Slashdot Mirror
Space Station Turning Into a Trash Heap
quintin3265 writes "Apparently, the International Space Station is becoming overloaded with junk, stored among other places in a now unused airlock. Since shuttles aren't visiting the station, the station's occupants can't return broken machines to Earth. Furthermore, the only way they can dispose of trash and human waste is by loading these items in Russian cargo ships that burn up in the atmosphere."
i for one welcome our orbital trash overlords
can't they just get some big nets and laso all of the garbage together for a day or two and then give it a push towards Earth?
Please bear in mind that the stuff is already traveling at orbital velocity. If you want it to fall first you have to knock about 4 miles per second off its velocity vector along the tangent to the orbital curve.
It's not like dropping a ball off the top of a ladder because it's moving 'sideways' at nearly 5 mps.
KFG
Can't they 'bundle' the trash and drop it towards earth? I expect it would all burn up into ash once it starts in the upper atmosphere, and shouldn't liter on the ground.
Am I missing something?
CB*)@@@
free ipod and free gmail!
Just use explosives dammit!
Blow that trash to smithereens!!
NASA takes little comfort in the fact that the 6-year-old space station isn't as dingy or messy as Russia's Mir, which tumbled from the sky in 2001 after 15 years of operation. The whole point, from the very beginning, was to avoid a pigpen in orbit. Yet here NASA is, on the verge of creating a mirror image of Mir.
Columbia's catastrophic plunge from the sky on Feb. 1, 2003, grounded the shuttle fleet and halted all space station construction.
The Russian Space Agency has been sending manned capsules and supply ships to the station. The cargo carriers have provided backup stores of precious oxygen that have come in handy during the repeated breakdowns of the station's main oxygen generator, a vexing problem that eventually could force an evacuation. But the Russian spacecraft can hold, at most, only a third of what the shuttle can carry and they are not exactly frequent fliers.