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."

Re:Push them further away

[Andorin]

Or the sun?

Who cares...

[Superdarion]

If companies don't hestitate to pollute rivers, seas, air and pretty much everything that could very well kill us right now, why would they think twice before polluting something we, as a civilization, have no regard for? Personally, I'd rather see them stop polluting Earth than low-orbit space.

Step 1: Ban space weapons

[GodfatherofSoul]

Stop idiots [wikipedia.org] from blasting satellites in space an creating even more debris. Stop other idiots [wikipedia.org] from giving the first group of idiots a reason to blow up satellites.

Re:Can you say Wall-E

[Idiomatick]

You mean planetes?

http://www.kumby.com/planetes-episode-1/ [kumby.com]

Re:Push them further away

[berashith]

Promise them money for their district. It isn't like their actions aren't easily bought.

Re:Push them further away

[jpmorgan]

Can we please never hear this idea ever again? Every time a hard waste disposal problem comes up, someone suggests throwing the nuclear waste, or decaying space debris into the sun.

Throwing something into the sun would require a truly staggering amount of energy. It will never be a practical means of waste disposal.

Re:Push them further away

[jpmorgan]

You're already in the sun's gravity well. And every little bit of matter in your body has been happily falling into the sun for 5 billion years.

Orbiting is very much like flying in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: it's the art of falling towards a celestial body with enough speed that you miss it every time. You want to hit the sun? You've got to slow yourself down by about 60,000mph, otherwise you're just going to keep missing it every time.

It's only slightly harder to fling yourself out of the solar system than it is to hit the sun and we've only managed that five times, I think.

Re:Options

[camperdave]

Pushing it towards the earth would increase the eccentricity of the orbit, allowing it to dip deeper into the atmosphere, where friction will bring it down.