“Space debris is increasingly becoming a huge problem and the legal framework must be updated to deal with it in any meaningful way.” -Shruti Gurudanti, Rose Law Group partner and leader of the firm’s space law practice
By Forbes
An object in space that astronomers initially identified as a close-to-Earth asteroid turned out to be a Tesla electric car that Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched in 2018 as a stupid publicity stunt. Stupid because space junk is space junk.
Last month an amateur astronomer discovered what appeared to be the “asteroid”— designated 2018 CN41—when it seemed to be passing very close to Earth.
When the supposed space rock came within 150,000 miles of our planet—closer than the orbit of the Moon—there were fears that it might hit us. However, the Minor Planet Center, which officially names and tracks such space rocks, retracted the findings within a day and confirmed there would be no collission.
The agency revealed that the object wasn’t an asteroid but a cherry-red Tesla Roadster that Musk charged with being shot into space during the first flight of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket.
There is just a 6% chance that the car—complete with a mannequin driver named “Starman”—will collide with Earth in the next one million years but that doesn’t excuse the launching of Musk’s sustainability-be-damned Mars-aiming junk, believes Thomas Cheney, a space law academic specializing in the environmental aspects of space governance.