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Traffic Cops for Space
The NY Times has a good story about a push for international action, via the UN, on the growing problem of space debris. Includes a pretty picture of a space shuttle window that got nailed by a fleck of paint.
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...is useless. The small size of objects large enough to do serious damage means that they're probably extremely difficult to track. What else is there? Design a giant space dump truck to scoop it all up? Sounds more expensive than new shuttles.
How could a group of utterly clueless politicians do anything useful about space junk? They'd form a committee and assign a bunch of 3rd-world communists to blame it all on the US.
Let's try to be somewhat accurate, it will be the US cleaning it up.
How about once a day Slashdot just lists all of the stories they want us to read at the NYT at places them together in one post.
That would reduce the number of stories on the front page by 1/2.
i can predict the future.
what, you don't believe me? i shall demonstrate my powers.
i predict that this post will be scored at -1 within a few seconds of me pressing the submit button.
However, I kind of question the value of this going thru the UN, especially when there are less than five countries in the world capable of going into space. Its pretty much the US, Russia, I think someone in Europe (unless they just use Russia), and potentially China, depending on how their new space program pans out.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
With the UN in charge, if someone broke the rules the UN would say, "Stop! or we'll say 'Stop!', again".
The UN has proven on numerous occassions that they are nothing but pencil pushing bureaucrates who, at best, do nothing, but all too often simply make the situation worse.
Look at Rwanda. Given the job of protecting 100,000 unarmed refugees, the UN security force DID NOTHING when a warlord's army arrived and proceeded to slaughter every man, woman, and child.
So now someone wants to give the UN the job of reducing space junk? No thank you, I'd rather take my chances with out their help.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Just like CO2 emissions and global warming... unfortunately, procrastination is a way of life, not just in college, but also for big, real-world problems.
Sound like a good way to add to the problem.
A closer look revealed radiating webs of damage in the outermost of three layered panes of heavy glass. When the window was removed back on Earth, the embedded mote was found to contain traces of aluminum and titanium. It was a fleck of paint, most likely from a derelict rocket casing. If it had been slightly heavier, the window could have imploded, killing the crew, experts concluded.
"Imploded"? I'll bet the "experts" concluded no such thing, if they were worthy of the name. With 1 atmosphere of pressure inside the vehicle and 0 pressure outside, the window would have exploded, not imploded. The writer was probably thinking by analogy with a CRT, which will indeed implode if shattered because there's a vaccuum inside. On orbit, the vaccuum is outside.
Sheesh!
And the brethren went away edified.
While space management may be a good idea, allowing the UN to do it is a very bad idea.
IMO, there is not really anything the UN ever did that was good. I don't mind nations getting together for large scale projects such as this, but the UN is a waste of money. I blew of some steam in a journal entry.
Have you read my journal today?
I don't think so, actually. The manmade junk isn't all spinning along the same plane, and we don't have shepherd moons. So from the former you get a spherical (or oblate) cloud instead of rings, and from the latter you just don't get rings. Some stuff plummets back (but below the chain reaction rate) and some makes it to lunar orbit and probably disturbs the space aliens on the far side, who awaken and bring our fiery doom.
Pity.
Computer-simulated pictures of orbiting space debris suffer from the same problem that images of our solar system do:
Each individual 'thing' (piece of debris/planet) is incredibly tiny compared to the size of the background object (Earth/the solar system). If they showed an actual scale model of the solar system on your (for example) 1600x1200 screen, even jupiter would be well under a pixel wide (in fact, Jupiter's diamater is about 1/40,000th the size of the mean distance from Pluto to the Sun).
Same thing for Earth orbit space debris - sure, there are tens of thousands of objects up there - but the biggest thing we've ever sent into space is only a few hundred yards long, and the vast majority of these things measure in the inches. The Earth is more than 12 MILLION yards wide.
Point is, you wouldn't see anything on any real scale model of either the Earth or the solar system. They artificially blow up the little things so it has some relevance to us feeble humans. Not that this lessens the danger from space debris, mind you - it's just nowhere near as bad as it looks from the pretty pictures.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Off the top of my head there are only a handfull of space programs worthy of the name, US, Russia, China, Japan and the EU. I think most of the members of the UN have other things on their mind, like starvation, AIDS, war, terrorism, and general economics. I'm sure that space junk isn't high on the priority list.
Democracy isn't about no one telling you what to do. It's about everyone telling you what to do.