Cold War era playground rockets. Photos by Lauren Orchowski. Click to enlarge.

Artist Lauren Orchowski created a great photographic series of 23 Cold War era rocket-theme playground structures, called Rocket Science, made with an 8 x 10 inch view camera between 2005 and 2008 all over the United States. [Source: Lauren Orchowski, via Gizmodo]

Satellite and computer visualizations of human activity. Click to enlarge.

The first image, in the upper left,

…shows air traffic in the US based on the data from FlightView, a page that tracks air traffic in real time. You can see it using three different criteria. The first is altitude—which is the one you are seeing here. The darker blues indicate higher altitude, while the lightest blue indicates take off and landing. [Source, with more images: Gizmodo ]

The other images are all of the United Kingdom, and are from a new BBC TV series, “Britain from Above“. These aerial/computer images show, clockwise from the top right: aircraft flight paths, London Taxi activity, Internet activity in the South of England, images on Britain’s roads as seen from over the M4/M5 junction near Bristol, and UK telephone exchange activity. [Source, with videos: Gizmodo]

I just think this is a great art installation, no matter if unintended as such. Who knows — these two dudes could be the Gilbert & George of China.

After more than 50 years of launching rockets and satellites into space, the human race now has to deal with the clutter left behind — or is it “above”? Dead satellites, spent rocket stages, paint flakes, and coolant from nuclear-powered satellites continue to orbit the Earth at ultrahigh velocities.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has an excellent video depicting the Distribution of Catalogued [Space] Objects, 1957-2000, as part of an article, Space debris spotlight. According to Dr. Walter Flury, ESA principal space debris expert (great name / job title!), “There have been cases of damage and destruction caused by hypervelocity impacts. Just last week, we had to do an avoidance manoeuvre.” Here are some numbers:

According to Flury, at the end of 2003, there were some 10 000 catalogued debris objects around Earth, comprising:

• operational spacecraft — 7%
• old spacecraft — 22%
• rocket bodies — 17%
• mission-related objects — 13%
• miscellaneous fragments — 41%

Artificial debris includes spent satellites, cast off Yo-Yo de-spinners (used to de-spin spacecraft after launch), tools dropped during spacewalks, discarded rocket upper stages and the fragmentary remains of craft that have exploded or otherwise broken up.

In addition to the 10,000 catalogued objects, ESA estimates there are at least 50,000 uncatalogued objects larger than 1cm, all traveling at velocities ranging from 14,400 to 50,000 kph. For comparison, a tiny fragment of space kipple zipping along at 50,000 kph is moving 17 times faster than the speed of a machine gun bullet. Just something to keep in mind if you have some extra cash to burn and are thinking about becoming a space tourist. Make sure your can has a wicked windscreen.

No doubt in a few years we’ll be seeing our landfill — and perhaps spacefill — overflowing with discarded old wall-E toys.