australia was the scene of the Skylab crash. Locals reported finding telescope mounts, fragments of fuel tanks, a box of lead film, a 22-foot-long piece of airlock, a shield protecting the airlock chamber and a large oxygen tank, which That was scattered in the bushes and fields.
According to NASA, a total of at least 38 pieces of debris were found, each weighing more than 454 kg.
Much of this space junk ended up in the Shire of Esperance, and the county passed a new law with a $400 fine for NASA to litter. The fine is technically outstanding to date.
Although the event was embarrassing for the space agency, it allowed debris from the reentry of a larger object to be examined.
The result was not just a deposit of metal, amazingly some of their complex structures survived including a hatch door or door with a knocker.
How big could the pieces of spacecraft at Point Nemo be?
In the case of the spacecraft, upon its re-entry into Earth orbit, it was predicted that the giant space station, which is about 13 meters long and consists of five laboratory modules, would break into 1,500 pieces.
Wreck experts said the largest pieces could potentially be the size of a small car. These will include fuel tanks, batteries, bulkheads and storage boxes, all of which have sunk into the deep seabed around Point Nemo. Even some lightweight materials like aluminum sheet and foam insulation can survive.
Now that the ISS returns to Earth in 2031, it will be more important than ever that debris fall on an uninhabited area like Point Nemo. It weighs about 400 tons. And there are already plans to achieve this goal.
“NASA has solicited proposals from US industry for the USD Orbit Vehicle,” a Johnson Space Center representative explained in an email.
NASA predicts that while parts of the ISS burn up, parts that are denser or more heat-tolerant are likely to survive. This includes trusses. It is a series of steel structures that form the backbone of the space station and can be up to 18.3 meters tall.
A historical record
All this means that Point Nemo as it is now will likely remain the same and will be a gold mine for future archaeologists. Gorman says: ‘You study them (spaceship graveyards) the same way you study an oyster or something in the garbage.’ Archaeologists often use these deposits of human waste hundreds or thousands of years ago to learn how people lived, including what they ate and what they valued.
By studying ancient shells or oysters, archaeologists have succeeded in reconstructing the behavior of ancient coastal hunters. They depended on seafood such as snails and oysters to survive. Although the act of discarding an object, be it a spaceship or oysters or snails, may seem like a careless act, Gorman describes these junkyards as the deliberate collection of artifacts. ‘One thing you can see is how it has changed over time,’ she says. Like, which ones are the earliest, which ones are the latest ones? What sort of technological or material changes do we see in the intervening years, etc.’
A thousand years from now when these objects are found at Point Nemo, people will see them as reusable rockets. “At some point, if you were to do a global survey of what’s in the oceans around the Earth, you’d see that there’s been a fundamental decrease in the amount of waste that’s been dumped into the oceans since 2013,” Gorman says. . It’s a value shift that people are starting to value recycling, reuse and reducing environmental damage.’
In fact, Gorman sees the artifacts at Point Nemo as an important record of early space exploration. And luckily it will probably stay there forever, going nowhere. Not only are the remains likely to be remarkably intact in the South Pacific, they may also be better preserved.
The waters around Point Nemo are considered some of the most lifeless on Earth, making them a perfect spaceship graveyard. It is far from land, which carries nutrients to the oceans. This, combined with the deep sea’s natural lack of oxygen, freezing temperatures and complete lack of sunlight, creates ideal conditions so that it will not even rust due to reduced rates of chemical reactions.
‘The main effect will just be on the chemical reaction of the salt water content,’ says Gorman. But many critical spacecraft components are functionally engineered with stainless steel and titanium and aluminum alloys so they won’t corrode. ‘That’s what you want from a fuel tank.’
Gorman believes the spacecraft at Point Nemo will still be in relatively good shape in 1,000 years. ‘It’s something you’d find on historic shipwrecks. They are very well protected under water. And it’s when they were bought on the ground that they were more likely to rot.’
So, while no one has yet been able to track down interesting space artifacts at Point Nemo, there are probably plenty out there in total darkness on the sea floor. At least for now, they have turned the dark emptiness of outer space into another solitude.