Slashdot Mirror
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."
It is of course very easy to point at the Chinese for shattering a satellite into a thousand pieces, but don't forget that the US has their share of stupid mistakes as well.
For example, in 1963 the US Military launched 480 million tiny needles into orbit (project West Ford), to see if they could be used to reflect radio signals.
That did not work well, but the needles remained in orbit for years.
And if scientists would not have been very opposed to it, they probably would have launched even more to see if the idea would work.
Also, it is difficult to say that space is "full" of junk. The LEO area has such a large volume that even hundres of millions of junk particles at a uniform distribution still means they are all many kilometers apart. So what is "full"?
>anything it would collide with would also be moving at a comparable speed
Comparable speed but not comparable velocity: if something in polar orbit hits something in equatorial orbit, grief will ensue.
I've sometimes mused about a big hunk of aerogel in orbit. I suspect that you don't really need to catch or stop things, just slow them down. If these pieces of junk could just be persuaded to drop perigee down into the 100 mile range, then atmospheric decay would help out.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
It's the old "Space is BIG!" problem. But the nearly meaningful adder to the aerogel idea would be to station some blocks of it ahead of and behind valuable things, notably the ISS. (If you stationed any around the HST, you'd also want to be able to move it when you wanted to look in that direction. Even this idea still has trouble with the "Space is BIG!" problem, but at least you're trying to protect a smaller space. Obviously it would be necessary to form the aerogel on-orbit, presuming that's possible.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.