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Space Junk Getting Worse
HockeyPuck writes "According to Space.com the amount of space junk is getting worse. 'A head-on collision was averted between a spent upper stage from a Chinese rocket and the European Space Agency's (ESA) huge Envisat Earth remote-sensing spacecraft. [...] But what if the two objects had tangled? Such a space collision would have caused mayhem in the heavens, adding clutter to an orbit altitude where there are big problems already, said Heiner Klinkrad, head of the European Space Agency's Space Debris Office in Darmstadt, Germany."
Sounds like it is time an outerspace garbage man.
Where can I apply for that job?
I hear Technora Corp is putting together some kind of department for this...
Bow-ties are cool.
Could we just continue this trend and call it a shield against alien invasions? I for one welcome the trash shield.
So why don't they just use it and clean up?
That wouldn't take much fuel or anything...
Exactly, so we should build a gigantic ground based laser that can vaporize a school bus sized object in 1/4 a second. I want the beam to be 30 feet wide and blackout every city in a hemisphere when it fires. Heck make it powerful enough that it adjusts the earth's orbit due to the amount of photos being fired.
Plus we can use it when the aliens get here all pissed off that we are cluttering up the lower EM spectrum with a lot of useless chatter.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
We do exactly that. We let them burn up in the atmosphere, or crash into the ocean. The parts then get dissolved in the rain, or in the ocean water. The dissolved little bits get laid down on the ocean floor and riverbeds as mineral deposits. These mineral deposits get mined. The ore gets refined. New parts are designed, and voila, a few million years from now you get a shiny new starboard reticle articulation trunion. Why, the very reticle articulation trunions used on the shuttle Discovery were once part of a Jurasic era weather monitoring satellite.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
We should start sending all our garbage there.
I agree, but how will we convince all 535 members of Congress to get on the space ship?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
A group of "industry scientists" has, they claim, shown conclusively that there is no "space junk problem". Moreover, they have shown that even if there is a problem, it is not man-made but is instead, due to natural changes that are cyclical in nature.
It'd be like flying one bag of trash from New York to China on its own private charter jet.
Didn't that already happen?
I suggest we create a fleet of Ark ships. Elected officials get on Ark Ship #2.
Brett