Report Warns of Space Junk Reaching a Tipping Point 105
intellitech sends this excerpt from a Reuters report:
"The amount of debris orbiting the Earth has reached a tipping point for collisions, which would in turn generate more of the debris that threatens astronauts and satellites, according to a U.S. study released on Thursday (PDF). ... The amount of orbital debris tracked by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network jumped from 9,949 cataloged objects in December 2006 to 16,094 in July 2011, with nearly 20 percent of the objects stemming from the destruction of the Chinese FENGYUN 1-C satellite, the National Research Council said. ... the panel made two dozen recommendations for NASA to mitigate and improve the orbital debris environment, including collaborating with the State Department to develop the legal and regulatory framework for removing junk from space. The study, 'Limiting Future Collision Risk to Spacecraft: An Assessment of NASA's Meteoroid and Orbital Debris Programs,' was sponsored by NASA."
Re:Nobody will take it seriously (Score:4, Insightful)
They'll start taking it seriously when multi-million dollar satellites start being obliterated.
In the US, money is a far more serious matter than human life.
Re:Nobody will take it seriously (Score:5, Insightful)
until somebody die from it. sorry, but it's been that way for centuries.
Nobody will take it seriously until an entertainment satellite gets taken out.
Re:I find it funny... (Score:5, Insightful)
Humans probably win on points because of the sheer creativity of their pollution, and the fact that they do it despite having brains large enough to predict that they will suffer for it; but they aren't exactly the first organism to synthesize something that didn't (yet) have anything evolved to break it down.
Re:Kessler Syndrome (Score:4, Insightful)
I also disagree that lasers aren't "politically not great" for the exact OPPOSITE reasons as you. When has getting funding for a weapons system ever been a difficult political proposition? Sure, everybody else might not like the fact that you can now shoot down their satellites, but they're not going to complain too loudly about it since:
1. Some day they might want to ask you nicely to shoot down somebody else's satellites for them.
2. They don't want you to shoot down their satellites.
3. They're going to be busy working on their own fancy lasers.
This is why I chuckle every time I see one of those "Boy, the Europeans will stick it to the US with Galileo" threads. Under just about any circumstance where the US would actually deploy selective availability, the EU would be pretty likely to freely do the same thing with their own satellite network. About the only case where that wouldn't be likely to happen would be an all-out US vs EU war, which of course would never happen, and in any case would just result in a bazillion ASAT weapons turning LEO into a cloud of buckshot. While it seems that everybody loves a good US vs EU thread, the reality is that on most issues the US and EU have far more in common than they have in opposition, and most of the political theater is to keep the various fringes in the political parties happy and focused on something other than the fact that just about everybody in office everywhere is corrupt.