Where is the true “middle of nowhere?” Philosophically speaking, it’s always about two hours drive from your home town. Scientifically, it’s Point Nemo: a place which is important due to the immensity and scale of its unimportance.
A deep blue spot of nothing located roughly 48°52.6′S x 123°23.6′W, Point Nemo is the farthest point on Earth from any landmass. It’s also the future tomb of the International Space Station.
Astronaut Scott Parazynski repairs the ISS solar array in 2007. Air leaks and degraded solar rays are only a few of the many age-related infirmities the ISS faces. But where are we going to bury it? Photo: NASA
The Pole of Inaccessibility
Point Nero is the oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility, the solution to the “longest swim problem.” This problem presented the challenge of finding the point on #arth where, if one fell over the side of a ship, they would have to swim the longest possible distance to reach any land.
The solution came from Czech engineer Hrvoje Lukatela, who published his findings in 1992. By mathematical necessity, the Pole of Inaccessibility would have to be equidistant between three or more coasts. If one piece of land were further away than the others, then the swimmer could head for one of the two closer islands and would therefore not be completing the longest possible swim.
Using software he himself developed, combined with the only dataset of coastlines then available, Lukatela found what he would come to call Point Nemo. The three vertices are Ducie Island, of the Pitcairn Islands, Motu Nui, an islet off the more famous Rapa Nui, and Maher Island in Antarctica.
Lukatela named the point for Captain Nemo, meaning “no one”, from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The book was one of his favorites. Lukatela further explained in a 2015 interview that because Nemo “vowed to…never to set his foot on dry land again,” his name “seemed to me to be appropriate for that point on the world’s oceans that is most distant from any land.”
In 2022, he ran the calculations again using newer, more accurate data. The three vertices were the same, but everything had moved by a few kilometers. The Point Nemo of today, at around 48°52.6′S x 123°23.6′W, is slightly off from the Point Nemo of the 2000s. But when you’re aiming from space, a few meters here or there don’t mean much.
Point Nemo and its three vertices, which are all around 2,600km away. Photo: Hrvoje Lukatela
Where do we put our space trash (other than space)
You’re probably aware that we’ve been putting a lot of stuff up in space over the past seven decades or so. We now have quite a lot of stuff up there and are beginning to realize we may have been a bit intemperate with the practice.
The European Space Agency is tracking 40,230 man-made objects currently in low earth orbit (LEO). Others too small to track number somewhere in the hundreds of millions. The knock-on effects are substantial. Debris can damage spacecraft or cause destruction when it falls to Earth. NASA estimates that we’ve had an average of one piece of junk per day falling to Earth over the last 50 years.
The ISS looks down into the South pacific Ocean where, if all goes according to plan, it will one day sink. Photo: NASA
It’s a problem that requires creative solutions, like the wooden satellite designed by Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency. Various global agencies have also considered (and even tested) harpoons, nets, robots, and lasers.
Then there’s the related problem: When we bring old crafts and satellites down, where do we land them (considering “land” is the polite word for “crash”)? Well, the farthest possible spot from anywhere else, obviously. Point Nemo has been a satellite graveyard for decades.
In fact, we’ve dumped nearly 300 satellites, manned and unmanned, into the point’s general area over the past 50 years. This includes the progenitor of the ISS, Mir.
At the time, Mir was the largest man-made object to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere. Debris was seen shooting through the sky as far away as Fiji. The above photo from 1995 shows the shuttle Atlantis docked at the station. Photo: NASA
Tomb of the ISS?
In recent years, NASA has been handing over the reins to near-Earth space to private companies, most notably SpaceX, in order to focus on more distant exploration. Also, after 24 years, everything on it is getting pretty old and broken and would be a real expensive hassle to replace.
The execution date is set for 2031. The place? The middle of nowhere.
Given its history and properties, Point Nemo was the obvious choice for de-orbiting the International Space Station. In fact, the ISS and Nemo have something of a history already. When the ISS passes over Nemo, it becomes the nearest human habitation. Point Nemo is so isolated that it’s closer to the space station than to anywhere else.
“The fish probably don’t enjoy having space garbage rained on them,” you say. Apparently, though, fish don’t hang out at Point Nemo either. This area, lying within the South Pacific Gyre, has such low productivity that scientists have called it an oceanic desert.
Still, ocean pollution travels. There is a degree of concern, especially since some of the material being dumped is radioactive. The Point Nemo graveyard plan isn’t a perfect solution; it’s more like harm reduction.
