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On the Matter of Space Junk

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the where-does-all-the-funding-go dept.

SpaceAdmiral writes "Nature reports that space is in need of cleaning. From the article: 'Space could soon become too risky to visit unless derelict satellites and rockets are removed from orbit. That's the stark warning from a new simulation of space junk drifting around the Earth, and scientists are calling for swift international action to solve the problem.'" According to another astronaut there is at least one more piece of space trash they haven't accounted for. Philip K Dickhead writes "Veteran astronaut Mike Mullane claimed that the NASA Space Shuttle is 'the most dangerous manned spacecraft ever flown [...] It has no powered-flight escape system." He also accused US space officials of suppressing safety concerns raised by crew-members of shuttle flights."

6 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. Make the corporations responsible.. by QuantumG · · Score: 3, Insightful

    For a start, rewrite the space treaty so governments are not responsible for everything their citizens launch into space. Next, hold the corporations responsible for their own mess. For every year they fail to deorbit their space junk (or boost it into a safe parking orbit) charge them a fine. If the fine is just twice as high as a terminator tether they'll soon take care of their space junk.

    --
    How we know is more important than what we know.
    1. Re:Make the corporations responsible.. by lazybratsche · · Score: 2, Insightful

      This might be a step in the right direction, but it only addresses the problem of big peices of debris (i.e. whole satallites or components).

      What sounds like the bigger problem is all the tiny hard to track fragments, the sort of stuff created when stages of a rocket seperate explosively. Here, perhaps, more work could be done in developing rockets and satellites that don't shed this sort of garbage.

    2. Re:Make the corporations responsible.. by Bad+D.N.A. · · Score: 1, Insightful

      And that is going to make money for someone...how?

      The cost of the salvage s/c + 100M to launch and for what?
      To hook up with some piece of junk that does not work any more?

      Not in your or my lifetime.

      --
      "Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations"
    3. Re:Make the corporations responsible.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      'outside the box' shouldn't include outside the reasonable. salvaging dying/dead satellites with technology many years old doesn't sound profitable, inside the box or out.

  2. motivation by bcrowell · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'd be much more motivated to clean up my garage if I had to move through it constantly, while the junk was all whizzing by at relative velocities of thousands of miles an hour.

    --
    Find free books.
  3. less delta-v? by lilmouse · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Anyone care to guess which would require more delta v, deorbiting a satelite or moving it to a "designated rubbish pile"?
    I'll take a guess and say deorbiting is cheaper.

    Why? Because you can you use very basic, very slow ways to brake it's orbit - such as painting it the right colour so that it will reflect sunlight and get pushed closer to the earth. (Think of plans to move that asteriod that might his us in 70 years) We don't have to deorbit it *now*, just eventually.

    I can see the argument about keeping it out of the gravity well, tho :) If we could just dump it on the moon...

    --LWM