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Swiss To Build Orbital Cleaning Satellite
garyebickford writes "As The ETH Lausanne says: 'The proliferation of debris orbiting the Earth – primarily jettisoned rocket and satellite components – is an increasingly pressing problem for spacecraft, and it can generate huge costs. To combat this scourge, the Swiss Space Center at EPFL is announcing today the launch of CleanSpace One, a project to develop and build the first installment of a family of satellites specially designed to clean up space debris.' This looks like a reasonable method, although I think that at some future point it might be useful to just put at least the smaller stuff in a higher 'parking orbit' for later destruction or recycling. This way you wouldn't lose one vacuum cleaner for each satellite retrieved. And much later down the road, it might be useful to collect bigger units — expended boosters, for example — as raw materials and/or containers. The cost of getting the mass into space has already been spent.
I optimistically foresee a future where much of the stuff sent into orbital space has a recycling function built into the design."
I mean, the stereotype of them being neat and orderly was not far off, at least from looking at their towns and cities. Some of the cleanest urban areas I've ever seen. I can see them wanting to clean up outer space too.
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
I get it. It's like an orbital Wall*E.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
We are currently orbiting the galactic core at 220 km/s and around the sun at 30 km/s and yet you...
Can you please convert this to ft/s for us Americans?
I learned from Speed - I thought they all had to stay over 55 mph...
The problem with recycling in space is that machines must be brought up into space to harvest the materials, then other machines would be needed to manufacture items using the recycled objects. Just think of a mother board yes you can get the elements back but creating a new processor takes very specialized machinery that needs upgrading every 5 years or so. For this to even be remotely possible there would all ready have to be a manufacturing facility in space, the up front cost to achieve something like this are hard to fathom and it probably would not be economically feasible to achieve due to the need to upgrade manufacturing facilities to keep pace with facilities on earth.
You forgot the China factor. Now that China has entered the space race, expensive and complicated machines will not be necessary to recycle the space material. Chinese laborers will process the debris manually at a cost savings of 10 to 1. Material too complicated to be processed by hand, such as motherboards, will simply be re-purposed, such as to serve as wall tiles for the new orbiting shanty towns that will house the workers. I think Foxconn is already bidding on the contract. As safety of the workers will not be a concern, the budget for the entire program will be only a fraction of a single NASA launch.
For us Americans, it's "purdy darned fast". It's faster than NASCAR, and faster than a shotgun shell, by a lot.
Also, it's about 136 miles per second. In each second, that's the distance of two hours of driving at most states' speed limits, one hour of driving in New Mexico (because after an hour of driving in New Mexico, any still-sane human has to stop anyway), and about 30 hours of "driving" through New York City traffic.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I wonder how long until it falls apart and creates more debris, which will need to be cleaned up by more satellites.