I wanted this to be a better article. It could have been so much better.

Astronauts already spend extended periods of time on the International Space Station—the record is almost 438 days, set by a Russian cosmonaut in the mid-’90s,

That's Polyakov, who volunteered for a long-duration test right about the time the Russians weren't sure if they were going to be able to keep Mir in space. He was basically a squatter to buy time with the international community. Not mentioned is Sergei Krikalev, who was on a short mission when the Soviet Union collapsed. It took another couple months before it could be determined who was responsible for getting him down. Krikalev currently holds the record for most time spent in space and is the VP of Energia. Considering this is an article about "things going wrong" in space that whole "oopsy, my country is gone" thing has always seemed pretty poignant to me.

The problem here is that, as Body Back designers Karin Tjerrild Lund and Mikael Ploustrup found out, a U.N. charter forbids littering in space.

Yet people do it all the time. Not only that, but it's the easiest thing in the world to cause a satellite to degrade and burn up on re-entry. The tricky part is getting it not to do that. Fire a body at Mars and it will be sterile cinders by the time it touches down.

Disposing a body on Martian soil would probably introduce extraneous variables into further probes of the planet’s microbial life (or lack thereof), making it very difficult to determine whether subsequent discoveries are of organisms native to the planet or introduced by way of decaying earthlings.

Not if you sterilize it.

“I'm not sure human bodies make particularly good fertilizer. I mean, no society has done that on Earth that I know of,” he told me. “There are societies that desperately need fertilizer, and even they don’t use their dead bodies for the purpose. There's always been an extremely strong taboo for using dead bodies for instrumental purposes.”

Nobody fertilizes with meat. It's got organisms in it that will kill your compost. That's why meat products are generally buried until such a time as they can be re-used; farmers and permaculture folx do this regularly. You let a dead critter (or table scraps) sit under dirt for six months to a year and all of a sudden it's got a lot of useful nutrients.

This very situation arose in 2003 with the Columbia shuttle crew, who were re-entering Earth’s atmosphere with a damaged wing. Ultimately, the decision was made not to inform them of the potential for disaster, although this may have been more the result of lack of certainty rather than any steadfast ethical policy, according to both Wolpe and Wayne Hale, a NASA flight director at the time of the disaster.

Well, it was a lot more complicated than that. NASA actually drew up contingency rescue plans but it would have made Apollo 13 look like a grocery run. The uncertainty was because our satellite-spying capability was down; the NRO has a program called TEAL which is stuff used to spy on other spy stuff and TEAL RUBY never went up because, basically, the Challenger explosion made the NRO decide Shuttle flights were bogus. A lot of effort went into trying to find out if the shuttle was messed up, but given the choice between saying "by the way, we think there's a slim chance y'all are cinders", launching a gajillion dollar rescue mission or hoping nothing went wrong, everybody went with hope.

The good news is that there have been only 18 deaths during space flights, a small fraction of the more than 500 people who have gone into low Earth orbit or beyond in the past half-century.

When one counts optimistically, yes.

That said, fans of this article should really read Packing for Mars.