'Gas Station in Space' - A New Proposal to Convert Space Junk Into Rocket Fuel (theguardian.com) 27
"An Australian company is part of an international effort to recycle dangerous space junk into rocket fuel — in space," reports the Guardian.
Slashdot reader votsalo shared their report (which also looks at some of the other companies working on the problem of space debris). South Australian company Neumann Space has developed an "in-space electric propulsion system" that can be used in low Earth orbit to extend the missions of spacecraft, move satellites, or de-orbit them. Now Neumann is working on a plan with three other companies to turn space junk into fuel for that propulsion system... Another U.S. company, Cislunar, is developing a space foundry to melt debris into metal rods. And Neumann Space's propulsion system can use those metal rods as fuel — their system ionises the metal which then creates thrust to move objects around orbit.
Chief executive officer Herve Astier said when Neumann was approached to be part of a supply chain to melt metal in space, he thought it was a futuristic plan, and would not be "as easy as it looks".
"But they got a grant from NASA so we built a prototype and it works," he said...
Astier says it is still futuristic, but now he can see that it's possible. "A lot of people are putting money into debris. Often it's to take it down into the atmosphere and burn it up. But if it's there and you can capture it and reuse it, it makes sense from a business perspective, because you're not shipping it up there," he said.
"It's like developing a gas station in space."
Slashdot reader votsalo shared their report (which also looks at some of the other companies working on the problem of space debris). South Australian company Neumann Space has developed an "in-space electric propulsion system" that can be used in low Earth orbit to extend the missions of spacecraft, move satellites, or de-orbit them. Now Neumann is working on a plan with three other companies to turn space junk into fuel for that propulsion system... Another U.S. company, Cislunar, is developing a space foundry to melt debris into metal rods. And Neumann Space's propulsion system can use those metal rods as fuel — their system ionises the metal which then creates thrust to move objects around orbit.
Chief executive officer Herve Astier said when Neumann was approached to be part of a supply chain to melt metal in space, he thought it was a futuristic plan, and would not be "as easy as it looks".
"But they got a grant from NASA so we built a prototype and it works," he said...
Astier says it is still futuristic, but now he can see that it's possible. "A lot of people are putting money into debris. Often it's to take it down into the atmosphere and burn it up. But if it's there and you can capture it and reuse it, it makes sense from a business perspective, because you're not shipping it up there," he said.
"It's like developing a gas station in space."
The right thing to do (Score:3)
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Pick-n-Pull in space.
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Plan proposed long before eBay: https://youtu.be/0cpbN_LSRwQ [youtu.be]
Article describes no path to glory (Score:3)
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Pretty much any metal used on a spacecraft will burn if you turn it into powder and immerse it in liquid oxygen.
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There are rockets that are designed to burn metal, including dealing with the "solid" (not so much at the temperatures of an efficient exhaust) oxides. You're always going to have to acquire oxygen from somewhere. Using on-orbit fuel saves you hauling that up in addition to the oxygen. The real problem is that you have to chase down the fuel.
They seem to be talking about an ion drive though. You don't burn the metal, you ionize it. The ionization energies of most metals are somewhat similar, and considerabl
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That's why it's called a research project.
Re:Article describes no path to glory (Score:4, Insightful)
Starship Economics (Score:4, Insightful)
If Starship lives up to it's design, the cost of putting stuff in space will drop to the point where these efforts won't make any economic sense. The focus on space junk will be to create small satellites that can attach to junk and push down into the atmosphere to burn up. They could build something like the Starlink satellites with some sort of epoxy they could deploy to connect to junk. They could launch hundreds of these at a time to clean out all the junk in similar orbits. A more powerful version of the same thing could be used to attack enemy satellites instead of just blowing them up.
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Sticky foam, but for space junk.
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/44... [osti.gov]
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Whatever they use, they have to be very careful not to have any of it break off and stay in orbit. Perhaps some way of welding the tug to the junk would work. Anway, I expect that is a relatively simple problem compared to everything else involved.
The haven't finalized the final exterior design (Score:2)
Seems like a way to power a collection craft only (Score:2)
I can imagine that designing a debris collection craft to utilize the debris it collects as fuel would be wise though it does increase the difficulty of designing the debris collection craft. Basically, it couldn't go with any of the sticky substance approaches that don't require exactly matching the orbit of the debris. All debris collection would be through easing up to it, grabbing it, and putting it into some sort of chamber to start processing.
But, to then actually get the processed material into an or
Re: Seems like a way to power a collection craft o (Score:2)
Pretty sure we did this already,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
Not really practical (Score:4, Insightful)
Separate issue is that the biggest problem is not the small number of large object, but the very large number of small objects. This system would need to maneuver to pick very small objects and its hard to imagine that being practical.
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Worse - it's lots of very small objects that will each require the capture craft to make a significant change in delta V to get close enough in velocity to capture them without having a bunch more small objects get blown off your spacecraft.
If you were using some kind of sticky foam for capture then you might need less velocity matching for things the size of a fleck of paint, but it doesn't seem like that would allow for very easy processing of the captured material after - and I doubt any foam capture
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In reality you need some kind of long range effector which will enable you to slow down incoming junk. So far all I've been able to imagine with modern technology is a laser that slows stuff down by vaporizing part of it. This has obvious problems but seems vaguely feasible as the problem of aiming lasers at other stuff in orbit is already solved or being solved for the purpose of inter-satellite communications. However, the unpredictability of the resulting movement could make that potential solution compl
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Not entirely. The problem is a combination of many small objects and a number of large objects that have the potential to become even more small objects when they encounter other small objects.
If we can keep the number of large objects down, we can limit the number of small objects growing. Especially large derelict spacecraft that cannot be steered away from known debris.
This is why huge satellite constellations in higher orbits are a bad idea, and should be placed in as low an orbit as possible. Air-breat
Rods? (Score:1)
great, except... (Score:3)
Another U.S. company, Cislunar, is developing a space foundry to melt debris into metal rods.
That's great when the debris is made out of compatible metals. But some space junk is whole spacecraft, while other bits are literally just paint chips. This seems equally difficult to asteroid mining, because you've got to somehow separate constituent components.
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Let's try actually looking at the problem (Score:2)
First let's categorise the objects and orbits we're interested in.
Objects in low orbits are likely to get enough atmospheric drag to find their own way home over a few decades. So they're not obvious candidates for capture
Objects less than 10cm will be hard to track and capture, so this idea is unlikely to help with them. Which is a shame because they're a real problem.
That leaves us with big objects in higher orbits, old satellites and the stuff that has been knocked off them. As has already been observed,