In the seven decades since the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, humankind has sent a whole lot of material over the Kármán line. Not all of it came back.
Like spacefaring litterbugs, we’ve scattered refuse far and wide across the cosmos. Our probes and their contents sail out of the solar system on one-way rides, or take up permanent residence in the orbit of distant planets. Miscellaneous items get dropped during spacewalks, released as symbolic gestures, or deliberately dumped for logistical reasons.
Jennifer Ross-Nazza, a human spaceflight historian at the Johnson Space Center, explained that leaving behind celestial garbage is sometimes imperative — on the Apollo missions, for example, the payload margins for getting back into orbit were slim.
“NASA instructed astronauts to leave items on the Moon to reduce weight on the trip home,” she says. “They couldn’t bring everything back.” Plus, they had to make room for the lunar rocks and soil they picked up for analysis on Earth.
In exchange for the extraterrestrial samples and astronomical data the universe provides us, we’ve offered an eclectic set of artifacts. From ashes to Legos, to mounds of human waste, these are some of the weirdest things humans have abandoned in space.
