Just in case you are an astronaut and need something to worry about, according to NASA there are 18,000 pieces of space junk the size of a basketball or larger right now orbiting the earth. That’s 18,000 chances to slam into the International Space Station (ISS), bump into a U.S. Space Shuttle, or plow into any of a number of satellites in low Earth orbit. Twice the ISS has had to be moved to avoid potential collisions and one other time when it couldn’t be moved the crew huddled in their Soyuz taxicab for danger to pass, with one such near-miss taking place just last week, which is what inspired this column.
I say it is time to clean up all that junk.
Space junk means everything from rocket upper stages weighing several tons down to the odd wrench lost in space by space-walking astro- or cosmonauts. This stuff that got to space more or less by accident is now torquing above the ionosphere at around 17,000 miles-per-hour, which would be worse if nearly all the junk wasn’t going in the the same direction. Friction and gravity will eventually bring all the space junk back to earth, but that could take centuries. So I say simply to avoid any more space junk stories in USA Today, we ought to find a way to get rid of the stuff.
It won’t be easy. We can’t shoot it down, because even if we are accurate enough to hit the junk all we are likely to accomplish is blasting it into lots more smaller pieces that will need tracking. We could shoot it with high-powered lasers, but unless we were able to vaporize the debris completely, all we’d be doing is boring very nice holes in it.
Nope, we have to gather the stuff and bring it back to Earth. But how?
I propose a space garbage scow.
My garbage scow would use a very fine net to capture the debris and hold it. The net could be built from kevlar, but this week I’m making everything from carbon nanotubes, thanks, so that’s what we’ll use. Nanotubes have the highest strength-to-weight ratio of any material and would allow us to make a very large, very light weight net. Our point here is to make the net light rather than strong, since our capture speeds will be low and the lack of gravity ought to make it easy to keep the junk tethered together. The point of making it strong, then, is so it can be light enough to be big enough to maybe gather all the junk — all 18,000 pieces — into a single scow.
I imagine a seine purse-style net, if you know your commercial fishing. Launch the net into an inclined polar orbit generally higher than the space junk to be harvested. The polar orbit will ensure that eventually the scow will go over every spot on the Earth as the planet rotates below, but it also means the scow will eventually cross the path of every piece of space junk.
Here’s where we need an algorithm and a honking big computer, because this is a 3-D geometry problem with more than 18,000 variables. Our algorithm determines the most efficient path to use for gathering all 18,000 pieces of space junk.
I haven’t yet derived this algorithm, but I have some idea what it would look like. We’d start in a high orbit, above the space junk, because we could trade that altitude for speed as needed, simply by flying lower, trading potential energy for kinetic.
Dragging the net behind a little unmanned spacecraft my idea would be to go past each piece of junk in such a way that it not only lodges permanently in the net, but that doing so adds kinetic energy (hitting at shallow angles to essentially tack like a sailboat off the debris). But wait, there’s more! You not only have to try to get energy from each encounter, it helps if — like in a game of billiards or pool — each encounter results in an effective ricochet sending the net in the proper trajectory for its next encounter. Rinse and repeat 18,000 times.
It won’t always be possible, of course, to gain energy from each encounter, but that’s why we start in a higher orbit, so as energy is inevitably lost it can be replenished by moving to a lower orbit.
By the same token I think we would logically start with smaller bits of space junk so the net would gain mass steadily over time, then do the same again at each lower altitude. Eventually the net would have corralled hundreds of tons of debris, carrying it down into the atmosphere where atmospheric friction would eventually burn it all up in a spectacular visual display that would create a thin ring of fire all around the Earth.
It’s a crazy idea, sure, but it could work. For all the worrying we do about space junk hitting astronauts or rockets as they launch, we could pretty easily get rid of it all. Small to big, high to low, all it would take is time. How much time? If the scow orbits every 90 minutes and it takes an average of a dozen orbits to set up the capture of each piece of space junk, that’s 18,000 * 90 * 12 = 19.4 million minutes or 36.9 years to get it all.
Funny, that’s about how long it took to put all that crap up there in the first place.
>>the scow will eventually cross the path of every piece of space junk.
How do you ensure it doesn’t also cross the paths of the several hundred indispensable satellites up there too? It seems that the fuel needed to adjust its course to avoid such disasters would make it FAR too heavy.
Or is that somehow in the ricochet algorithm too? Somehow I doubt the US military is willing to trust an algorithm to keep a careening scow away from its birds.
Cringly, you been drinking again?
Wow. When i was 10 i though working as a garbageman would be cool. Who ever knew you could one day get a job as a garbage-spaceman….or is that a space-garbageman??
Oh, and the part about “atmospheric friction would eventually burn it all up in a spectacular visual display that would create a thin ring of fire all around the Earth”, no evil pollutants or anything involved in that which would come tumbling back to earth, right?? no bad side effects??
We want to keep the idea green. People like green.
The Traveling Salesman Problem is already NP-hard, and you want to make it worse by assuming moving targets and adding in deflections? Ow! I won’t be alive long enough for that to calculate even a significant percentage of the path.
> The Traveling Salesman Problem is already NP-hard
It’s not a traveling salesman problem because we don’t care at all about visiting them in minimum time – we just have to visit each one, one after the other. Minus the orbital mechanics, that’s a trivial algorithm.
Except it effectively is very much like a traveling salesman problem except you’re aiming for a minimum ENERGY path. In fact realistically there are probably several constraints on the path. It would be significantly harder than the TS problem IMHO. Best case it would still be some form of NP problem. Of course a PRACTICAL solution might be arrived at in a feasible amount of time, but it surely would be the most complex problem in orbital mechanics anyone has ever tried to solve.
The real question I have is why haul all that stuff back down to earth once you’ve collected it? It cost a heck of a lot to get it up there in the first place. Instead of throwing it in the proverbial trash dump how about some recycling? Now THATs green! 😉
Actually it is even worse: you have to approach each piece of garbage at a relative velocity of a few meters per second.
Which is of course impossible if the trash is in a generally circular low Earth orbit and your scow starts from a high altitude orbit.
I’m pretty sure this post was a joke. Well… I was laughing, anyway, until I started reading all the serious comments. :~)
NP?
I think this kind of stuff is exactly the way we can start privatizing space. I don’t think a “large scow” is the way to go.
But I can see NASA contracting with private firms that claim they can do this kind of work, using a variety of rockets (or other means) to get into orbit, a variety of vehicle types to capture the junk, and various means of disposing of it (tow and throw into the atmosphere, deflecting an orbit to decay faster, etc.)
A contractor would sign up with NASA or a foreign space agency to find certain pieces of junk being tracked, bids on the cost to remove it, etc. Company B contracts to do other pieces, etc. Large pieces that couldn’t easily be guaranteed to burn up would have different costs than the basketball sized pieces that do.
The aerospace and robotics industries grow creating interesting concepts for vehicle design would be proposed with a variety of buyers, some of those buyers being manufacturers of rockets themselves (looking for a way to prove their rocket so that it could be later used for launching satellites as an example). Competition arises to build the cheapest, most effective garbage truck.
Some of this technology could be sold back to NASA, the ESA, the Japanese, India, whatever, so that probes or satellites being launched for scientific purposes would be “self-recycling”. Regulations could be drafted so that if you want to put a satellite up for a commercial purpose (making maps for Google, for example), you have to build into your plan a way to not leave it as junk when the mission is complete (either you dispose of it yourself of have a contract with somebody who can).
I like it. I think it is a great X-prize competition – build a craft that can locate a piece of space junk and dispose of it. Winner gets the first contract with NASA. There would be “black areas” – areas where no craft is allowed to try to get junk for security reasons (it’s not like where these satellites are is exactly a mystery)
Joe
This would entail a huge amount of redundant work and failures, which would be extremely inefficient. Additionally, every mistake by these less than experienced companies will further exacerbate the problem.
How do you find an “experienced” company. I can’t even find an experienced contractor to waterproof my house (SD, CA).
People may like green but they love fire. I suggest the space scow be designed to grab as much junk in orbit and, at regular intervals, incinerate it with atmospheric reenty.
The polar orbit thing won’t work, as most of the junk is in equatorial orbit and the net effect [sic] would be for a piece of junk to t-bone your net perpendicularly at 17,000 miles-per-hour, or 34 times the speed of a bullet.
Poof! Big hole in your Kevlar bulletproof net. You’d need to travel in almost the same exact path and speed so that the relative velocities are low enough to actually catch the item.
It’s all about dissapating energy. What if instead of a Kevlar blanket, you put a block of ice in front of a speeding fragment? The imact would vaporize some of the ice, and blast the rest into tiny fragments, which would submlimate away fairly quickly. This should take away enough energy from the fragment to either capture or de-orbit it.
I think that for this to work, you’d need something like a large, sticky ball of some sort of reinforced aerogel: something to absorb the energy of the collision, and prevent fragments from bouncing off or passing all the way through.
“each encounter results in an effective ricochet”
I think would only work if the piece encountered was not captured but rather, deflected by a collision (very controlled we hope) that nudges the junk into a faster decaying orbit while imparting energy/direction change to the scow.
Hey I like this idea! Instead of being a garbage scow my device is a bumper car! This actually sounds more effective to me. Bravo!
Bob
Could they be small/cheap/fast devices that could be launched into the right orbit with a railgun, say one climbing Mr. Kilimanjaro? If they were already put into the same altitude orbit as the target junk, they would only need enough fuel to match up with the junk, ram it (in the gentle, space-travel way), and then de-orbit itself.
How about an X-Prize to mass-produce these at $10K a unit? Even with the rail-gun construction you’re probably under the cost of an Ares V launch.
For the paint chip types though, maybe a giant kevlar/aerogel block spacecraft that’s slowly, always mopping up.
Okay, so I’m looking at my Roomba. So if we disable the cliff sensors, lash it to an ICBM…
First of all, I propose that any such space garbage collector should be named “Katamari”.
Second, if your calculations as to the rate of garbage collection bear any semblance to reality, you’re going to need more than one of these things, otherwise your rate of cleaning isn’t going to match your rate of pollution, is it? The cleaning will only slow down the rate at which the problem is getting worse in that case.
Also, I wonder whether various space agencies would be willing to actually pay per piece of space junk recovered. There’s an interesting thought: put a bounty on space junk, and let the market sort it out!
Katamari
You nailed the name.
No one solution is going to get the job done. The best disposal technique for any random orbiting bolt most likely is substantially different than the best technique for disposing of an intact boost stage. Also it seems to me you would get the most bang for your buck (pun intended) by going after the largest objects first, to reduce the chance of them banging into each other (https://www.space.com/news/090211-satellite-collision.html)
and spawning hundreds or thousands of new fragments. This is a real opportunity for private launch companies to prove themselves. Create a space micro-tug that can be launched, grab onto a spent booster or derelict satellite, and deploy a space parachute of sorts, inducing enough drag to bring the object down. Thus private companies can prove their spacefaring capabilities without risking a $200 million payload.
Trying to gather the junk together is the wrong approach. Billiard balls ricochet because they do not stick together. If you capture the junk then no matter what tricky angle you capture it you will end up with the same sum of momentum of your vehicle and the debris. You can get a little of the effect you want by converting some of the linear momentum into angular momentum but then you will be tumbling. If you stop the tumbling you mostly end up back where you started. Even if you could solve all of these problems, having a large mass of junk re-enter at once poses a threat to us humans on the ground. Remember skylab?
Your billiard ball concept was right. You would be better off deflecting the debris towards earth at an angle such that your vehicle gains momentum in a useful direction. Since it does not really matter at what speed or direction the debris heads towards earth you have a lot of wiggle room. In order to keep things feasible and to prevent making more debris you should capture the debris at reasonably low closing velocities and then hurl it towards earth.
Bob, it is Friday the 13th, not April Fools. You had me going there for a second!
Speaking of very old space junk…
The Soviet ambassador stood up in the U.N. General Assembly to announce: We have sent a Soyuz with two cosmonauts and they have circled the Moon!
Wild applause!
The U.S.ambassador jumped up and announced that an Apollo spacecraft had carried two astronauts to a successful landing on the Moon!
Wild cheers!
When things had quieted down, the Italian ambassador got to his feet and said: “Italy has launched a Fiat rocketship with two men and it is headed for a landing on the Sun!”
Dead silence.
After a few stunned moments, the Polish ambassador half stood up and asked, with this index finger pointing up: “How can you land on the Sun? It is millions of degrees!”
“That’sa OK, we gonna land at night.”
[I got both sides of the family in that one. :^) ]
I didn’t see the Cringe do the thought experiment where he has calculated the volume is cubic miles, of the space junk zone… followed by a calculation of how many orbits (length of time) it would take to just sweep it once with a certain size aperture of kevlar net … without paying attention to whether any space junk was caught. We’ll all be long dead, I suspect, before the end of the first sweep.
Cringe knows he can’t carry enough fuel for directed maneuvering, so he has to rely over time on slingshoting to get back into higher orbit which requires energy even with no change in angular momentum.
A practical solution would be a blessing.
Sounds like a cool game!
About forty years ago I asked a NASA engineer about this problem. His answer was that it will never be a problem because space is too huge.
So given this sort of “thinking”, it seems to me that what will happen in the near future is that people will stop being sent into space, as it will be too dangerous for them. Next, the lack of fuel and the other problems we are not doing anything much about here on Earth will mean that sending things into space will slowly end. After 30 or so years of not sending stuff up there and making a mess, we will once again have a clear sky in space. Afterall, we seemed to get by OK before we sent stuff into space, so it seems to me all we have to do is remember a few basic things about living on this earth together without messing it all up.
Burn it up? No! That is not junk, it is salvage. There are 10s? 100s of tons of high grade processed metal already almost out of the earth’s gravity well. Collect it and boost it to one of the Lagrange points. Set up a smelting mirror. Bam! Cheap materials for the beginnings of an industrial facility.
Brilliant. This is by far the most elegant solution to the pollution I’ve seen here. Not sure of the economics (money and energy), but I like where your head’s at.
Cringely at his best!
Don’t get me wrong, I come for the commentary but what keeps me coming
back are the tinfoil harddrive, lunar x prize, USS Garbage Scowl pieces!
Keep it coming.
Not to mention the next episode of Neard TV.
How about a really big electro-magnet?
Um, quite a few problems here. First off, as Michael Long says counter orbital velocities are incredible, check out the pictures of a .2 mm paint chip impacting the shuttle https://www.aero.org/capabilities/cords/debris-risks.html
Next off it’s nearly impossible to detect objects smaller than a basketball from the earth, much less determine the orbital elements. The best bet is optical detection from orbit which is quite hard, to say the least, particularly when it is headed at you at insane velocities.
Not only are the velocities insane but the volume of cis-lunar space is equally insane.
Next off, the scheduling problem, it’s 6 dimensional (the Keplerian elements) and involves insane distances and velocities.
Of course keep in mind that we are ignoring the cumulative angular momentum of each chunk (nothing to damp it out in a vacuum).
But I could be wrong, just get the Two Line Elements (TLEs) for the larger than 10 cm chunks of the FENGYUN 1C (Chinese ASAT experiment) here ( http://celestrak.com/NORAD/elements/1999-025.txt ) and work out the orbital dynamics for your collection system. A trivial exercise I’m sure.
Of course, if your approach works, it’s also the ultimate ASAT weapon with a single tug having the potential to de-orbit EVERY satellite a nation has in short order.
Yeah, Bob’s been drinking kool-aid this week . . . but his musings have got me musing. A net wouldn’t work, but how do those pretty “divs” appear in Saturn’s rings? Jupiter has rings too. So it seems an orbiting body can clean up a band somewhere beneath it, by accelerating some particles in the band out, and decelerating others in, just with gravity. Call it the gravitational “mine sweeper” – it would probably have to be quite big to work.
Bob! Have you filed the patent application yet? If not, WAIT!! I’ve got a few ideas to improve it, and I’ll go halves on the royalties.
I agree it has to be in a crossing orbit to the stuff it catches, so it’s not going at the exact same velocity as the junk, but it’s gotta be in a nearly equatorial orbit so for most stuff the difference in velocity is only a km/s or so when stuff hits the net. The net has to be strung on a rigid hoop, or the first object it catches will make it look like a gunny sack with a cannonball in it. Anything that hits in in a spot different that the centroid of mass is going to start it spinning, so I propose three hoops with nets on perpendicular axes, and the nets are slack at the hoops so the centrifugal force on the caught objects causes them to move to the periphery of the nets, where conservation of angular momentum keeps the spin induced by the captured object to the minimum possible. The tug engine has to be in the center of the net assembly is a gimbal mount so its attitude is somewhat independent of the nets’ spin, and trackable, so when sufficient junk is accumulated a rocket blast slows it to fall out of orbit.
We should get a contract for a demonstration project of 10 units, with small nets only about 1 km in diameter, with contract provisions for 400 or so more following proof of concept.
Maybe there is stimulus money available for a cost plus contract with a mere 15% profit margin. We will, as inventors, be compensated just like bankers, say $40M for you and only $35M for me.
Hey, it’s gotta be a better investment than forclosed mortgages, right?
Call when you want to meet for lunch and hash out the details.
The concept is not a lot different than the iRobot I have to clean my floors.
An intelligent random pattern that amazingly manages to sweep up all the garbage bits in less time than you’d expect.
Another great Cringley idea. Do it, please.
A few tonnes of metal in low earth orbit would have commercial value. I propose a little welding factory on the side of the scow to weld up a few hab units. Could pay for itself.
Maybe it would stay up forever like a rag and bone man collecting junk and selling units.
Longtime reader and fan of the column. I happen to have a background in this as a former US military officer who worked from 2004-2007 in the unit that tracks everything in Earth orbit. I now work for a non-profit foundation that deals with this and other issues concerning the long term sustainability of space.
I appreciate that Cringley is talking about this issue but I fear that the author lacks a lot of the background knowledge about the topic (and orbital mechanics in general). The “garbage scow” as outlined here simply won’t work. Primarily because of the velocity issue – as someone else mentioned, outside of geostationary orbit the debris is all moving in different inclinations and directions and the “garbage scow” would need to maneuver and match velocities with every piece. It’s like being given a sharp stick and a bag and being asked to pick up all the garbage from NYC to LA on foot.
The space debris problem is absolutely a huge concern, and there is an emerging consensus that we will at some point need to remove some debris. However, there is still not a technically or economically feasible way to do it (the International Academy of Astronautics is finishing up a report on this) And there are huge legal and policy issues that need to be dealt with even when the technical piece is solved.
For example, the country that placed an object in orbit still has sovereignty over it. So an American “garbage scow” that goes around picking up Russian, Chinese, and French space debris is a big no-no. And there is no accepted definition over what is “debris” and what is still a valuable payload. Maybe one of those dead satellites was really just in hibernation. What’s the difference between a “garbage scow” and an anti-satellite weapon?
People are working on this problem. Recent studies have shown that removing as few as 10 or 20 of the “worst” objects each year could be enough to stabilize the debris population. That is where the international community is currently focused. There is also a big DARPA/NASA conference on this topic coming up in Chantilly, VA 8-10 December.
I would be happy to answer any questions that commenters or the author has on this topic. You can contact me at bweeden AT swfound DOT org.
More info:
https://www.secureworldfoundation.org/index.php?id=14&page=Mitigation_of_Orbital_Debris
https://www.secureworldfoundation.org/index.php?id=167&page=Staff_publications_and_interviews#brian
EXCELLENT IDEA!!!
Like any visionary idea of this type, of course some adjustments would be needed, and of course the final product could change significantly from the original vision, but the *concept* it’s what’s important here. I think it’s a sound idea.
I only wish some visionary people with influence in the right places read this suggestion and hires Cringely. I know I would…
I like the idea of salvage, if the junk launchers squawk too much, offer them a discount on whatever you make from it.
Why collect it? Why not push all the junk into the atmosphere and let it burn up in reentry. Cannot a large magnetic field nudge these pieces of space junk into a trajectory of falling into the atmoshere? As you say these pieces are already falling into the atmoshere can’t we help them along witha little push?
I’m assuming the threat to the space station only comes from the objects traveling in the “wrong” direction. At a given altitude, objects traveling in the same direction would be going the same speed. Therefore, they would be motionless relative to each other.
This means the problem can be greatly reduced. Just pick up the objects traveling in the wrong direction. And have the UN negotiate an agreement for future satellites to follow a uniform trajectory.
“At a given altitude, objects traveling in the same direction would be going the same speed.”
That’s only if they are in circular orbits with the same inclination. If they are in slightly elliptical orbits or are inclined (as virtually all are) the velocities will differ at the same altitude and collisions are possible and statistically probable.
It’s not just inclination – you can have two objects in circular orbits with identical altitude and identical inclination collide head on – 14 Km/s in low earth orbit.
Mr. Cringley has no idea what he’s talking about here – from basic orbit dynamics and geometry, to what velocities on the order of Km/s really mean. For reference, a rifle bullet typically has a muzzle velocity around 1 Km/s A satellite in low earth orbit has a velocity of about 7 Km/s. Now recall that kinetic energy goes as the square of the velocity – so that little chunk of debris the weight of a rifle bullet coming straight at you in LEO will have almost 200x the energy of a rifle bullet.
So you’ll have to essentially rendezvous with every piece for even your “billiard balls” solution to not end up with a bright flash and thousands more pieces of debris.
Which means alot of orbital maneuvers. Check out how much a plane change costs in dV and get back to me.
You don’t really need to capture the debris, you just need to alter the orbit a small bit so that it contacts the atmosphere sooner rather than later (hopefully in days rather than in centuries). The first significant drag from the atmosphere will seal its doom.
The net idea is good. Maybe an unconventional net. I can image a net that deflects and at the same time adds something that makes tracking the object easier (a radar reflective coating maybe). And the orbiting debris can simply punch a hole through the net. And the net doesn’t have to be thin, it could be tenuous but meters thick. Like the air gel NASA used to capture comet dust for example.
Lastly, whatever you end up with, make it controllable from the internet (with all appropriate precautions, of course). Then turn it loose and every kid on the planet with an internet connection will be competing to see who can bring down the most space junk. You could start a whole new game genre.
It’s unlikely a garbage scow could ever use only collisions. As others have pointed out, the crashes have to be at low relative speeds or you get a smash up. You would need a lot of fuel to manage the relative speeds, make the capture, slow the ship to a lower orbit, drop the bundle, then gain altitude again to find the next piece.
What about a net. Each time an object hits the net, the entire net/junk bundle will be slowed down and sent to a lower orbit. So it would take fuel to keep speeding it up so it’s in the higher orbit with the junk. Eventually a large net/junk combination will re-enter the atmosphere. It would likely be large enough to be a danger.
[…] X Cringely” (Mark Stephens) offers his own design for a “space garbage scow” to clean up all the space junk. It sounds a bit more […]
This has already been solved by Buck Henry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_(TV_series)
It’s a very real issue especially if your up there;
Hugh Lewis predicted that the threat from space debris would rise 50 percent in he coming decade and quadruple in the next 50 years. Currently more than 13,000 close calls are tracked weekly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris#Dealing_with_debris
Hey Bob,
You haven’t been smokin any of that open marijuana in Colorado have you? Maybe its just second hand smoke. I like your column – but stick to IT…..
John
Indiana
Just push the self-destruct buttons.
Next.
What about using magnets, would that work instead of a net?
Bob,
Cleaning out NEO is a great idea, but that stuff is not junk. Anything that is already above the atmosphere is worth more than it’s weight in gold. I would propose a craft that would start in the lowest orbit possible, and use an electrodynamic tether to exchange angular momentum with the earth, via the earth’s magnetic field. Once it cleans out the low inclination orbits, it could use conventional thrusters to get to the high inclination ones, since I don’t think you can do that with an ED tether. Bundles of collected material would be dropped off in high orbits, where they can be collected later, once facilities are placed in orbit to recycle the metals, and other materials. If nothing else the stuff would make a good radiation shield, minus the old soviet radar sats with the onboard fission reactors.
I’ve always thought a snowplow model would be a possible approach. Basically a large blade, angled towards earth as it moves through its orbit. Anything it hit would be sent down into the atmosphere to burn up, and at the same time help to raise the plow, maintaining its orbit.
It’s really a job for the space elevator –
At 3 to 5 levels – 800 miles, 500, 300, 200, 250. Each level simply
sprays water horizontally (no more than 1000ft/sec). This is well
below orbital velocity, so the sprays essentially form a fountain with
3 to 5 levels.
Anything that impacts the fountain will be deflected away from the
elevator, slowed into a more elongated orbit. Each impact by the
same object will eventually bring it into the atmosphere.
More water can be brought up relatively cheaply on the elevator.
Any satellite that is significant can just manoeuvre itself out of the
impact zone.
The problem with all of the “scoop it up” methods is that the
most significant problems are caused by the smallest items –
a 3 ounce bolt, slivers of random metal spinning like a buzz saw…
Take a queue from the fort in St. Augustine – made of coral, cannonballs embedded themselves in the matrix – making it stronger.
So instead of a “net” – make it an even larger tangle of your tubes or kevlar, and just let the junk embed itself in it.
I’m afraid I have to agree with the people saying that this is not a workable idea. You need to put some numbers to it. You’re going to catch basketball sized objects in a net? Have you thought about what happens when a massive object hits something at several miles per second? Here’s a hint: imagine that you’re catching dynamite, and it explodes the instant you touch it. Got that in your imagination? Well, it’s a lot worse than that.
(And if your solution is, well, make sure you come up on it at slow relative velocity… that means that you have to essentially match orbits with each piece of debris. This is unrealistically expensive in terms of delta-V.)
And the bad problem isn’t the basketball-sized objects, which you can track and avoid. It’s the much much more numerous objects that are ping-pong ball sized and smaller– but still far more dangerous than hand grenades.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about when you say you will “tack” by hitting at “shallow angles”. If you catch something (if you could catch it), you accumulate its momentum. You don’t “tack”. And, the higher orbits have less debris, and you encounter objects much more slowly.
Also, have you calculate the relative size of the net needed to sweep out a few trillion cubic kilometers of space?
Too many “miles” to process easily. Please use SI/metric to avoid brains of entire globe population except US/Liberia/Myanmar exploding. Thanks.
Why not get your stuff checked for plausibility before publishing? There are so many physicists out there who could talk this through with you for the price of a beer. F’rinstance you cannot choose to trade kinetic for potential energy at will as if you were flying a glider: Your orbit is essentially fixed into a parabola where your distance and speed from the Earth varies accordingly, deterministically, and you cannot change that without firing a rocket.
Here’s where we need an algorithm. Naw…what we need is an
AlGorerithm…….”sorry couldn’t pass it up”.
He’s trying to save the planet.
Yes. I think we should just add more and more junk in all possible orbits, calling it the solution to global warming.
The problem I see with this proposed approach is that it will be very costly (in terms of momentum change) or time-consuming to move the mass of the single net and its catch to all positions of the debris items.
I wonder if the following approach would work better:
– Launch a platform to a “medium” orbit, i.e. give it the average speed of the objects you want to clean up.
– The platform consists of a solar-cell powered magnetic launcher capable of launching a 1kg “mini-Wrecker” payload with a a relative speed of 100m/s in any direction once per hour.
– Each “mini-wrecker” is thus set on a course to intercept a specific piece of junk within a year. Once it rendezvous with its peace of junk, it matches the speed using a small chemical or ion thruster, and then bonds itself to the target.
– For small targets, it could just use the thruster to slow the target down,
– For large targets in relatively low orbit, it might just inflate a large balloon with a few grams of gas in order to increase the cross-section considerably. If we allow for a 500g spherical plastic balloon hull, then at a thickness of 1um, we would get a surface area of roughly 200m^2. The cross section then is 50m^2. If we attach it to a target with a 1m^2 cross-section, then the time required to remove this object from orbit due to natural atmospheric drag should also be reduced by a factor of 50. As a side benefit, we would mark each piece of space junk with a large radar reflector.
Since the 18.000 “mini wreckers” would be mass produced, they wouldn’t be too expensive, a few 100.000$ each.
And they could be delivered to the launcher successively, e.g. by unmanned freighters like the soyuz missions supplying the ISS.
The Launcher itself could be equipped with an ion thruster, so that within a few years, it would lift itself from low to a high orbit, beginning to clean the lowest objects first, then gradually working on the higher ones.
Why not position lasers above the debris. Like they want to do to move astroids: hit it with a laser and evaporate material on one side. The evaporated material going up (because that’s were the laser is) will push the debris down to earth. Accelerating the normal process of debris slowly falling to earth.
A variation on klaus idea.
put up a satellite that matches velocity with debris items and then pushes them into the earth by a rail gun or other electric mass driver. The reaction to the gun allows the satellite to change its orbit to match the next item, so the reaction mass is always being replaced. Solar collectors can provide the energy with a mass driver providing the propulsion.
The thrown debris can go in many directions to still hit the earth (change its orbit to a narrow ellipse, Slow it down, sped it up etc) as long as it will come low in the atmosphere and brake from air drag (bonus points for always getting impact in the middle of an ocean or perhaps salvage metal by always hitting the middle of some desert). The calculations are difficult but not impractical for the computers that already track the debris anyway.
Hmmm…this article explains Bob’s previous article about “Teledesic 2.0”
and launching another 800+ satellites into LOE (low earth orbit)! For his
800 some odd satellites to have room, he’s got to clean up the “space junk”
first! Hehe…seriously though…
The problem is real, but no solution is going to be simple. What we need is
an alternative propulsion system rather than conventional rockets. Even if
we could design around the “scooping” problem, what do we do with the
collected stuff? If we’re recycling, we need some method of a “controlled
re-entry”, if we’re going to just let the atmosphere “incinerate it”, we still need
some method to control when it is sent hurtling back towards earth.
As others have mentioned, the “large” items aren’t the major problems, it’s
those small “no see ums”…they could even damage our garbage scow and
send it back in a meteoric shower…a pretty display of fireworks! Solar panels
could provide some power for on-board electronics, maybe even propulsion
itself via some sort of “solar wind sail”. But those would only do for minor
corrections and manuevering. Still need a propulsion system for highspeed
movement…ideas? Ion propulsion? Nuclear?
How about you start in low earth orbit, grab the first piece of garbage at the end of a long arm extending from the main mass of the craft. Then begin spinning the craft and garbage, eg using a flywheel in craft. Once enough momentum is acheived, release the garbage as it is moving backwards in the orbit, thus slowing its speed enough to drop out of orbit and increasing the speed of the craft to next higher orbit for the next rendezvous.
More likely to have better shielding/defense against the objects?
Objects travelling at these velocities would likely be able to pierce the armor on an Abrams M1 from the frontal arc, travel completely through the fighting compartment, power pack and out the back. However, thinking along these line and using some ideas from previous posts how about:
A large as possible inflateable kelvar object, a la Bigelow Aerospace, double skinned with an expandable foam to produce a tough outer shell to collect objects? Even use this idea with multiple iterations, the principle of the Russian matryoshka doll – multiple nested inflated structures with outer skins sandwiching an expandible foam that hardens to absorb as much energy of the pieces of junk. Orbit this thing so that it eventually reenters the atmosphere. Anything striking this ‘sticky ball’ would loose velocity…
Let’s wait until we develop the ability to create a black hole. (My wife claims the credit for that solution.)
Random question. Where the heck is Nerd TV? If Nerd TV was a school project, Bob you would have failed that class miserably.
Use the mass driver described by Bob Phillips to deflect garbage orbits to earth, plus mount the mass driver on a 360 pivot, and use a computer to calculate the direction to fire the gun from to adjust the course of the garbagecannonship.
I hope somebody can build machines that awesome someday.
70th.
Cringely, I think you should stick to not knowing anything about the computer industry.
Not only is a multiple inch thick kevlar net capable of catching 15km/s space degree not going to be “fine”, but unless you are prepared to wait a million years for atmospheric drag to bring the net down from high orbit, you’re going to be using multiples of the nets mass as propellant to move it.
With 78,000-odd space particles entering our atmosphere each year, and 12,000-18,000-odd over 1kg in weight, many of which make it to the surface, the 18,000 pieces we’ve left up there seem uninteresting. The solar system is like your carpet after a bunch of tradespeople have been in your house to fix, repair, replace, your kitchen, bathroom, light fittings and balcony. It’s a mess of debris of all different shapes and sizes. From gasses to grains of sand, to pebbles, stones and basketballs. If you’re intention is to ‘clean up’ our little sector of space, forget it. It’s like sweeping the dirt.
“If you’re intention is to ‘clean up’ our little sector of space, forget it. It’s like sweeping the dirt.”
Which, funny enough, is what people used to do before the Victorians invented the grassy front yard.
Bob might have some of the details wrong: he’s not a rocket scientist, he’s a journalist.
But the problem is real. And shouldn’t we be glad that some people in the mainstream are getting it?
Great idea as a solution, but there are some glitches in the details.
One big detail is wrong – if the scow is in a polar orbit and most of the space junk is traveling in the same direction in equatorial orbit, these are not going to be low-velocity encounters. It’ll be two 17,000 mph objects hitting each other at a right angle. If the net is held open by a solid frame, you’ll need a carbon nanotube equivalent of bungee cord to absorb the impact without damaging the frame. Plus, after a few encounters, the net will have been deflected by the momentum it absorbs from the captured debris. At that point, it’ll no longer be in a polar orbit, but in a highly eccentric equatorial orbit. It’ll be cheaper to just launch the thing into an eccentric equatorial orbit in the first place.
Also, I don’t see this solution being practical from a manufacturing and cost perspective if it relies on the traditional NASA contracting process. Better to crowdsource the design and launch it from a private company. You might be able to get each of the various space agencies and private launch companies to fund the cost of a single capture net, so that you have about three or four of them up there.
Bob,
Don’t know if this would work or not but….. I dig it just for the Quark picture!
two things pop out at me right away that make your proposal is silly:
1. the amount of fuel needed would only allow you to visit a few pieces of debris
2. the kinetic energy of objects in orbit is greater then their mass in dynamite. There are some awesome pictures of aluminium bbs hitting test satellites in the lab.
the problem is difficult to wrap your head around at first. I think it is analogous to a road trip. you end up with enough dead butterflies on your car that you think it would be easy to catch them by dragging a net. get out of your car and go out on the side of that same road, you are not likely to see a butterfly let alone catch one.
now pretend like the butterflies explode if you touch them too fast and you can only take 10 steps before you die.
Yeah, right. Because magicium will enable it to avoid all those useful commercial and “black” military satellites out there now while still gathering up the 18K pieces. A honking big thruster would help with active steering, but you are still going to find the complexity and the funding more unobtainable than the carbon nanotube net. (what, no quantum nanotubes?)
Um, this time, it is rocket science, I’m afraid.
You can’t “trade potential energy for kinetic” in orbit. It takes energy to drop to a lower orbit, just like it takes energy to raise to a higher orbit. Tell, me, exactly, how you’ll “simply fly lower” in orbit? There’s only one way, reaction mass, which means fuel.
And the very idea that a polar orbit at right angles to the equatorial orbit that quite a lot of orbital debris lives in will result in “low capture speeds” boggles the mind.
Better idea: fire ions at each chunk of garbage until they’re so heavily ionized that they interact with the earth’s magnetic field in such a way as to be driven lower towards the atmosphere (charged particle + motion through magnetic field lines = force perpendicular to passage through field lines).
Or any of a dozen of other ideas that folks have probably already thought of.
A garbage scow, seriously? Have you been watching TV versions of space flight lately?
I think you have underestimated the speeds and energies involved. In low earth orbit velocities are on the order of 10 km/s. Picking up trash in an equatorial orbit with a spacecraft in polar orbit (at the same altitude) means that the approach speeds will be on the order of 14 km/s. Swooping down from high orbit to low orbit (even if orbits are coplanar) has similar problems.Falling, in an elliptical orbit, from 1000 kilometers to pickup trash at 300 kilometers gives a delta-v of almost 9 kilometers per second (this is the speed difference as the trash collector approaches the trash from behind). This is not feasible.
[…] ROBERT X. CRINGELY PROPOSES a space garbage scow to clean up orbital debris. […]
See if that Oreck guy is willing to undertake a space program.
Wouldn’t two to four garbage scows to hold the net open be better? Or, better perhaps, once we have a space elevator in place we could build a space vacuum to suck the stuff back to earth in a hurry, just like siphoning gasoline. The net would lead to the siphon hose: the greater gravity on earth would suck the space junk down in a hurry.
How on earth can you vacuum inside a vacuum? You cannot “suck” anything out of space, there’s no air to suck.
And any kind of syphoning wouldn’t work either, you need a gravitational difference for that to work, like the volume of petrol in the longer end of the syphon tube weights more than the shorter end, the longer end falls, pulling in more petrol at the short end. You’d need a tube several hundred miles long at that altitude… But still, nothing to suck, so redundant theory anyway.. 🙂
Good fun, although this is an absolute classic -Classic!- example of why Information Technology types (and curricula) need more physical sciences (or hands-on labor actually, y’know, building stuff). Physics – Its the Law!
On a more serious note, I’m attracted to a solution out there that involves using water to slow down the junk such that it deorbits. The hard part about cleaning up space so far seems to be getting past the ‘tragedy of the commons’ attitudes out there, but I think the marketplace, once again, holds the answer.
Heh, ‘Capitalism’. Is there anything it can’t do?
You really should have identified the ship picture. It’s from the 1977 TV show Quark which IMDB describes as, “The misadventures of an outer space garbage collector and his crew.”
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077066/
Bob, it’s a cute idea, but it has a problem. Consider, simplest case, a polar orbit for the net and an equatorial orbit for the random space bolt, both circular and (obviously) with the same altitude. Let v = the orbital velocity; then the relative velocity at impact will √2v or roughly 1.414v. For a relatively low earth orbit, that’s in the neighborhood of 11 kilometers/sec.
You won’t get a capture, you’ll get a bright flash and an expanding cloud of vapor and fragments. For small objects, that might be okay, but for larger pieces, you’ll get large fragments heading off in random orbits. This isn’t probably a net win.
As it were.
You also must not know the scrap metal business very well. Somebody paid through the nose to push that “junk” up the gravity well. Why would you spend as much again just to dump it back down? After going to all the trouble–and it will be a lot–to gather up all that high-tech stuff, you’d want to park it someplace stable, to re-use in future projects. It has resale value, and it’s already catalogued.
This is too important to trust to governments. What this planet needs is some good enterprising rag-and-bone men.
This is one of the best comments on here. Yet again, we can harness this beast called capitalism to solve a problem. If 18,000 items are in orbit, a combination of salvage (some enterprising person WILL do it eventually) and tagging each one with a ‘bounty’ could wipe out most of this problem. Larger items have their own worth in space while smaller ones could be assigned a bonus to sweeten the pot for anyone willing to deal with them.
Although the idea of hitting them with a solar powered laser in precisely the right spot that the out-gassing of vaporized material would propel them towards the atmosphere is pretty slick as well…
Actually, Bob, you _can_ use lasers to effectively de-orbit debris. By vaporizing minute amounts of a piece of debris at the right time, you can use the object’s own mass as reaction mass. In other words, you create a small ‘jet’ off the object by vaporizing a small part of it. You time things so that that jet is pointing in the right direction to lower the object’s orbit. Do this enough times, and the object will eventually get down into enough atmosphere to de-orbit.
The plot of the short-lived 1978 TV series “Quark” was about the so-named intergalactic garbage vessel and its Trek-parody crew, led by Captain Richard Benjamin. A must see!
There is an analogous an arguably more pressing garbage problem in the oceans. The waters in the central gyres contain vast amounts of tiny pieces of plastic. See e.g. the Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_Patch . I’m sure bright ideas on how to clean that up would be welcome.
Even better idea, use those cool GLAD ForceFlex® Bags! They can hold anything!
“Ficus … I think I hear the bee …”
Andy Griffith already did this in 1979:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079847/
Imagine a deep trash can filled with aerogel scooping up most of the small debris. The aerogel is probably radar transparent, so the ‘can’ leads the scow as it seeks out debris in an opportunistic fashion (minimal fuel consumption). This scow would still need fuel to reboost (every capture would steal momentum), so fuel and aerogel replacement requires in orbit support (ISS or fuel depot). The debris could be de-orbited by jettisoning the ‘can’ at perigee with a negative vector, the scow reboosting to rendevous with a station to connect to another ‘can’ to repeat ad infinitum.
Wasn’t there a show in the 70’s called Qaurk about this?
Or you could create highly ionized surfaces on orbiting orbs whose chief purpose is to attract this space junk as soon as a near pass by occurs. Left in space and powered by solar energy, these orbs will dutifully capture this junk over time without major cost or maintenance.
I accidentally came up with a solution to the space junk problem in the course of working on a combination rocket and laser transport system to reduce the cost of lifting a million tons per year to GEO for power satellite construction. It looks like this would get the cost per kg to under $100.
An ablation propulsion laser of only a few MW and a redirection mirror in GEO is enough to bring down hundreds of tons of space junk every year. One sized in the GW range for lifting parts to GEO would make very short work of cleaning up the space junk.
Google henson oil drum for more detail or ask, hkeithhenson@gmail.com
Keith Henson
There is a solution in nature. What we need is a small moon in low earth orbit. It will need enough mass to disrupt the junk from its present orbit.
It is believed the moon is getting farther and farther from the earth. At sometime in the very distant future it is believed the tides will be less, earth’s rotation about its axis will be less stable, and the climate will change.
Once my small moon cleans up the junk in orbit, maybe we can use it to adjust the moon’s orbit.
Where do you get a small moon? I haven’t seen them at the local hardware store.
Aisle 7, between plumbing and gravity generators.
Pay close attention to your plumber and he’ll eventually come up with a moon.
Make an inflateable one a la Bigelow Aerospace.
As a frame of reference consider the average height at which the 18,000 particles are orbiting. If it’s 1,000 miles then there is an average density of one-one-piece-of-junk-per-four-square-miles. That’s because the surface area of the sphere at such an orbit is equal to:
(4) times (Pi) times (Earth’s radius + Orbit Height)
Although it is difficult for non-specialists to know the average orbit height, we *do* know that geosynchronus communications satellites have orbits of 22,000 miles. Thus if all the junk is orbiting at that height then the average density is only one-item-per-18-square-miles.
Oooops! I have to correct my own comment owing to the error of failing to square the radius term.
The surface error of a sphere is:
(4) times (Pi) times (Earth’s radius + orbit altitude) *squared*
Thus, if the average orbital altitude is 1,000 miles the surface error of the orbital sphere is
(4) times (22/7) times (4,000 + 1,000) times (4,000 + 1,000) = 314 million sq. mi.
thereby yielding an average “junk density” of 314 million / 18,000 which is equal to:
one piece of junk for each 17,400 square miles. That means there is one piece of junk for each square measuring 132 miles per side.
Is that much of a problem?
A spaceship with a big sling-shot. Load the debri and aim towards the sun
Put your slide rules away. This is not a physics problem. This is an economics problem.
There is a cost associated with tracking, avoiding and not avoiding space junk. NASA and other space agencies track these costs. These costs are infinitesimal compared to the cost of any potential cleanup plan. None of the plans even make it off the drawing board before they are deemed to be not cost-feasible.
“First, build a rocket …”
“Stop right there …”
It might be fun, but it’s a waste of energy to try to figure out how to do this until this becomes a real problem. And it won’t become a real problem until the cost begins to approach the cost of a potential cleanup solution.
Ok, we’ve abused ole’ Bob pretty good there. Here’s a realistic stab at solving the problem:
Idea 1 – Maybe something like a kevlar based system is what you want, working on the principle of an aircraft carrier arresting system. You let the objects hit and punch through a kevlar barrier. Each hit would take some energy from the object, hopefully eventually forcing it into a lower, decaying orbit. The target would be stabilized by some sort of propulsion system (ion?) and once the useful life of the system had been exceeded it could be programmed to defurl and deorbit. Size of target – as big a could be practially controlled. Of course there are risks like damage to the control systems…
Idea 2 – Sow a defined area of space with some type of abrasive substance, I like moon dust. Objects entering this cloud of moon dust would experience a reduction in velocity and hopefully eventually be forced into a decaying orbit. This cloud of moon dust could be deployed in a decaying orbit itself so that most of it would eventually enter the atmosphere.
Idea 3 – A space garbage guy stationed at the International space station and equipped with an ion propelled, solar powered tug to go out and dispose of the larger objects when the opportunity arises, one by one. I’m sure there are some objects in orbit that could be disposed of this way.
Idea X – Any idea to whittle away at the problem, bit by bit.
Nets, pfft! My idea is to send up an apparatus with many, or massive tanks of compressed “stuff” that, when combined in earth orbit, will form a giant ball of taffy. Think of that “Great Stuff” expanding foam.
So, we should many of these satellites up into orbit, get them into right orbit and speed, send the signal and they explode into giant balls of space-goo that will blot up and collect orbiting debris, then orbitally degrade and burn up on re-entry.
Well, not goo or taffy, since it would harden into something like styrofoam.
The polar-orbit collector net is problematical (to put it mildly), for reasons already mentioned. But counter-orbiting “pea shots” may do the trick more directly, and at a fairly low cost, at least for junk in low Earth orbit (LEO).
The key here is to realize that for an object in LEO you don’t have to change its velocity very much to put it onto on orbit that will bring it into a thicker part of the atmosphere, or even on a collision course with the Earth’s surface, and so “dispose” of it quickly. A change in velocity on the order of 1%-2% is all that’s needed.
Imagine an object orbiting at an altitude on the order of 100 miles above the Earth’s surface — this is LEO by any standards — and assume that its orbit is perfectly circular. If we now reduce its velocity, suddenly, by 1% but keep its direction the same, then it will be in an elliptical orbit, with the point at which the slow-down occurred being its highest point above the Earth (apogee) and the opposite side being its lowest point (perigee). With a basic high-school physics (conservation of energy and angular momentum, or equivalently using Kepler’s laws) one can show that, for small changes, the percentage difference in orbital radius at perigee versus apogee is the same as the percentage change in velocity at apogee compared to the original velocity for a circular orbit.
Got that? It means that if we slow an object down by 1%, then its height above the center of the Earth on the other side of the orbit will be 1% lower than the height at the point it slowed down, ie the height of the original circular orbit. All low Earth orbits have an orbital radius basically the same as the Earth’s radius, about 4000 miles. A 1% decrease in velocity, then, will lower the altitude a perigee by 1% of this, or about 40 miles. Measured above the surface of the Earth, this means that the object’s altitude decreases from 100 miles at apogee to just 60 miles at perigee, which is starting to be enough to bring it into contact with the thicker part of the atmosphere, which will slow it down even further and its end will come quickly, within a countable number of orbits. Change the orbital velocity away from circular by 2%-3% and its perigee will be within the Earth, and so it won’t survive even one more orbit.
So here’s the strategy: launch into counter-rotating, somewhat-inclined but near-equatorial orbit a large number of 1-Kg “smart peas,” that have just enough rocket power to make a fine course correction. [I think they may still have some left over from the old Reagan-era Star Wars program.] As with Bob’s original argument, each one will have many, many chances to “cross paths” with each of the junk pieces in normal, near-equatorial orbits. Some of those will be sufficiently close encounters that even a little bit of rocket power can put the pea on a collision course, if you calculate well enough in advance. If a 1-Kg pea collides and becomes embedded into a 100-Kg object going the other way, the resultant combined object will be slowed down by about 2%, which should be enough to de-orbit the junk piece permanently. Even if the result is not a single, combined object but an explosive mess, then the _average_ velocity of the debris is still lower than the circular orbital velocity by 2%, independent of the details of the collision. Surviving pieces which are not sufficiently slowed-down can be re-targeted in later follow-ups as necessary.
So, with this approach we can de-orbit junk in LEO at the cost of launching about 1% of the junk’s mass into a counter-rotating orbit — somewhat more expensive than a typical orbit, but not prohibitive — and the “peas” can actually be fairly low-tech as long as we have very good orbital calculations. A penny-on-the-dollar solution enabled by lots of computer power — just the sort of approach Bob should love!
You are seriously suggesting that a 1kg shell hitting a 100kg object at 50,000 km/h will become ’embedded’?
There was also a 26-episode 2003-2004 Japanese television 2003-2004 anime series called PLANETES where the heroes did some serious orbital garbage collecting. They only went after the big stuff. For my money it’s the best science fiction anime to come out of Japan in a very long time. It’s available in English dubbing on DVD with the original Japanese track as an option .
It’s based on a manga. I read the version translated into English, and I think I liked the books better than what was in the anime.
Why do the older comments have to appear via a link…especially located at the bottom of the page? I can page-down hundreds of pages, if need be, effortlessly. This “feature” is confusing to readers when some comments appear to be non sequiturs. And it doesn’t show the full impact of responses.
This article is one of the stupidest things I’ve read on the internet. I would laugh you to scorn if I knew you.
Really folks — Lighten up.
In a way Bob is messing with us. Enjoy it. Let yourself smile.
In Bob’s solution he did the calculations right and showed his nutty idea would take almost 40 years to work. He admitted it was impractical.
Okay, what do you want?
Bob offered a solution to the problem and by showing how long it would take to work, he showed us the magnitude of the problem. We’ve learned there is a problem with orbital junk and it won’t be easy or cheap to fix it.
Lets keep things in perspective.
Let’s put this into perspective:
First of all, we’re talking about miles above the earth, and 3 diminsions. That’s millions of miles to play with. We’re talking 18,000 piece of space junk. We could pile that amount of junk in someone’s back yard. The chances of that debris hitting anything important is slim to none! It’s like worrying about a semi in florida hitting the White House! I know, NASA gets riled up at the slightest hint of danger, but give me a freaking break!
Instead of worrying about cleaning the debris up, I think it woudl be more feasable and practical to worry about protecting the space around the space station, by putting up a “barrier” around it (maybe put some “nets” up). Something that will attract any debris around the station and “trap” it, until we can properly dispose of it. Maybe put the trapped debris into a shuttle of some kind and point it toward the sun!
Why burn it? What a waste. We wasted literally tons of fuel to put these hunks of metal into space, and something like aluminum or steel in a reasonably processed form is hard to come by in earth orbit. Plus, once you’ve got it all in one place, it is no longer a risk. Then you’ve got a worthwhile economic justification for this mission! People can pay you for the hunk of metal they need for their mission years later.
A number of people have theorized on the value of using spent rocket boosters as spacecraft skins/frames and/or station habitats. Its only a little bit of EVA welding to make one these things airtight. The tricky part is orbital capture. But you’ll have already done that.
Also, I imagine that if you actually worked out the algorithm you’d find its gonna take a lot more fuel than you think or its gonna take a very long time and the impacts are going to be high velocity.
[…] technology writer RobertX. Cringely posts about space trash, recognizing it as an additional barrier to spaceward movement. Why leave this manmade hurdle in […]
Replace “garbage” with “another nation’s military satellites”. Congrats. You might have sparked the next arms race 😉
Instead of a travelling scow you deflect or ignore small pieces and for larger pieces shoot tiny robots that project a superstrong filament to a nearby spacestation. Filaments are captured and the large pieces are reeled in slowly and the microrobots (fine nanomachines) are recycled for reuse.
To clarify the microbots would be shot onto the large pieces. Anchoring to these pieces and webbing the thing together so you reel it back in one piece are both fairly trivial.
The trouble is that aside from the debris of a recent launch all that junk is moving on wildly tangential vectors due to tidal forces. I don’t think a single Quark-class garbage scow could carry enough fuel to go after more than a few pieces at a time.
Don’t disparage lasers, btw. The new 100MW military lasers under development could vaporize anything under 1-2 kilos in mass. Judicious targetting from higher orbit could send some of the larger pieces careening into the atmosphere to burn up. Oh, and many of the “dead” satellites up there are actually just in standby mode and have enough reaction mass to crash themselves if the crowding becomes too great.
As for the “is that much of a problem” argument, one of the space shuttles came back with a 1″ gouge in a forward viewing port caused by a bolt off a Russian probe from the 1960s. A couple of satellites – very, very expensive satellites – have died suddenly and mysteriously, after having flown through probable debris clouds. Launches from each facility tend to orient along well-defined “skyways” to their intended orbits and while most of the stuff that falls off tends to burn up right away, some of it makes it into orbit and orbits being what they are tend to hurl the stuff back ’round at least a few times before friction knocks them down. It’s starting to become a serious trafffic management problem with the ever increasing # of launches.
A net won’t do : if the piece is too small, it will pass through, if it is to big or fast it will destroy the net. My silly idea : how about a largish sheet of polythene : on impact of the particle the kinetic energy should vaporize and form a burst like a braking thruster, reducing the velocity and therefore send it to a lower orbit where the drag of the lower atmosphere will take care of it eventually. The aim is to reduce the orbit lifetime from decades to hopefully months.
We should only clean for safe corridors in orbits we are interesting in, like with mine sweeping, no point in cleaning the whole of the ocean/space.
And of course the remnant of that PEsheet better shouldn’t fall on a plane below.
Garbage scow captain and galactic chef — your careers of yesterday’s tomorrow!
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