In a tiny alcove at the bottom of several flights of stairs, round the corner and tucked behind the broken coffee machine at the very bottom of the basement at the United Nations in Vienna lies the office of the UNOOSA, otherwise known as the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs.

This little-known (oh, alright, entirely unknown) arm of the UN is tasked with the responsibility of ensuring peace in outer space, which onerous mission includes collecting a huge amount of data about goings-on in orbit and publishing it in documents such as Highlights In Space 2009, a work that demonstrates that given sufficient effort, even an exciting subject like this can be made tedious.

For example, one afternoon a rapidly approaching bit of old rocket motor caused the space station cosmonauts to abandon ship and take cover in the lifeboat, although the chances of it hitting the lifeboat must have been about the same as it hitting anything else. Pretty damn scary stuff, but the UN still had time to note that:

"The debris was only about 12 cm long but traveling at 9 km/second. It was probably part of the payload-assist motor (PAM-D) on the Delta upper-stage that launched a global positioning system satellite in 1993, not a product of the recent (10 February) collision of two spacecraft (see below). NASA had identified the threat on 11 March as coming within the "red box" distance of 25 km that requires action, but it was then too late for an evasive maneuver by the ISS. The odds of its hitting the ISS were estimated at one in 10,000."

It's pretty amazing that NASA was able to spot an object only 12cm (under 5 inches) long to begin with, surely worth an article in its own right, if not a movie; and even at odds of 10,000 to one I bet the cosmonauts weren't that relaxed about the situation. The object could have hit anything in a 25km area, including their lifeboat, and at almost 6 miles a second, nobody would have even had a chance to shout "oh sh*t" or whatever the equivalent is in Russian. And we'd really have liked to know what they felt about that, but we never will. Ah well.

Then there's the problem of collisional cascading - there's so much junk and non-junk up there that everything is in constant danger of colliding with everything else, and each collision causes more collisions with the subsequent debris, until nothing is safe and everything is junked. Apparently some people think it would be a good idea to outsource the whole problem to private companies, which is about as scary, in my opinion, as doing nothing at all. But then I'm English and remember when they privatized the jails. People were climbing over the walls and running away as if they'd been dared to, and it took months to catch them again. So anyway, the document goes on to observe that due to political problems, the idea won't fly - excuse the pun - because one country or another owns every single 12cm-long piece of old space rocket up there, and anyone wanting to remove one would have to get permission first. Except nobody would be entirely sure who owned what, without careful study, and nobody would be allowed to destroy anything just in case someone wanted it back, and if someone accidentally removed, say, a space-borne laser belonging to The Other Side, it could get nasty.

See, this is interesting stuff. There are pages and pages of it, and it would fire up the imaginations of kids and make a few good movies, and I assume the same sort of thing is happening every year. But it's all relegated to a UN handout which few people outside of the Peace In Space business are ever going to see.

But all is not lost, as there is news that the UN is about to create an Ambassador to Outer Space, whose role it will be to greet any aliens that land here and welcome them on behalf of the people of Earth, or at least, the ones that matter. No, seriously, I kid you not, it was in The Daily Telegraph, so you can't argue with that. All the recent scientific discoveries claiming there are habitable planets out there have allegedly caused the UN to reconsider their lack of an official representative to ETs, and so the head of the UNOOSA, a lady by the name of Mazlan Othman, is up for the job.

It's a great story. Unfortunately, the lady, who is a Guardian reader and therefore not impressed with The Telegraph anyway, wrote to her favorite newspaper to deny the rumor. I suppose we should have guessed. I can't imagine the politicians allowing anyone not a politician be the first to greet an alien, unless of course the alien had a damn big ray-gun.

What the story has done, in any case, is to shed light on this otherwise unremarkable office of the UN and caused us to wonder who, if the need arose, would actually be chosen to represent mankind. At least one media source has observed that an alien saying "take me to your leader" would be somewhat perplexed to get the head of UNOOSA, who he won't have heard of even if his race has been studying Earth radio and TV signals for the last 50 years. Which is probably just as well, since UNOOSA is responsible for overseeing the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which calls for aliens to be sterilized, just to be on the safe side.

None of this, of course, explains the Peace In Outer Space part, which, given that there's currently nobody we know of in outer space anyway, presumably means trying to prevent the space-faring and potential space-faring countries here on Earth bickering over the very small but significant bit of space that we can reach. Meanwhile, the UNOOSA will continue to report on such developments as the Indian Space Research Organization's plan to put astronauts into space by 2015. Whoever knew NASA was outsourcing?


References (in case you didn't believe a word of it):

http://www.oosa.unvienna.org/
http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7020056392?Report:%20Malaysian%20To%20Be%20Appointed%20U.N.%20Ambassador%20To%20ET (amongst many)
http://www.isro.org/scripts/futureprogramme.aspx#Human
http://www.oosa.unvienna.org/pdf/publications/st_space_46.pdf