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Nanosatellite Takes Out The Trash
michael.creasy writes "The BBC has a article about a new nanosatellite due to be launched later this year. The idea is that the satellite be used to latch on to and slow down junk in space so that they will fall out of orbit and burn up on re-entry. " The only problem, as the article points out, is that there's no one really interested in purchasing this right now. Still, it's a pretty cool, especially if the price points are correct.
>and what, precisely, are you going to make the tether out of? thus far (AFAIK) there is no
>material that is feasible. carbon nanotubules aren't long enough to make one yet...
>are you planning to tether it to the ground (since this seems to be what you're implying)?
No, no, this isn't a tether. It's a piece of conductive cable of a pretty good length, but nowhere nearly long enough to reach the ground.
This is high-school physics stuff -- moving a conductor through a magnetic field induces current on that conductor; passing current through a conductor conversely generates magnetic field.
By manipulating the amount of current you're letting be generated versus the amount of field you're generating, you can push yourself around relative to the larger field of the earth, speeding up and slowing down, and therefore achieving different orbital velocities.
Basically, you're using a long piece of strong wire as a magnetic "sail."
>and from where comes this "power" that you're running through the cable, if not from propellents?
>why would a "nighttime" pass need more energy storage than anything else? this isn't dependent on solar anything.
You've just answered your own question. During the day, the satellite would likely recharge electrical batteries with solar energy as well as with the current induced from pushing through the magnetic field, so nighttime manuevers would have more of a drain on the storage since there was only the one medium of recharging, and it wouldn't be used when you were creating a field to slow down. You'd want to do less moving about at night, for sure.
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I don't see this as a general-purpose "lets clean up all of space" device, but I can see it being usefut for sweeping particular orbits, say, clearing out anything that's likely to come close to the ISS.
If anyone has a better idea, of course, I'd like to hear it! :)
and what, precisely, are you going to make the tether out of? thus far (AFAIK) there is no material that is feasible. carbon nanotubules aren't long enough to make one yet...
and from where comes this "power" that you're running through the cable, if not from propellents?
are you planning to tether it to the ground (since this seems to be what you're implying)? if you are, you can only have it in one orbit - geosynchronous - which would make it awfully hard to "go after" anything. and how big of a chunk of sky would this take up from aviation (safety margains included)? if not, how do you "run power" through the cable?
why would a "nighttime" pass need more energy storage than anything else? this isn't dependent on solar anything.
this is only the beginning of the problems (or ambiguities) with the scheme you've discussed... of course, if I've misinterpreted, please clarify.
Lea
There have been simulations that suggest that we may be getting to the point where we risk a chain-reaction that could make things very hazardous up there. One satellite getting majorly fragmented would result in even more -- and less easily-tracked -- dangerous-bits-o-stuff, which might trash a couple of other satellites, each of which might trash a couple more, etc.
To counter a couple of other misunderstandings I've seen:
(1) Yup, space is big. But the subset of space that's useful for satellites is less big.
(2) Satellites aren't all tidily lined up one after the other in perfectly circular orbits. Satellites can be in similar orbits and still have closing velocities that can cause damage. And satellites in different orbits can still cross paths, and the closing velocities there can be really nasty.
Take a load of sand up to an extreme orbit which allows swinging around the Moon, then disperse the sand as it's falling toward the target in Earth orbit. It can cover a very large area. Hughes unintentionally demonstrated this recently when they salvaged a satellite by sending it into high orbit via the Moon.
nope, that's not how it works..
If one of the Iridium birds was hit with anything much bigger than a BB, there would be thousands of new things to track as it would blow big chunks out of the Iridium. Things in intersecting orbits tend to be moving at Km/sec relative speeds.
Starman97@Gmail.com (bring it on spammers)
When you realize that if one of these hits a satelite or (worse) space, shuttle...at the velocity it's going...it would basically tear a hole right through it.
Um. I hate to point this out (well, no I don't), but the whole idea of a satelite hitting another satelite as massive speeds is kinda silly. You see, a satelite's orbit distance is regulated by its speed. If a satelite is going much faster than the other satelites, it will have a much higher orbit. The most common orbit, of course, it geo-syncronous orbit, or the orbit height that keeps the satelite over the same point on Earth at all times. Ever notice that the space shuttles don't do that? At the orbit they're at (most of the time) there really isn't that much junk. That's probably why they use it.
...worth it to get unlimited funding for NASA!
Here's how:
Like the garbace they're cleaning up, these nanothingies make really small holes if the shuttle were to hit them. But what if we could make even smaller robots (picothingies) to clean up the unused nanothingies? Of course that will create a similar cleanup problem and harder-to-find leaks when they hit the shuttle. But wait...even smaller robots could get rid of these robots!
I wonder how long NASA could keep this going...
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Win98 sux without these 1337 toolz !!
GPS recivers figure out how much distance is between them and each of the GPS sats they can listen to. The cheap recivers figure that down to a wavelength (about 18cm) and then figure a position based on that.
The velocity limits have nothing to do with SA being on or off. They are limits in the firmware and software (and sometimes hardware). Old export laws required them to be about 18,000 m (60,000 ft) and 999 kts ( mach 1.55 according to units(1)
Is it just me or does this seem like a relativly cheap way to deorbit critical military and communications satellites that are owned by unfreindly nations? I know that the US and the Soviets had both space based and air launched anti-satellite weapons, but IIRC they were very expensive and somewhat difficult to use (well at least ASROC the US air launched anti-sat missile required pretty precise ground/air coordination to get it right) These Snap satellites on the other hand are very cheap and in theory will work quite autonomosly of ground based control. It would be trivial to put a hand full of these in orbit near key military/comm sats of potential enemies and leave them dormat until the shooting starts, then right before you attack activate these "trash collectors" to deorbit the bad guys birds and well you get the idea.
On the other hand, &100,000 plus lauch fees seems like alot of money to deorbit one piece of space trash. If they can find some way for each one to deorbit more than one peice of junk in it's lifetime I could see this being a good solution to a growing problem, but a &100,000 suicide garbage collection mission seems a bit excessive to me.
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
I think that there is way too much technology for us to use single use garbagemen.
How about one that "rests" in an orbit that keeps it in the sun (this is possible, no?) then "attacks" junk. Then deorbits it by pushing geting above and in front of the junk in a decaying orbit,then pushing off, stealing energy from the junk? This would improve its orbit, and degrade that of the junk.
I understand that this would be painfully slow, but if there were several of this things working (semi-)autonomously it would be workable.
-Peter
Slashdot cries out for open standards, then breaks them.
It's not fast enough to take out nukes, but it's an interesting play for taking out spy satellites. Since it wasn't developed by the military, it doesn't cost much, which means that multiple countries and occasional private citizens may have an interest in buying them.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I agree totally. Plus, you can store a lot more energy in a flywheel of comparable size to a zapacitor, and the lifetime under this type of strain appears to be much longer.
I think this device and the needed control infrastructure could be built for less than $100 million and launched for about the same.
Absolutely. With tethers, speed isn't the name of the game, at least not yet.
Either way, the only energy that needs to be expended is in getting to the object. A good sized tether ought to be able to move the OMV itself around with impunity. Once you attach to the object, size isn't an issue, you just start expending power and let the conductive tether gobble up electricity in exchange for kinetic energy. Use a portion of the power to spin up some flywheels to fierce RPMs, then use that concentrated power to boost your OMV out of the death orbit it put the junk into. Find another satellite, rinse, and repeat.
Something cool about tether technology is that junking the stuff isn't the only option. Create a legal 'Junkyard' area in space that's at high altitude. Instead of de-orbiting satellites/discarded shrouds/interstages/etc, boost them all up to a parking orbit of sorts in the legislated 'Junk Yard'. There are orbits just one or two hundred miles higher that have lifetimes measured in decades because of lowered atmospheric density.
The junk yard concept is for the optimist that imagines a future where humanity will gratefully harvest the junkyard for raw materials in the future. The de-orbit option is for those seeking the easiest and relatively hassle-free option of fire and forget.
Are you absolutely without clue to the nature of energy management? Each pound of metal hauled into orbit costs between $5,000 and $20,000 each. The reason to use an orbital junkyard is to have access to metal without needing to pay to bring it all up.
A $.01 cup of water in Oregon is worth a lot more in the middle of the Sahara, pal.
Asteroids and the moon are the next step, of course, but you need to get to them before you can exploit them.
...unless you're suggesting all the commercial astro/cosmonauts just ride out to the asteroids on smelters with nothing but their spacesuits on. This isn't a ride to the local Dairy Queen where you can hang off the side of a truck.
Tethers have limited utility for roping asteroids. Unless you haven't noticed, there aren't any asteroids orbiting in low earth orbit, the place where electromagnetic tethers are effective.
The idea is to store the payload shrouds and dead satellites in a place where LEO industry can use them later. Perhaps the use they'll pick will be constructing devices to mine asteroids, but they need to get there first.
> OMV is not tether-based, btw. (I work with the guys that designed it, and they are always
> pulling out the little models and such. *Grin*) In any case, all you need is surface area, so if
> you wanted to do something fancy, consider just hooking on a big inflatable sail dohicky - cheap, low mass, and effective.
>
>If you have the power to spare for a tether, I'd wonder if it wouldn't be simpler to just use
>electric propulsion; for a few hundred watts and a few tens of kilograms (and a year or two) you
>can deorbit most anything.
The rest of your post was insightful, but these are critical errors you've just made.
A OMV stands for a 'Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle'. It is not a reference to TRWs OMV design for the Shuttle C program, or any other specific vehicle. It is a description of a vehicle that maneuvers things in orbit. That's all.
Second, the entire purpose of this design is to avoid using propellent entirely. A tether based system can stay up as long as needed and keep working for years, de-orbiting hundreds of satellites and shrouds before wearing out. If you used an ion drive, you would quickly expend your propellent after de-orbiting maybe one or two payloads. It's foolish, and hardly economical. That's the wonder of tethers: As long as you have power, you have movement.
Tethers are potentially the most important development in space travel since the fuel cell. No joke. No other propulsion system exists that can provide the thrust in LEO of a tether, nor does and device lend itself anywhere near as good to ease of deployment. A solar sail is a fanciful idea for this purpose and would be quickly destroyed by debris before it put out enough thrust to move a single kilogram out of orbit, and it would be unbelievably difficult to build and deploy for this purpose.
This article is a bunch of BS. I work in the field they speak of, and there is *no freakin way* that they would be able to deorbit any significant amount of debris with this method.
There is so much debris there, all of it moving with different attitude and velocity. To send up a single sattelite or a hundred or a thousand would not be able to deal with the situation. Everything that you have ever read about this topic has been conservative at best. It is so out of control that they are now trying to launch a PR campaign (this sattelite) to try and look mildy responsible.
The biggest problems are larger pieces of debris (over 10cm), since they have enough inertia to plow right through our functioning sattelites. So its over 10cm, and moving at tremendous velocity. How the hell do they think they are going to catch it for one (radar is accurate, but accurate down to cm? mm? no way) and the amount of force required to deccelerate the object would quickly deplete the fuel reserves of the spacecraft.
Additionally there isn't very much to be gained by decellerating debris anyway. Changing its inclination yes, but slowing it down? I can't see how that would help at all. Debris under about 1000km usually exits (unless its abnormally dense) in 25-30 years anyway (which is the current NASA NPD).
Probably the best thing that anyone can do (and they are doing it)is to monitor current programs and make sure they won't produce MORE debris. This way in a few years (40 or so) the biggest and most dangerous debris will have burned up, and we will have less debris to deal with.
For more information check out orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov, that is the website for the Code QS program that tries to monitor current spacecraft and make sure they are compliant with the new guidelines. There is also a quarterly OD newsletter there.
1 million is pretty steep for a garbage collector... how about using high powered lasers to blast the sky clean?
I guess you've being too many movies.
The laser could heat the debris, ok.
In the best case a laser could split a large piece into smaller pieces, what would only aggravate the situation. Instead of 1 large piece to track, you'd have n pieces.
-
Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
Whatever happened to the day when hard-working middle-class American garbagemen used to get rid of our garbage? I think it's unfair to replace these fine souls with these robotic monstrosities. I would much rather see this money used towards finding ways we can send the garbagemen we already have into space to do this job rather than rendering them obsolete as the rest of mankind enters the space age. Nothing this robot does is beyond the capacity of humans.
Garbagemen (and women) of the world, unite against obsolescence! Fight for your right to work in space!
Donny
Gotta say that I agree. Since the vast majority of launches so far has been from France, Russia, and the USA, we should pitch in to cover most of this cost.
I'm not big on glabalism, but unless one country or another decides to "claim" space (an unpopular move, to be sure), I think an international treaty of space exploring nations would be a Good Thing.
We could form a controlling body, and call it DIAOSC (for "DIAOSC Is An Orbital Satelite Committee").
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
No, all objects in a stable orbit at the same altitude share the same velocity. The shuttle is not in a stable orbit... it goes up, then it comes back.
Also, being at the same velocity does not protect objects who's paths intersect. By your logic, you could safely drive on the wrong side of the highway, as long as you were going the speed limit.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Cleaning the space junk up now is cheaper than not letting it go during the early days of space travel. If we can put it off another decade, it will probably become even cheaper. Costs of orbital space missions have gone down considerably in the past 40 years.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I don't think so. Most satellites are one of kind. There are a few companies that have put out spacecraft "buses" that are the same, but the payloads are different. The cost of putting someone/something up in the orbit to collect all the piece and build something new with them would be _much_ greater than the cost to just build something new. Satellites and space vehicles are non-trivial to build...that's why they cost so much on the ground. Recycling parts is a pipe dream at this point.
At £100,000 each, I can't see how such a system would be practical for cleaning up "space debris." Since each satellite that attatched itself to the debris would burn up in the atmosphere, we would have to produce hundreds or thousands in order to see any effect. There must be a better way to eliminate such debris.
Right now, it costs an insane ammount of money to launch a spacecraft. As I'm sure you all know, the more it weighs, the more it costs. Some sattelites can cost upwards of $100 Million or more to launch. I read somewhere that almost *all* of the costs asociated with SpaceFlight is attributed to getting the stuff of the ground in the first place.
;-) Not to mention that any metalwork that you do would be *perfect*, or darned near close to it, since you're doing it in zero-g. When it reforms, it would be uniform. Yes, I know that all things melted would turn into spheres in space. So, you melt it once, let it cool, and then heat it up enough to make it pliable.
So it's really mind boggling that they want to destroy all this so-called *junk*.
How may of the these so called "non-functioning" sattelites have functional, or close to functional rocket motors? How about fuel tanks that weren't all the way depleted. Or solar panels, or computer chips. Granted, some of the technology is outdated, okay most of it is outdated. But still, it's already *there*. No expensive launches, no planning, nothing. Need a solar panel, grab it off that sattelite over there, need a new hull, rip a section off that one over there. Wanna hook a rocket motor to it, grab it from there. Hey look, that sattelite still has some fuel left, grab it's fuel tank.
Need to do any welding, metal work, just use the sun. It's already 350+ degrees in the sun, just imagine how hot it would be if you amplified it. Gives burning ants in the sun with a magnifying glass a whole new meaning.
There's plenty of computer equipment out there to use in whatever it is that you build. Want to send a mission to the moon, you could do it for FAR cheaper by recycling what is already there, than to build it on the ground and ship it up.
Just imagine how fast and cheap they could build a space station, deep space probes, lunar mining equipment, orbital maneuvering vehicles, etc.. NASA is always going on about being smaller, faster, cheaper. Well you don't get any cheaper than almost free. Besides, aren't they always talking about the three R's. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
Perhaps they should start listening to what they've been preaching.
Pete...
I don't understand why they are burning up $100,000 satellites just to take out trash. Why not build a more expensive satellite that can stay up longer? Would it be possible for one of these satellites to catch the trash, picking up a boost of energy, while deacclerating the garbage? How about a cheap ion engine to keep it in orbit, and a couple of solar panels? Sure $100,000 may be cheaper then an ordrinary satellite, but that isn't including the cost of launching these buggers, and it's still a heck of a lot more expensive then the trash itself - and there is a lot of trash.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
This (Post-Flight Inspection of STS-90) is from NASA Orbital Debris Quarterly News:
Using samples collected by tape pull, dental mold, and wooden probe extraction techniques, a scanning electron microscope (SEM) equipped with energy dispersive X-ray spectrometers (EDXA) were able to identify the nature of 29 of the impactors. A total of 16 particles (55%) were found to be man-made debris, while the remaining 13 particles (45%) were meteoritic in nature. An analysis of the orbital debris impactors revealed an assortment of aluminum (56%), paint (31%), and stainless steel (13%) projectiles.
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The FAQ from this site says:
8). Does the U.S. Space Shuttle have to dodge orbital debris?
Whenever a Space Shuttle is in orbit, the U.S. Space Command regularly examines the trajectories of orbital debris to identify possible close encounters. If another object is projected to come with a few kilometers of the Space Shuttle, the Space Shuttle will normally maneuver away from the object, even though the chances of a collision are only approximately 1 in 100,000. This occurs infrequently, about once every year or two.
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- but you could be if you got off your ass.
If you notice, the Earth now has a ring similar to that of Saturn. With all this debris, finding an affordable commercial space solution will not be the only problem. It would be no good to see Titanic revisited. Just as icebergs are a problem at the turn of the century, space debris will be a problem during this century.
Pax Digitalia
Launches are very expensive. The Pegasus, which is one of, if not the lowest cost launch, runs at about 11 Million US. It could, though, pack quite a few of these birds on it. I wonder about the satellites' maneuvering propellant margins...
As satellites become smaller and more capable, not to mention cheaper, this places a downward pressure on launch costs. IMHO, this product is a bit premature, as the cost of getting it up is greater than the cost of acquisition.
The only current way to mitigate launch cost is hitching a ride along with another satellite. This causes porblems (ask the OSCAR guys.) As an example, you need a special dispenser that releases multiple payloads in such a way that they enter their proper orbits and don't come into contact. This technology is rather close to a piece of ICBM tech...
It is important, though, to try to clean up the orbit areas if we want to establish any real long-term orbital presence. the threat to hardware (and, eventually, wetware) is too ugly to ignore.
Would we need an entire spaceship to get all the damned unused AOL CDs off the planet? I mean, you can only use so many of them as coasters before they end up in the garbage. If everyone in America got 15-20 of those like I have, it'd take a couple of rocketships to get the billions and billions of wasted space off the ground. Still, they make effective weapons if you just sharpen the edges a little bit. Sharkey
www.badassmofo.com
I'm surprised the US government hasn't invested in these babies to take out the occasional spy satellite:
Mission Control: Sir, the nanosatellite is now in position...
The commander puts his coffee down on a red button sticking up from the panel. Suddenly the nanosatellite attaches itself to a Soviet spy satellite
Commander: Ooooops. I didn't mean to do that. It was an accident, I swear! I'm just going to call my commanding officer and tell him that the mission was a succ.... I mean, that I should be demoted in rank for wasting a 100000 dollar piece of equipment... yes, that's it...
Malfunctioning satelites in a high orbit could be cheaply brought to low earth orbit where they could be repaired. This might generate more revenue than finding someone willing to pay to clean up old boosters.
If even that fails to generate revenue there are always other less nobel options: Pay us 10 milion or your 100 M satelite is fish food.
I wonder if these things are accurate enough to target Redmond?
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Actually, most stuff under ~750 km altitude will decay all by themselves within 25 years or so, give or take a solar cycle. Even big stuff. Stuff above that altitude is going to be around there longer, but under 750 km altitude is where precious things like shuttle, station, and hubble lay, so that's where the most concern is.
NASA has recently imposed requirements that all satellites deorbit within 25 years, either coming back to earth, or being boosted up to above 1400 km (iirc).
Also, there are a LOT of satellites way, way out at GEO. But these are spaced so far apart that we generally merely boost them up to a slightly higher orbit and leave them there. There is no drag at GEO so no fear of seeing them run into other stuff.
On the positive side, the smaller an item is, the quicker it de-orbits due to atmospheric friction. For example, a cloud of dust (or sand) would de-orbit from LEO within a couple days. It's all about altitude.
Techically, it's a function of altitude, mass, and surface area. Solar cycles play a role as well; when we're in a solar max condition (lots of sunspot activity), the atmosphere "thickens" and thus spacecraft are subjected to stronger drag forces and will decay faster. Surface area is very important. At the end of life we'll feather a spacecraft's solar arrays to maximize atmospheric impingement, and thus go down faster.
OMV is not tether-based, btw. (I work with the guys that designed it, and they are always pulling out the little models and such. *Grin*) In any case, all you need is surface area, so if you wanted to do something fancy, consider just hooking on a big inflatable sail dohicky - cheap, low mass, and effective.
If you have the power to spare for a tether, I'd wonder if it wouldn't be simpler to just use electric propulsion; for a few hundred watts and a few tens of kilograms (and a year or two) you can deorbit most anything. Getting back up out of the drag well would be challenging if you wanted to reuse the orbit maneuvering craft. Probably better to just deorbit the whole mess. But if a spacecraft operator is on contract to deorbit a spacecraft, they generally like to get it done ASAP, and having to wait a few years for a slow deorbit can be expensive.
But the fact of the matter is that most of the garbage up there is *tiny* - bolt heads from old explosive bolt mechanisms, pieces of tape or foil, and bits of metal from explosions or impacts. Small teeny stuff.
OK I was one of the team at SSTL that built that satellite, and it's probably time to set some of the record straight :)
;)
First junk busting is not entirely why we built SNAP. It's main application areas are:
1. Remote inspection: You throw it out of a space station to inspect damage etc.
2. Inferometry: You fly a bunch of them in formation to simulate a big dish/lens.
3. Space science: Fly a number of them to get multiple readings of something like the magnetosphere at each point in time. So you get both time and space measurements.
4. Satellite deorbiting: A SNAP spacecraft with large fuel tank could be used to track down and latch onto a dead satellite, then bring it down.
Now SNAP-1 is just a technology demonstrator. We're proving all the new miniaturised computer/transmitter/camera/propulsion systems actually work. That's why no-one has bought it, cuz it ain't for sale. We do obviously have people in contract negotiations with us to buy their own versions of the SNAP spacecraft.
So to sum up. SNAP-1 is a completely functional spacecraft in a 30cm diameter package. That's quite an impressive feat to pull off. We're flying SNAP-1 on the 28th June 2000. It's probably just got to the launch site as we speak. Once we've proved it works customers will then come to ask us to build new SNAP spacecraft for their particular missions.
It seems all our websites are slashdotted so I wont give any URLs
Richard Lancaster
Journey to Yandol
No Laughing Allowed!
The answer to removing large pieces of junk from orbit is to send up a couple of tether-based OMVs to do it automatically.
Space tethers are basically conductive cables, maybe a mile long or more, that are suspended out of an orbiting vehicle. Because of gravitational gradients, the cable will align itself to be pointing down towards the ground. As the cables pass through the Earth's magnetic field, they convert velocity for energy, producing lots of electricity. It's like an electric motor.
Normally.
If, on the other hand, you run power through the cable, you trade electricity for velocity. Again, like an electric motor.
The end result is that you have a method of altering your orbit that doesn't require expending propellents. This technology will be installed on the Mir space station late this year or next, ending the reliance on Progress boosters.
Anyhow, the reason I'm bringing this up is that this is the key to removing big debris.
You launch an orbital maneuvering vehicle that uses this technology. It would rendezvous with the piece of debris and turn on the orbital brake (eg, use the tether to start generating electricity) until the object was on a re-entry vector, then it would detach and use the tether to raise itself to the orbit of the next piece of large debris.
The process could be mostly automated and wouldn't require expending propellent. Gyros would provide attitude control (and maybe energy storage for nighttime passes).
Of course, this only takes care of the stuff that's big enough to be tracked.
On the positive side, the smaller an item is, the quicker it de-orbits due to atmospheric friction. For example, a cloud of dust (or sand) would de-orbit from LEO within a couple days. It's all about altitude.
I knew Iridium would turn out alright!
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
I remember a gentleman from NORAD come to my school about 4 or 5 years back to discuss what exactly they did up there. One of the facts that they gave us was that they were (then) tracking over 65,000 objects in and around earth's upper atmosphere. Most of it man made trash.
:P
When you realize that if one of these hits a satelite or (worse) space, shuttle...at the velocity it's going...it would basically tear a hole right through it.
I think in the best of all possible worlds, the U.N or some other international organization would get together to find the funds for something like this. It's getting pretty cluttered up there, and i don't want to have to see a whole bunch of garbage when i take my scenic trip to the moon in 2014.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume