Broadband Expansion Could Trigger Dangerous Surge In Space Junk (theguardian.com) 129
A new study from the University of Southampton warns that expanding broadband networks via launching "mega constellations" of thousands of communications satellites could increase catastrophic crashes of dangerous space junk in Earth's orbit. "Dr Hugh Lewis, a senior lecturer in aerospace engineering at the University of Southampton, ran a 200-year simulation to assess the possible consequences of such a rise in orbital traffic," reports The Guardian. "He found it could create a 50% increase in the number of catastrophic collisions between satellites." From the report: Such crashes would probably lead to a further increase in the amount of space junk in orbit, he said, leading to the possibility of further collisions and potential damage to the services the satellites were intended to provide. The European Space Agency, which funded Lewis's research, is calling for the satellites planned for orbital mega-constellations to be able to move to low altitudes once their missions are over so they burn up in Earth's atmosphere. They must also be able discharge all batteries, fuel tanks and pressure tanks to prevent explosions that would scatter debris. Lewis is presenting his research this week at the European conference on space debris at the ESA's center in Darmsadt, Germany. Krag said he expected some of the companies planning launches to attend.
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High orbit sats are indeed high lag. Low orbit sat constellations aren't quite so bad and have the advantage of automatically re-entering the atmosphere after a few years, rendering the professors fears of "Not being able to reliably perform an end of life manoeuvre" moot.
Re: surface plz (Score:2)
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"Satellite Internet" does not and should not count as "high-speed Internet."
For one, high-speed Internet combines both raw bandwidth and low latency.
If you were to count Satellite internet, it would entirely discount the importance of latency, and also discount the importance of upload speeds.
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The new satellite constellations will be in low orbits, and there will be a lot of satellites, allowing both high speed and low latency. Whether they will sell high bandwidth for a reasonable price remains to be seen, of course.
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Yeah, geosynchronous satellites are way out there at about 6 Earth radii with 700ms ping times.
We're talking about all of the new low earth orbit mesh networks, though, that SpaceX and Facebook and Google and Virgin Atlantic have all expressed interest in launching, either as part of the Iridium 2 constellation or in competition with it.
Here's a visualization I've made of SpaceX's proposed 4000+ node constellation based on mission parameters that Elon Musk has announced publicly:
https://youtu.be/neLPRMrhy80 [youtu.be]
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And I just used up my mod points. Too bad. I mean, sure, the visualization doesn't necessarily give an idea of how difficult it would be to launch (the width of one of the dots looks to be approximately the same as the Paris metropolitan area, and I'm guessing the altitudes can be offset by enough to ensure that even if the dots appear to be in the same place at the same time that they don't collide).
I've just never seen 4000 things orbiting earth before, and the illustration of the flight paths shows tha
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One data point: the satellite network proposed by SpaceX will use altitudes ranging from 715 miles to 823 miles. The altitude of a geostationary satellite is 22,236 miles. In both cases the path to the satellite is somewhat longer because the satellite is almost certain not to be directly over you. (If you're in the continental US a geostationary satellite will NEVER be directly overhead even if you're at the correct longitude because all the land is above the Tropic of Cancer. The SpaceX satellites might b
Need to build a cleaner (Score:2)
What we're really finding out here is that we need to build an orbital cleanup satellite. I know that nets have been suggested but considering the speeds we're dealing with in orbit (about 17K mph), it seems like a beaded door curtain would be able to handle the stress and be able to catch small pieces. Naturally, each strand of the "curtain" would need to be exceptionally strong, perhaps something like woven carbon nanotubes.
However it's designed, we need to build something to clean up our space junk tha
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What we're really finding out here is that we need to build an orbital cleanup satellite.
We don't even need a satellite. We can do it from the earth's surface. Just put a big fricken laser on the summit of Mauna Kea or Cerro Toco, point it westward, and shoot it at the leading surface of the debris to slow it down into an unstable orbit.
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That's a lot of wasted energy! How do you plan to power that shit? It would be much easier, cheaper, efficient to just to place a laser in geostationary orbit and blast debris when the sun charges its capacitor bank.
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How is a laser in geostationary orbit cheaper than one on the ground ?
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It converts solar radiation into electricity into laser light, without loss [because no atmosphere].
Who cares about a bit of loss when you can just install 10 times the number of panels here on Earth, and still be cheaper.
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How is a laser in geostationary orbit cheaper than one on the ground ?
It converts solar radiation into electricity into laser light, without loss [because no atmosphere].
The summit of Cerro Toco is over 18,000 ft (5400 m) with near 0% humidity and 0% cloud cover. That solves 90% of the "atmosphere problem".
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"Just put a big fricken laser on the summit of Mauna Kea..."
If the Democrat volcano gods hate astronomy, they are really not going to like this idea.
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New construction on Mauna Kea is already at a standstill because of some Hawaiians who think that telescopes disrespect the great volcano spirit -- but you want to put a massive Laser up there?!?
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New construction on Mauna Kea is already at a standstill because of some Hawaiians who think that telescopes disrespect the great volcano spirit -- but you want to put a massive Laser up there?!?
Satellites are real, though.
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New construction on Mauna Kea is already at a standstill because of some Hawaiians who think that telescopes disrespect the great volcano spirit
Nobody really believes that. They are just looking for a payoff. We just need to bribe the right people and the objections will disappear.
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The suit that stopped construction was brought by native Hawaiians who feel that their state was stolen by the white man and a federal judge gave them enough credence to stop construction. Feel free to attempt to buy off one or the other. I wish I could be there to see the consequences...
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Wouldn't work. We need to breed ill tempered SPACE sea bass !
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What we're really finding out here is that we need to build an orbital cleanup satellite.
Or just use mega maid [youtube.com].
Low-cost is the factor here (Score:3)
A "low-cost" device sent into LEO? So it's being sold on the admittedly astonishingly low cost compared to traditional launch costs.
So any additional costs (such as end-of-life mechanisms designed to put it into a burn trajectory) are going to have a proportionally greater impact on that "low cost" selling point, which means the proponents have a motive to resist such extra mechanisms and costs.
Anything sold on its main benefit being "low cost" will eventually result in a race to the bottom, and the cost-cutting that entails - "hey, our module is lighter and cheaper to get into orbit (because we decided to do without expensive impact shielding/temperature control/whatever)"
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It's a non problem. Cube-sats are deployed to low-earth orbits and burn up after a few years anyway. The space junk problem is for things in higher orbits that take centuries/millennia to de-orbit naturally.
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I've been saying to anyone who'd listen,
I bet you're popular at parties ;P
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If crap I buy from Amazon can have a way to recycle it, then I'm pretty sure the millions we spend on satellites can stand a small increase to cover the costs of cleanup/recovery/de-orbit or whatever.
I know it's a dirty word, but some minor regulations here would solve this problem in short order. That only requires that the countries with launch capability agree to it (yeah, easier said than done).
Restrict orbits (Score:5, Interesting)
A simple solution would be for such satellites to be restricted to orbits with a short expected lifetime.
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The sat networks being mooted recently do exactly that using the lower cost to orbit/higher launch cadence that reusables are making possible.
Instead of sats being so expensive to launch that you perform as few launches as possible and place very expensive high capability sats in mid-level orbits that take centuries to degrade, low-cost reusable launchers perform more launches with less expensive sats that reenter after a few years anyway.
Disadvantages: More sats & more launches are needed.
Advantages: B
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One issue is that the existing debris-reduction standards allow a certain small probability of payload/mission failure per payload. When a single "mission" launches hundreds [oneweb.world] or thousands [spaceflightinsider.com] o
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The problem is that collisions in these short-lived lower orbits can result in debris with enough energy to be kicked up into higher orbits where they'll remain for a longer time.
A collision would be unlikely to create debris with higher speed than the original parts, most of it will go slower, and fall down. Also, the new orbit of the debris would still intersect the old one at the point of impact.
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Deorbiting doesn't take a special module. Most satellites will have small thrusters and some fuel for station keeping that can be used to deorbit. The problem is when the satellite dies before it gets a chance to deorbit itself. With a low orbit you won't have that problem. The fuel is used to keep the satellite up, and when the fuel runs out, it will automatically fall back down.
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That's why you have a standard module with known life expectancy. Why re-engineer a custom foolproof solution for each satellite?
The standard module can die just as well as the rest of the satellite. A low orbit can't fail. Even in the case of a collision, pretty much all the debris will come falling down.
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The sats are intended to work for a long time
As technology advances, they will become obsolete fairly quickly.
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Space-X's plan for low-orbit constellations of less expensive Sats that burn up after a few years means regularly replacing them with newer non-obsolete models.
Re:Restrict orbits (Score:5, Insightful)
Low orbits are _very_suitable_ for broadband networks. It's just that they need to be replenished regularly and up to now, with throw away launchers, using low orbits wasn't _economical_.
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Better to put them in atmosphere-scraping orbits and replace them every couple years....
And mankind continues its great quest... (Score:2)
... to pollute every enviroment it can access. We've done a nice job messing up our atmosphere, the land and sea so the next frontier naturally is space. Who cares if ultimately all this microsatellite crap put up by here today, gone tommorow startups will hang about for decades and cause endless future problems for serious satellites in the future? Profit matters and it matters NOW! Hang any other considerations, right?
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So stop being part of the problem will you? Land, sea, air & space would be too much cleaner without you around to pollute it!
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Pick one of those projects and read the technical details; de-orbiting is built right in.
For example:
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp... [arstechnica.net]
That link is the SpaceX plan. Please refer to page 55 for re-entry estimates. These constellations are destined for orbits that are just outside the thermosphere so the real challenge is keeping them in orbit for the duration their useful life.
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some days it's not worth getting out of bed (Score:1, Insightful)
With all the space junk, and polar rivers flowing backwards, and Al Gore jetting around in his private aircraft, and Muslim maniacs, and Elizabeth Warren, and alligators on golf courses. I'm going back to sleep.
Fiber (Score:2)
How about we just use fiber instead?
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Having more stuff in space = more stuff to hit (Score:2)
This is really going full on glass half empty and it's wrong to single out communications. We are at the point where we are increasing our usage of space resources for all kinds of things. That means there's going to be more stuff up there from everything. It's a sign progress. Who knows the stuff might be able to be harvested and reused in orbit.
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Who knows the stuff might be able to be harvested and reused in orbit.
That activity is on the other side of asteroid mining... well on the other side of it. We're nowhere near there. This can become a problem long before then. Using communications satellites for anything other than getting coverage where it's not physically possible to get a wire is retarded, and I mean that word literally. It is scientifically retarded.
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O'rly
http://www.space.com/27128-dar... [space.com]
There you go satellites that repair other satellites go figure.
Obligatory " I for one welcome our orbiting robotic overlords"
Focus on cleanup (Score:4, Funny)
Scientists need to invent a space vacuum cleaner.....
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So...Mega Maid [youtube.com]?
Who is Krag? (Score:2)
sigh (Score:2)
The Fsck'n companies can't even expand manage and compete in their terrestrial areas, there is no way they should be allowed access to orbit. The lag associated with satellite internet access is awful. Why should we let them have access and compete with Hughes net when they won't compete with their land bound opposition. Screw AT&T, Spectrum, Rogers, and Shaw.
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Only retarded capitalists deny something that can save money due secondary reasons.
Make recycling satellites profitable, and you will have several corporations doing it.
But don't make it TOO profitable, or you will get freaking space wars over junk satellites.
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Only retarded capitalists deny something that can save money due secondary reasons.
You're ignoring that it's not the same capitalist who will pay the cost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality [wikipedia.org]
If I launch a satellite in a cheap 'junk-heavy' way, it's not me who it harms.
Reckless Endagerment (Score:2)
Of course, it will be you — if there is enough of it left to hurt somebody on Earth upon falling, that's enough to determine, who launched it. Reckless Endangerment [wikipedia.org] is a crime. Criminal and civil penalties will soon follow.
Unless, of course, it was launched by a government organization, which is immune to prosecution. Figure that into your KKKapitali$t-bashing next time...
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Criminal penalties for a CEO ... bwahahahahahaha what century do you think this is ? We haven't expected corporations to actually FOLLOW the law, and been steadily getting rid of every law we made for them that they don't follow anyway, for decades ... you think they'll CARE ?
Their sum will simply be: is the fine likely to be larger than the cost of not causing this problem ? No (it never is). The end.
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Yes, criminal and civil penalties. It happens all the time [epa.gov]. Like these:
Now you list the folks prosecuted for anything in relation to space-related disasters — such as the Challenger Shuttle explosion [wikipedia.org]... Oh, wait — evidence is not really your thing, is it? You s
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ALL the predictions by climate scientists have been successful - the people who tell you they haven't are lying to you through the simple expedient of pretending they were predicting the WEATHER and then pointing out that every so often the weather doesn't agree with the predictions (which is not surprising since it was never what they predicted).
Now the DEGREE of accuracy of prediction has not been constant, it has been steadily improving from -the ballpark has been getting smaller and the margins of error
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-1 Offtopic. Wrong thread.
Citations missing, as is customary with silentcoder.
Yeah, yeah...
Meanwhile, the request for citations of government employees prosecuted for governmental space-disasters remains unanswered...
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I don't need to give citations for claims I never made. I said absolutely nothing whatsoever about government space disasters and so I owe no citations for any claims about it.
I simply stated the fact that the law is no deterrent to evil, harmful or outright murderous behaviour by wealthy corporations because it lacks any real teeth and if ever a law is actually inconvenient those nice republican congressmen they bought will get rid of it for them.
More-over your analogy is false - there has been exactly ZER
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There are no other options: space exploration will be done either by the evil KKKapitali$t$ or by the omni-scient and benevolent government workers.
Earlier in this thread it was alleged, that the former will not pay attention to the dangers of the space-junk injuring folks on the ground because, as Wootery wrote [slashdot.org], it will not be the (reckless) capitalist, that will bear the costs of t
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People who are attached to the project have voluntarily accepted the risks - unlike everybody else. How does that NOT make sense ?
I again will not give citations for things that I didn't claim, have no knowledge off, do not care about and are not relevant.
>But the only alternative is it being by done government
Not its not - the alternative is making sure that the law is such that CEOs lie awake at night terrified of the consequences if their company harms somebody and makes damn sure it never harms ANYBO
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They may have accepted the risk, but it still illegal to recklessly endanger them.
I explained in detail, why it is relevant.
Ah, so you do agree, that space-exploration should be done by Capitalist enterprises, good. Wootery's comment
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>They may have accepted the risk, but it still illegal to recklessly endanger them.
None of the examples you cited had any evidence of recklessness that I know about. But nevertheless there is a fundamental difference between harm coming to somebody who was part of the project, had accepted and agreed to the risks - and harm coming to an unwitting third party. The latter is significantly more severe - which is ironic since our legal system tends to treat it as less so. Externalities hardly ever lead to pr
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Bzzzz! Hold it right there. You can have your opinions, but you can't have your own facts. You did dispute this twice higher up in this thread, when you stated that CEOs are "never" held accountable and then softened up a little bit by changing that to "they aren't held accountable as much" (...as someone else).
Because wether or not CEOs are held accoun
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>You did dispute this twice higher up in this thread, when you stated that CEOs are "never" held accountable and then softened up a little bit by changing that to "they aren't held accountable as much"
No, you thought my statement was false since we were using very different definitions of "accountable" - mine was based on the fundamental principle of equality before the law. I clarified the terminology as I used it - and within my use my statement is true, even Madoff wasn't held accountable by my defini
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-1 Offtopic. Wrong thread.
Well...... you asked him, after all.
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-1 Offtopic. Wrong thread.
Well...... you asked him, after all.
I asked him to reply in the other thread, duh...
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Yeah, "an" EPA to police the entire planet's upper atmosphere and the vacuum beyond... Seriously?
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No. Don't be silly. Right now, no-one is worried about getting sued for leaving space-junk. That proves my point.
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How do you know?
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Because they're still doing it. It's clearly not working as a deterrent.
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Who are "they" and "what" are they doing?
No one — in the 60+ years history of humanity's space-exploration so far — has been injured by space debris [space.com]. Either it is not really a significant threat or something is working as a deterrent.
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Who are "they" and "what" are they doing?
Well, rather obviously, 'they' is everyone who contributes to space junk, and 'what' is their contribution to space junk. Do keep up.
No one — in the 60+ years history of humanity's space-exploration so far — has been injured by space debris
You're really going to try downplaying the space junk problem? Fine, I'll quote Wikipedia at you. [wikipedia.org]
As of December 2016 there were 5 satellite collisions with space waste.
So sure, no humans have yet been harmed. Good job cherry-picking.
Apparently though there really is a legal deterrent these days in at least some countries. [wikipedia.org] Wikipedia doesn't comment on how effective this has been, but even if it's working great I guess it doesn't help with the exi
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When arguing, it is best to be explicit and avoid pronouns — to prevent both unexpected confusion and deliberate traps.
?? Who else are we talking about? Rabbits? Fish? Of course, it is about humans.
Good, good — if only you did this research before going on the ant
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Do you believe in economic injury? The problem with space debris is not that it's going to fall on my house or my foot. The problem is that it will damage other satellites. Satellites are inherently expensive (if only in cost to orbit), and therefore valuable (or they wouldn't be launched) and space debris can therefore destroy valuable property.
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Of course, it is about humans.
Smashing satellites is also a problem, no? But david_thornley already made this point.
if only you did this research before going on the anti-Capitalism crusade.
I don't think you're in any place to be smug. I remind you that you never did any research. You had no idea there were comparatively young laws on the books, specific to space debris.
My point stands, though: if someone — a human — is injured by space-junk, it can easily be traced to the original owners, who can then be sued/prosecuted by the victim(s).
Don't be ridiculous. If your crew/space-station/space-ship/satellite gets smashed to pieces by floating metal in space, how exactly are you going to figure out whose floating metal it was?
And suppose you somehow manage to figure out it was the
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Re:Recycle! (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah OK, so when the thing is worn-out and obsolete you propose to...recycle it somewhere, like on the ISS?
You know that one person-day of work in LEO costs MINIMUM 7.5 million bucks, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
That buys you a fuckton of cubesats & launches, space cadet.
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Where do you propose to find the Delta V to safely recover all these sats, hmmm?
They're not a couple escaped helium ballons from for birthday trapped on your ceiling waiting to be grabbed, they're flying about faster than bullets in differing and often completely opposing orbits and there is no Neo from the Matrix around to wave his hand and make them all magically stop for you.
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Geocentrists that believed the Earth was the center of the universe were popular once. A few hundred years later, not so much. I personally hope that my descendants will live & work in space but that doesn't mean I do.
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They're not a couple escaped helium ballons from for birthday trapped on your ceiling waiting to be grabbed, they're flying about faster than bullets in differing and often completely opposing orbits and there is no Neo from the Matrix around to wave his hand and make them all magically stop for you.
We've had our eye on you. We thought you might be the one, but we can see that you're not ready yet.
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Oh stop procrastinating & gimme the red pill already
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Space is big. Mind-bogglingly big. You may think it's a long way to your....
Anyway, the satellites you'd want to recycle are a very few satellites in a large volume of space. There's no single place where they hang around, ready to be harvested. There's billions and billions of cubic miles in LEO space, and maybe a million objects larger than two millimeters. That's thousands of cubic miles per fleck. It's probably going to be more concentrated near the lower part of LEO, but it's still incredibly
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The whole concept recycling old satellites is beyond crazy. All you get is a bunch of worn old scrap for insane cost. And a factory still needs raw materials, so you save nothing in launch costs.
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It could be free, if time isn't much of a factor - you could use radiation thrust for example, so you don't need to burn fuel to get to where you're going. It's slow as all hell - but it works, hell some satelites like Voyager used radiation thrust as a primary station-keeping tool.
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Now I know it's a *horror* for your standard capitalist these days, but what about, like, PLANNING (omfg, he's said the *P* word!) a bit ahead?
How do you propose to "plan"? We don't have any use for recycled materials in orbit. There's a lot of infrastructure that would need to be in place first before it makes sense to recycle.
Think about some standards which would make those things as recyclable as possible (like trying to keep a set of agreed-upon materials, standards for easy deconstructibility -- all things which, you know, *might* help us down here too), working towards a LEO factory of the future?
Let us note that those sorts of recycling standards routinely create a big mess on Earth, including lower quality electronics (such as tin whiskers) and more effort spent recycling than would be saved in materials. I don't see the point of having expensive satellites follow some recycling standard that isn't justified, low
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Unlikely. Launch capability is quite a step from ORBITAL launch capability. We have had solid-fuel rockets (gunpowder based) since the 13th century. We didn't get to liquid fueled rockets until 1926. From there to the first manmade objects to reach space were German V2 rockets during world war 2 - twenty years later. It took another twenty years for Sputnik 1 to become the first manmade object to actually get into orbit (and it only stayed there a few months). The oldest object in space is Vanguard 1 which
Re: North Korea's ultimate deterrent? (Score:2)
North Korea is currently suborbital launch, also it is expensive. The key here is between companies like spacex and satellite miniturisation are getting launch costs down to the point where it would be feasible having lots of low earth orbit satellites rather than a dozen in geosynchronous orbit. LEO comments gives better latency but one needs a lot more as you need multiple in the sky at any time as they are constantly moving relative to the user. Before now such constellations have been the work of large
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So just how much damage would it cause if a certain unpopular nation with launch capability lofted a few tonnes of grit and ball bearings into orbit, packed around some high explosives, and set it off?
Sounds like the whole plot of Gravity.
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Educated people know better than to try and drink salt water.