Space Archaeology (SPACE JUNK) with Alice Gorman
Ologies with Alie Ward
00:00
The First Piece of Space Junk
We haven't been catapulting things into orbit for our entire existence on earth. When did we start flinging stuff? There's a rather wonderful story that in the early 1950s a nuclear explosion in underground cavity which had what is often called a manhole cover on the top caused that manhole cover to jet off the earth and get into earth orbit. Many people say this is the first thing that actually made it into space properly. So really if we're looking at the first objects that got into earth orbit we have Sputnik 1 in 1957.
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