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The Space Garbage Scow, ala Cringely
An anonymous reader writes "Robert X. Cringely once again educates and amuses with his take on how we could clean up the garbage that's in orbit around Earth. I cannot vouch for his math, but it makes sense to me. Quoting: 'We’d start in a high orbit, above the space junk, because we could trade that altitude for speed as needed, simply by flying lower, trading potential energy for kinetic. Dragging the net behind a little unmanned spacecraft, my idea would be to go past each piece of junk in such a way that it not only lodges permanently in the net, but that doing so adds kinetic energy (hitting at shallow angles to essentially tack like a sailboat off the debris). But wait, there’s more! You not only have to try to get energy from each encounter, it helps if — like in a game of billiards or pool — each encounter results in an effective ricochet sending the net in the proper trajectory for its next encounter. Rinse and repeat 18,000 times.'"
You could try reading the summary next time. His proposal was for one flight, not 18000. I imagine his plan is still impractical for lots of reasons (you probably can't get enough impulse from each piece to approach the next one at a low enough speed, etc.), but it's still not as bad as your suggestion of 18000 manned space flights.
Who says it needs to re-enter? If the bits of junk are all lodged in a larger net structure which behaves in a predictable manner, it could just be left up there as a sort of orbital junkyard. The proposed designs for a space elevator require a chunk of ballast to keep the tether taught... Why not a bunch of discarded booster shells and such, tacked together? It took a lot of energy to get that stuff up there... Why waste it?
Just wanted to point out that for the first time in the history of slashdot, you correctly spelled "losing" and "loose" in the same sentence. The content of your point is good too!
I wonder if this means that if you hurled 100mm armor steel plate @ mach 8.0 at a pencil if the pencil would survive-- perhaps we should be investing in pencil-based armor