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."

Comments

Figures It Would Be The Swiss

[avgjoe62]

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.

Re:Figures It Would Be The Swiss

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to explain this based on the Swiss sterotypes, then the one you really should be using is more allong the line: the Swiss discovered that the debris had not filled proper paperwork to be in the orbit that it was in, so they are sending up a clerk to take care of things.

Re:Spaceba!

[rah1420]

I get it. It's like an orbital Wall*E.

Re:It's like catching a bullet

[kimvette]

We are currently orbiting the galactic core at 220 km/s and around the sun at 30 km/s and yet you can catch a baseball tossed to you, unless you're a total klutz, right? If you are riding in a bus, walking toward the back, and a passenger in the back throws a cellphone to you, you can catch it, right? Even though if the bus is traveling at 65mph relative to the street, and the cellphone 35mph relative to the bus floor (or 100mph relative to the street)

Motion is relative. Speed is relative.

The satellite will not be motionless relative to the junk.

Think about it.

Re:...with another bullet

[na1led]

That's not a very effecient way to collect debris, if you have to expend fuel just to catch up to it. It seems like there would be a better solution, like using lasers to push the debris out of orbit into space.

all I know about buses

[NEDHead]

I learned from Speed - I thought they all had to stay over 55 mph...

Re:It's like catching a bullet

[Sarten-X]

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.