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Low Earth Orbit Junk Yard Nearly Full
vlado4 writes "The New York Times has up an article on the amount of space junk in Earth Orbit. According to NASA officials, the amount of stuff we've put into LEO is at critical levels. Additionally they have great graphics of the nearly 1000 new pieces resulting from testing the new Chinese anti-satellite weapon, as well as the damage to Hubble's solar array. The litter is now so bad that, even if space-faring nations refrained from further interference, collisions would continue to create more clutter just above our atmosphere. Space debris appear to be a difficult problem to deal with and may hinder future space exploration."
Not only are we destroying our own environment, our planet is surrounded by floating trash.
This is a HUGE problem. Considering that kinetic energy is proportional to the square of velocity, think about how much damage even a small chip of paint can do at orbital speeds (low Earth orbit = approx. 5 miles per second). Then think of a 2 lb. chunk of metal at the same speed (8 times the speed of a rifle bullet).
Right off the top of my head I can't think of a feasible way of beginning to clean this up. Perhaps large orbital superconducting magnets (easy to maintain cryo temperatures in space) for the ferrous stuff, but what about ceramics and all the other junk?
This has the potential to make what is usually the safest part of space travel (sitting there in orbit) the most dangerous part, unlike the historical danger zones of liftoff and reentry.
Didn't somebody design a really cheap system of kamikaze satellites that would grapple the dangerous pieces and de-orbit them into the atmosphere? By really cheap I mean ~10,000 dollars. Surely we could put a couple of those on the ISS in case it looked like something was coming for it. I know it's expensive to launch the things, but AFAIK they're about the size of a propane tank for a BBQ and could be launched in vast numbers on a single rocket. The space is so large we only need to worry about the stuff in the space we WANT to be in or go through. All the geosynchronous stuff is in a much higher orbit, so we only need to worry about the stuff in LEO and the stuff going through it. It shoudn't be a problem to plot a course through it, and we can clear the orbits as we go.
One reason this is not so simple, is that there is so much space to vacuum. You will not find much junk by just vacuuming (especially in the vacuum of space)...
Then there is the problem that speeds are very high. A particle in a different orbit than your Roomba will probably go right through it, instead of being properly processed.
Uh, have you looked around the US? I personally live in a valley in Northern California that used to be a sort of paradise in which the locals (Pomo "Indians") used to regularly live over 100 years due to their diet and lifestyle. Today the lake is horribly polluted with mercury and agricultural run off. The lake is called Clear Lake, and it was when white men first showed up here. Today it is about the same color as pea soup and frankly you can't see much further through it most days.
This is pretty much the story of the US. Some people were living in harmony with nature, doing controlled burns on a regular basis to provide stewardship of the land. (In fact my lady and I were just looking at a seed catalog and found a plant that said "to germinate, burn several inches of pine needles above the seeds" etc etc.) Then some white guys showed up, killed and enslaved lots of them, and cut down their oaks (depriving them of a major staple) in order to plant crops or grow cattle. Then the government gets involved, and kills most of the rest of them. We have an island up here now known as Bloody Island because the army came through and massacred all but a small handful of members of one band. The island is up the road from where I work in a tribal casino. Next the government would take further action to make sure they couldn't maintain their old way of life; besides granting all their land to some other white people, they actually paid people to plant walnut trees. Walnuts are tasty but they provide nothing like the nutrition of oak acorns.
You are sadly deluding yourself if you think China is any different from the US. They're just behind. And they're catching up rapidly.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"