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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."

13 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. satellites and Starry Night software by calyxa · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I have Starry Night, a night sky simulator, and I was amazed at what things looked like when I set my location to the north pole and sped up time by 300x. There were dozens of satellites zooming overhead constantly!

    --
    Decay! Decay! Decay! -Helium
    1. Re:satellites and Starry Night software by mkosmo · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I use Orbiter ( http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/ ) as my space flight simulator. Too bad it doesnt feature space junk :) They also accurately represent space objects as you add them, and its amazing... despite there being so much area... i thought I was too close within 10000 miles of anything. Then again, at those speeds, that is close. Space flight is tricky, and the shuttle does need some escape, but also, we do need to clean our trash out there as we do here. It will be a sad day when space is as full as your local landfill...

  2. Ken MacLeods Books by MishgoDog · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Ken MacLeod's Sky Road presents a scenario space is so cluttered part of the premise of the book is that an AI is required to navigate it - no human could leave Earth because of the chaos up there. Lets hope it doesn't get that far!

  3. Sounds like we need the Debris Section! by EvilMagnus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Planetes deals with exactly this problem. Only they didn't see it as being an issue until the 2070s (the series takes place in 2075).

    Still, a pretty fun anime, and the manga is even better.

    --
    -EvilMagnus
  4. new moon by j1m+5n0w · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Maybe if we gathered them in one place we could eventually have a new (very small) moon that could be easily tracked and avoided. I suppose it would be below the roche limit, and would thus perhaps need to be caught in a net, or a strong magnet.

    Anyone care to guess which would require more delta v, deorbiting a satelite or moving it to a "designated rubbish pile"? It seems like some space debris would be salvageable, it seems a shame to drop it back into the atmosphere after spending so much fuel to get it up there in the first place.

    Anyone have any good ideas for the names of aforementioned moons?

  5. With the recycling! by Gorimek · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It gets real useful when you then build a space station out of all that "trash". It's not perfect, but given that it costs $10k/kg to send up cusom made stuff, you should be able to do a lot, given the right tools.

    1. Re:With the recycling! by cbcanb · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Trust me, it's much cheaper just launching new stuff at $10k/kg than to bodge together something using the junk already there.

      It's called "space junk" for a reason. Some of it's probably OK, but most of it is real garbage.

  6. OK by hurfy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    'the most dangerous manned spacecraft ever flown '

    As opposed to the ones that have a powered ejection seat...

    Surely you cant eject gracefully from that little Russian capsule either, or can you?

    So the LEAST dangerous one would be ???

    or does he simply work for a aerospace design corp now?

    WOuld be handy i suppose IF you were in the right time of launch to use it and IF you had time to activate and IF you were pointed the right way (wouldn't really want to eject toward the path of a booster rocket or something).

    Exactly how long does one have when the bomb you are riding on goes off? Didnt the first one blow up almost immediately?
    Certainly you cant eject during reentry, if your ship is burning up, isnt that jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire?!?

  7. Re:motivation by Bad+D.N.A. · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Really?

    Even if it cost you like a gazzilion dollars to clean your garage with only a miniscule chance you would ever come in contact with the hypersonic junk, and then only a miniscule fraction of those times it would pose an actual problem?

    That would be one seriously expensive spring cleaning

    --
    "Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations"
  8. various uses for space junk by j1m+5n0w · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Trust me, it's much cheaper just launching new stuff at $10k/kg than to bodge together something using the junk already there.

    It's called "space junk" for a reason. Some of it's probably OK, but most of it is real garbage.

    I suppose that depends on the intended purpose. I don't think assembling a space station out of it is practical (at least, not without a lot of manufacturing infrastructure that we don't have in orbit right now), however, it could be used as part of a space elevator counterweight (assuming the significant orbit modification can be made more cheaply than launching a similarly heavy object from the ground), or use the debris as the reaction mass for a mass driver, or use it as a radiation shield.

  9. deposit? by j1m+5n0w · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Perhaps the solution would be to require companies to put down a deposit whenever they stick something in orbit. They get it back when the object leaves orbit.

  10. Re:Make the corporations responsible.. by DerekLyons · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.
    Well, welcome to 2006 - where not shedding debris has been the gold standard for a decade and more. Contrary to the TFA, the problem *is* being adressed. Among other things, every major rocket manufacturer has modified stages of theirs that will be left in orbit to depressurize themselves at the end of the burn - no pressure, no breakup. Every major rocket manufacturer has replaced their seperation systems with ones that don't shed parts.
  11. Chain reaction.. by aero2600-5 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You would think the potential loss of almost all the satellites in orbit would make them do something about this. The junk floating around in our orbit is a disaster waiting to happen. The satellite traffic is already pretty heavy. Assume that one of the satellites suffers a direct hit from a meteor or a fast moving piece of space junk. You're satellite has just become about 100 pieces of space junk. Assume that just two of those pieces collide with other satellites. Now there are a couple hundred pieces of space junk in that particular orbit. Follow the chain reaction, and we could lose most of our satellites in just a few weeks.

    We're going to wind up with rings just like Saturn, but ours is going to be the remains of our communications infrastructure.

    Aero

    --
    Please stop hurting America -- Jon Stewart