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.'"

Re:Wouldn't that be bad when it re-enters?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

We'll just tell them that it is our new orbital anti-whaling weapon...

Re:Make sure.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure that NASA could run a $1 million dollar competition to see who can de-orbit space junk with frickin' laser beams.

I'm betting on the sharks winning.

Re:"net"?

[Toonol]

I would think that if we went 'spongy', it would make sense to send up a few cubic meters of a densely packed raw material and then extrude it in space; after all, the whole point of those materials is how low density they are. One jar of popcorn kernels is easier to transport before they're popped.

Do popcorn kernels pop when exposed to vacuum? I may have solved the issue, right there.

Re:Wouldn't that be bad when it re-enters?

[LordLimecat]

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

Re:Cringely is an idiot.

[Dirtside]

You could try reading the summary next time.

You must be new here. We don't read the summaries, let alone the friendly articles. Hell, any day now I expect most /. readers will stop reading the headlines, too, and every article will be a homogeneous mishmash of vim vs. emacs arguments, libertarian propaganda, and goatse links.

Not that I have a problem with this, mind you.

Re:Wouldn't that be bad when it re-enters?

[Anonymous Coward]

Quick someone email this to the mythbusters!
I wanna see Kari with a pencil