On the Matter of Space Junk 90
SpaceAdmiral writes "Nature reports that space is in need of cleaning. From the article: 'Space could soon become too risky to visit unless derelict satellites and rockets are removed from orbit. That's the stark warning from a new simulation of space junk drifting around the Earth, and scientists are calling for swift international action to solve the problem.'" According to another astronaut there is at least one more piece of space trash they haven't accounted for. Philip K Dickhead writes "Veteran astronaut Mike Mullane claimed that the NASA Space Shuttle is 'the most dangerous manned spacecraft ever flown [...] It has no powered-flight escape system." He also accused US space officials of suppressing safety concerns raised by crew-members of shuttle flights."
satellites and Starry Night software (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:satellites and Starry Night software (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:satellites and Starry Night software (Score:1)
Make the corporations responsible.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Make the corporations responsible.. (Score:2, Insightful)
What sounds like the bigger problem is all the tiny hard to track fragments, the sort of stuff created when stages of a rocket seperate explosively. Here, perhaps, more work could be done in developing rockets and satellites that don't shed this sort of garbage.
Re:Make the corporations responsible.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Make the corporations responsible.. (Score:1)
Get Pedro and that garbage truck of his (Score:2)
-Eric
point of no return (Score:1)
Re:Make the corporations responsible.. (Score:1)
Well, actually you aren't contradicting the article, but agreeing with it. TFA states:
Unfortunately this doesn't address the problem adequately. The article also states that their simulation assumed that all space launches were halted in Dec. 2004. The danger arises from the inevitable collisions of junk that's already up there now, producing sm
Re:Make the corporations responsible.. (Score:2)
Re:Make the corporations responsible.. (Score:2)
Re:Make the corporations responsible.. (Score:2, Insightful)
The cost of the salvage s/c + 100M to launch and for what?
To hook up with some piece of junk that does not work any more?
Not in your or my lifetime.
Re:Make the corporations responsible.. (Score:2)
Re:Make the corporations responsible.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Make the corporations responsible.. (Score:2)
My problem is my box does not extend beyond the exosphere.
If yours does, then size really does matter.
deposit? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Make the corporations responsible.. (Score:2)
Maybe if you required commercial endeavors to put a giant amount of $$$ in escrow when they put up a satellite that might work...
Besides, there's no international law court that can fine a corportation. Yeah, a corp based out of Afghanistan launched some garbage up from their site in Chi
Ken MacLeods Books (Score:2, Interesting)
Sounds like we need the Debris Section! (Score:5, Interesting)
Still, a pretty fun anime, and the manga is even better.
new moon (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe if we gathered them in one place we could eventually have a new (very small) moon that could be easily tracked and avoided. I suppose it would be below the roche limit, and would thus perhaps need to be caught in a net, or a strong magnet.
Anyone care to guess which would require more delta v, deorbiting a satelite or moving it to a "designated rubbish pile"? It seems like some space debris would be salvageable, it seems a shame to drop it back into the atmosphere after spending so much fuel to get it up there in the first place.
Anyone have any good ideas for the names of aforementioned moons?
With the recycling! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:With the recycling! (Score:2, Interesting)
It's called "space junk" for a reason. Some of it's probably OK, but most of it is real garbage.
various uses for space junk (Score:3, Interesting)
I suppose that depends on the intended purpose. I don't think assembling a space station out of it is practical (at least, not without a lot of manufacturing infrastructure that we don't have in orbit right now), however, it could be used as part of a space elevator counterweight (ass
bootstrapping (Score:2)
Re:With the recycling! (Score:2)
You can launch a ton of custom made stuff for the price of just one dude
You do know that it takes an army of people to build these things right?
Do you really think you can make/assemble any device worth anything with the junk flying around for cheaper than it would cost just to build it here and launch it? I'm not convinced you could do that if all of the parts were sitting in a lab on the ground somewhere, with a whole team at your disposal, to say nothing
Naming the new moon! (Score:1)
Re:Naming the new moon! (Score:2)
Re:new moon (Score:2)
In contrast to put everything into a parking orbit you have to change all of the orbital parameters. Changing your orbital inclination can be expensive.
Re:new moon (Score:2)
Whether it takes less delta-vee to deorbit or go into a disposal orbit depends on the
orbit. Deorbiting a geostationary satellite is much harder than kicking it into a slightly higher disposal orbit, so that's what usually happens. Only one precise altitude is geostationary, so anything higher i
Re:new moon (Score:2)
Katamari.
Re:new moon (Score:2)
less delta-v? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll take a guess and say deorbiting is cheaper.
Why? Because you can you use very basic, very slow ways to brake it's orbit - such as painting it the right colour so that it will reflect sunlight and get pushed closer to the earth. (Think of plans to move that asteriod that might his us in 70 years) We don't have to deorbit it *now*, just eventually.
I can see the argument about keepin
motivation (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:motivation (Score:3, Interesting)
Even if it cost you like a gazzilion dollars to clean your garage with only a miniscule chance you would ever come in contact with the hypersonic junk, and then only a miniscule fraction of those times it would pose an actual problem?
That would be one seriously expensive spring cleaning
If we can't clean up junk, forget other NEOs. (Score:1)
No doubt the problems are different, but discouraging none the less.
http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/ [nasa.gov]
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0726/p01s04-stss.htm l [csmonitor.com]
Re:If we can't clean up junk, forget other NEOs. (Score:1)
Re:If we can't clean up junk, forget other NEOs. (Score:1)
Rain down on the largest concentration of junk with a directed blast towards Earth to cover a wide area.
Never mind...just grasp at straws.
Re:If we can't clean up junk, forget other NEOs. (Score:5, Informative)
The average radius of the Earth is 3,959 miles [lyberty.com], call it 4000. The definition of LEO orbit is from 400 to 1600 miles above the Earth [answers.com]. Sphere volume (close enough) is defined as (4/3)*pi*r^3.
To cover LEO, we need to cover a volume of (4.0/3)*pi*((4000+1600)**3 - (4000+400)**3) miles, which is 378,000,000,000 cubic miles (378 American billion). Our incredible optimistic nuke can "clean" (4.0/3)*pi*(10 **3) cubic miles, or 4,200 cubic miles. Dividing the (unrounded) numbers reveals that we need to set off 90,449,062 (~90 million) miracle nukes to clean the orbit.
(If you start python and type as your first line "from math import pi", those expressions will slide right into Python so you can verify them. Insignificant figures have been trimmed for presentation.)
And it's even harder than that, since the objects are moving at different speeds, and it's quite easy for objects to slip between the cracks if we don't light up the entire orbit at once.
Clearly, this is absurd, because we don't even have that many pieces of space trash in orbit, by many orders of magnitude. Because of the difference, we don't even need to do any sort of statistics to safely conclude that there are no "concentrations" of space trash that could be nuked, and we are in fact going to have to address the situation one piece of trash at a time.
Re:If we can't clean up junk, forget other NEOs. (Score:1)
How about some sort of roving unit that shoots these things down?
They are doing the star wars thing anyway, give em something to shoot at.
Re:If we can't clean up junk, forget other NEOs. (Score:2)
As parent indirectly points out cleaning the junk is a task many orders of magnitude more difficult and expensive then putting the junk there in the first place.
We have junk/landfill problems here on the ground that we do not have a solution for. Sure we should try to minimize the amount of refuse we leave in orbit but unless/until we are ready to abandon space because we simply pollute it too much, we should try to find s
Re:If we can't clean up junk, forget other NEOs. (Score:1)
So...
Since much of the junk is fairly small, and it should be carrying a charge from the solar wind, could you run a dragnet across some suitable orbit, charged to the same polarity, and electrostatically bump everything below it at a certain rang
Re:If we can't clean up junk, forget other NEOs. (Score:2)
I can't see any reason why it couldn't be done.
I can think of a few problems, however
For one, you'd likely need a nuclear reactor to keep the mesh charged.
For another, to be effective, it'd have to be at least hundreds of miles across. Tides would play merry hell with a structure like that, as would other particles, like sunlight and the upper atmosphere. You'd have to have ion thrusters on the outsides to keep it open and oriented (oh well, we already have a nuclear react
Re:If we can't clean up junk, forget other NEOs. (Score:1)
Too bad; I imagine the "Floating Junk Meteor Shower of 2012" would have been quite a show.
Re:If we can't clean up junk, forget other NEOs. (Score:2)
Re:If we can't clean up junk, forget other NEOs. (Score:2)
I dont remember if he discussed any specific orbit or L shell that was involved but I do remember that he stated that everything in that orbit was knocked out.
Does anyone have any factual references to this 'event?'.
I've wondered about this for a while.
Re:If we can't clean up junk, forget other NEOs. (Score:3, Informative)
You can find good writeups in any good history of US nuclear testing. The Wikipedia article on "Nuclear testing" is as good a place to start as any. Loo
Re:If we can't clean up junk, forget other NEOs. (Score:2)
Re:If we can't clean up junk, forget other NEOs. (Score:2)
I remember my prof. catagorized this as one of the dumbest things that we have done in the last x+ years (that was of course 10 years ago but I haven't forgotten it).
My curiosity on this topic falls along the lines of all the fancy GPS military hardware we have. If the oposition (whoever that may be) could detonate a device in a GPS orbit would that cripple the defense/offense system of the military? No doubt? smart men have thought
Re:If we can't clean up junk, forget other NEOs. (Score:2)
Another solution, since nukes can't be used (Score:2)
If nothing else, nukes close to the Earth would blow the civilian satellites with radiation. That is why Orions can't start from the surface these days, if I remember correctly from the "Project Orion" book... :-(
I read about an alternative on the Usenet space groups. See the first hit on this [google.com], for instance.
Re:If we can't clean up junk, forget other NEOs. (Score:2)
Re:If we can't clean up junk, forget other NEOs. (Score:2)
Actually, what will happen is that we will develop a kick ass asteroid diverter, an inbound Death Asteroid will be found, the asteroid diverter will be launched on its mission to save the world, but it will collide with a piece of space junk on the way up and be destroyed, thus resulting in the death of everybody.
Re:If we can't clean up junk, forget other NEOs. (Score:1)
OK (Score:3, Interesting)
As opposed to the ones that have a powered ejection seat...
Surely you cant eject gracefully from that little Russian capsule either, or can you?
So the LEAST dangerous one would be ???
or does he simply work for a aerospace design corp now?
WOuld be handy i suppose IF you were in the right time of launch to use it and IF you had time to activate and IF you were pointed the right way (wouldn't really want to eject toward the path of a booster rocket or something).
Exactly how long does one have when the bomb you are riding on goes off? Didnt the first one blow up almost immediately?
Certainly you cant eject during reentry, if your ship is burning up, isnt that jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire?!?
Re:OK (Score:2)
Re:OK (Score:4, Informative)
They use solid-fueld braking rockets for last-second deceleration of a parachute landing. Rocket failure might result in some pretty nasty bumps and bruises, but that's all. It's a highly reliable system. The soviets even used it for para-dropping armored vehicles with the crew strapped inside. NASA opted for "splashdown" and naval recovery for simplicity's sake.
Re:OK (Score:2)
Re:OK (Score:2)
Nah, explosives can really only impart one quick, violent, generally omnidirectional force. Kinda like trying to slow a car down by having people on the side of the road hit it with a sledgehammer.
Re:OK (Score:1, Informative)
> Russian capsule either, or can you?
The capsule itself isn't dangerous, so there's no need to eject from it. The danger is the rocket it's attached to. That's why Mercury, Apollo, Soyuz and Shenzhou all have what's called an "escape tower". That's a big solid rocket attached to the top of the capsule which will fire if the main rocket starts to blow up. The escape tower will haul the capsule away from the exploding rocket, then the parachutes ope
"the first one" (Score:2)
Re:OK (Score:5, Informative)
The Challenger crew compartment was essentially still one piece when it hit the ocean. Considering that part crew escape mechanism design involves engineering decisions like NOT putting the crew vehicle next to the "bomb" , like the space shuttle, but rather putting it on top, like [soyuz|apollo|other traditional] spacecraft; well, yeah, then there's plenty of time for a solid fuel rocket to separate them from the fireball.
Certainly you cant eject during reentry, if your ship is burning up, isnt that jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire?!?
The space shuttle is a flimsy design, 30 years out of date. "Standard" spacecraft design is pretty darn reliable-- they basically don't burn up on reentry because they're not built out of ceramic foam blocks glued onto superlight carbon fiber frames, they have predictable non-flimly ablative heat shields. The only time you'd ever need to "bail out" with a standard design would be if the parachute failed, after actual reentry, and that is (in theory) possible.
So basically the two space shuttle accidents have shown that it is a highly vulnerable system. A fuel tank explosion on launch of (say) one of the Apollo/Saturn V launches would result in the crew module separating and being pulled away by the solid fuel rockets of the escape tower for a safe parachute landing. Damage to the reentry vehicle from an insulating foam chunk off the launch vehicle would be impossible, given that A) the former is above the latter, B) it's not built like french racing bicycle out of delicate materials, but more like a solid military aircraft.
Re:OK (Score:5, Informative)
As opposed to the ones that have a powered ejection seat...
As opposed to the ones that have any form of escapesystem at all. The Gemini [astronautix.com] and the Vostok [astronautix.com] used ejection seats (the use of which was the normal mode of ladning in the case of the Vostok - the cosmonaut did not ride his capsule all the way down). The majority of manned spacecrafts (Mercury [astronautix.com], all the various versions of the Soyuz [astronautix.com], Apollo [astronautix.com], Shenzhou [astronautix.com] and the planned CEV [astronautix.com]) fetures escape towers - a rocket that will pull the part of the spacecraft with people inside away from any accidents (and hopefully high enought up for parachutes to work). As far as I can tell, the Shuttle shares the dubious distinction to be one of two (the other was Voskhod [astronautix.com], which was basicly a juryrigged Vostok) to have flown in space with no escapesystem at all.
Back in the 'good, old days', a lot of thought went into weird and wonderfull ways to bail out from orbit [astronautix.com], but these days it seems like there is little will to admidt that things can go horrible wrong up there...
Re:OK (Score:2)
Re:OK (Score:2)
Re:OK (Score:2)
Re:OK (Score:2)
Re:OK (Score:2)
Re:Hahahaha oh my fucking god (Score:2)
Quick clean (Score:1)
Re:Quick clean (Score:5, Funny)
NASA suppressing safety concerns? (Score:2)
Space Nets, Recycling Programs and Alien Janitors (Score:1)
The area of collection is small in comparison to the orbital space, however, over time everything should coalesce into one manageable unit as it sweeps overhead.
Then if possible, direct it to a solar trajectory or burn it up in the atmosphere.
Another option could be to offer commercial ventures incentives to collect space junk. The items returned are paid back per weight.
Some smartass will figure out that eBay buyers will also pay big bucks for a piece of histori
Chain reaction.. (Score:3, Interesting)
We're going to wind up with rings just like Saturn, but ours is going to be the remains of our communications infrastructure.
Aero
Re:Chain reaction.. (Score:1)
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't space junk low orbiting though?
Dupe and a miss (Score:2)
Then there is the second part of the posting. A story which I submitted on the 18th and had rejected so I posted it in my Journal. Go ahead, go look. I'll wait. It's the same thing, isn't it? Ok, not the same. My article had more information and a better outtake from the book.
I know Taco has been posting stories about the selec
Time for Quark! (Score:2, Informative)
What was old is new and in humour there is truth.
Where (Score:2)