Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: August 31, 2014

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REAL LIFE NEWS: THE EXPLODING SPACE GARBAGE TRUCK

by Hazed

How do you deal with rubbish from the Interstellar Space Station? You don’t want to just eject it into space, because it would join the other millions of bits of space junk that are causing a hazard to satellites. So the astronauts have just used the Earth’s atmosphere as a garbage disposal system.

They packed a commercial spacecraft called Cygnus full of their trash and steered it towards Earth, so it would burn up in the atmosphere. It was totally destroyed above the Pacific Ocean. There are pictures and videos of Cygnus’ incineration at the source links, below.

This sounds like a tremendous waste of a spacecraft, but Cygnus was never intended to survive anyway. It was an automated craft, launched in July to carry 3,000 pounds of supplies to the ISS, operated by a private company called Orbital Sciences. Given that it was disposable, it makes sense to use its destruction to get rid of unwanted garbage.

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/18/international_space_station_cygnus_rubbish_disintegrates_enters_atmos/
http://io9.com/garbage-disposal-is-a-thrill-ride-in-this-timelapse-vi-1624484275

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