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.

Comments

With the UN in charge

[rossz]

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.

Misleading pictures

[freeweed]

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.

Re:Space cr4p

[oh]

Wouldnt it be advantageous to the UN to clean up a majority of the stuff (manmade) in space to prevent further problems such as the speculated involvement in the recent Columbia crash?

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.