Why space junk is part of our heritage.
Wreck chasers don’t always find what they’re looking for. But occasionally, they find what they’re not looking for, and it’s even better than the original quarry.
Michael Barnette’s day job is sea turtle conservation at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. On his own time, however, he’s an accomplished wreck diver. Two years ago, he set off in search of the Martin PBM Mariner that was lost while searching for five Grumman TBM Avengers that disappeared off the coast of Florida in 1945, inspiring the myth of the Bermuda Triangle.
During the dive, seven miles off the coast of Cape Canaveral, Barnette spotted a large structure. “It looked like a portion of a flight surface,” he says. On a hunch, Barnette texted a photo to fellow diver, Bruce Melnick, a retired NASA astronaut. Melnick confirmed that the artifact was a piece of the pad that fit underneath the thermal tiles on the shuttle orbiter. “That’s when I realized, damn, we’ve got a piece of Challenger,” says Barnette.
The thrust chamber from a Saturn V rocket engine was discovered on the floor of the Atlantic by Bezos Expeditions in 2013.
“This discovery gives us an opportunity to pause once again, to uplift the legacies of the seven pioneers we lost, and to reflect on how this tragedy changed us,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. Space is the final frontier of aviation archaeology. And Earth—specifically the ocean floor near Cape Canaveral—is promising ground for discoveries. Notably, a 2013 expedition funded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos recovered dozens of parts from the Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo 11 into space in 1969, including a massive F-1 engine thrust chamber (now on display at the National Air and Space Museum).
“It’s like an underwater museum,” says Barnette of the area off Florida’s east coast. “Basically, the whole history of the space program is there on the bottom of the ocean.”
Archaeologists are searching for aerospace artifacts even farther afield. Alice Gorman, who goes by Dr. Space Junk, popularized aerospace archaeology with lively TEDx talks followed by a book. Two years ago, she co-directed an archaeological survey on the International Space Station—the first archaeological fieldwork ever undertaken beyond Earth.
She believes that satellites and space debris in low Earth orbit are as worthy of archaeological study as ancient ruins. As she wrote in her book: “You could say that the entire solar system is now a cultural landscape.”
This article is from the Fall 2024 issue of Air & Space Quarterly, the National Air and Space Museum's signature magazine that explores topics in aviation and space, from the earliest moments of flight to today. Explore the full issue.
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