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Aerospace engineer and sometimes snorkeler Mike Irmen came across a huge piece of space debris while exploring the waters of a remote island off the coast of Honduras.
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The 20-foot-by-12-foot hunk of metal belonged to the upper cowling of the Ariane 5 rocket, which is designed to jettison from the spacecraft after three minutes.
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Although a strange place to find a piece of space debris, the effects of human spaceflight can even been seen in some of the most remote place in the world.
Spaceflight is a messy business. Thousands of tons of fuel spew pollutants in the atmosphere—which impacts the ozone layer and even punches holes in the ionosphere—and could eventually raise the temperature of the stratosphere as rocket launches become commonplace.
Then, there are always more direct impacts. Harrowing footage showed debris from a Long March 2C rocket raining down on a Chinese village earlier this year, space junk from the high-flying International Space Station (ISS) crashed into a Florida residence in April, and even remote areas of the world aren’t safe from this increasing amount of space rocket precipitation.
Last month, while snorkeling along the remote island of Cayos Cochinos off the northern coast of Honduras, Mike Irmen—an aerospace engineer by trade—glimpsed something much more eye-catching than colorful tropical fish. Before jumping into the crystal blue water, Irmen noticed a large piece of metal, roughly 20-feet-by-12-feet in size, lying in the sand some distance away. As he got closer, he “knew it was something aerospace,” he told Newsweek.
Emblazoned with the name “Ariane” on its metal surface, the large sheet of debris, Irmen confirmed, originally belonged to an Ariane 5 rocket.
“The upper cowling of a rocket covers the payload during launch,” Irmen told Newsweek, “and then it jettisons from the rocket after it leaves the Earth’s atmosphere. It looked like it had been there a while since the salt water had corroded a bunch of the metal pieces.”
Manufactured by the ArianeGroup, a French spacecraft engineering company, the Ariane 5 is the preferred chariot to the stars of the European Space Agency. For the past 20 years, the rocket has launched from the Guiana Space Centre near the coastal town of Kourou in French Guiana (hence why the cowling made its way to a remote island in close-by Central America), and it’s successfully performed over 100 launches. With the recent demonstration of its successor, the larger and more powerful Ariane 6 (an effort to keep up with the ever increasing demands of the new Space Race), the Ariane 5 remains one of the most successful rockets in the history of human spaceflight.
With the Ariane 5 sporting an impressive 96 percent success rate, this piece of upper cowling isn’t part of one of the few failures. In fact, it was designed to blow off. The light-yet-rigid panels protect the payload from the rigors of Earth’s lower atmosphere during launch, and 208 minutes after liftoff, they’re jettisoned from the craft having served their protective purpose.
Although it’s quite a stark image for a large piece of a space rocket to abut a cozy, beach-side cabin, it’s not the strangest place where spacecraft debris often ends up. Point Nemo, sitting in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, is known as the “loneliest place on Earth” as it’s a good 1,670 miles from land in all directions. Since the 1970s, space agencies have tossed more than 300 retired spacecraft to this remote location. NASA is even planning on crashing the International Space Station around this point in 2031.
Luckily, abnormally intense UV rays, along with low-nutrient flow in this part of the ocean, thankfully means Point Nemo has relatively low biomass compared to other parts of the Pacific. But this inelegant retirement for the ISS and other spacecraft means that even in the most remote parts of the world, the detritus of humanity’s spaceflight ambitions can be found.
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