Home » Now, here’s something new to worry about: space debris

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Now, here’s something new to worry about: space debris — 14 Comments

  1. Not a new issue at all and years of research, even real world testing of methods has been done.

    Most nations (I think all that go to space) cooperate in cataloging this stuff and notifying all other space going nations of their stuff. Some have been a little delayed (China) in notification.

    In the beginning decades of humankinds’ forays into orbit debris was not given a top priority, and a lot of the particles that are of concern today come from those early decades. I doubt it will get worse. All space programs are very cognizant of the problem and work to avoid creating unnecessary debris.

    Cleaning it up is quite a challenge. We imagine these things floating slowly where a probe could simply “sweep” them up, but it’s all traveling tens of thousands of miles per hour (bullets travel 600 – 1,200mph) and even a small chunk (a chunk the size of a bullet) can do tremendous harm to a spacecraft. Imagine trying to even something that can “sweep” up buckshot mid-air after it’s launched from a shotgun. Now imagine the buckshot is traveling 40 times faster.

  2. So much of science “news” is taking a single, immature data point, extrapolating it out generations hence and screaming, “The sky is falling!”

    Paul Ehrlich did this in the ’60s with population trends. Turns out, when people move from farms to cities they have fewer children AND when women work outside of the home or farm they have fewer children.

    When societies move to industrialization they do a lot of strip mining, clear forests and pollute water sources. Then, when they get through that phase they manage forests and control pollution. People don’t remain static and people don’t like to live in their own sh*t if they have a choice. If the number of automobiles in Manhattan today were horse drawn carriages the island would be covered in a mile of horse manure.

    These predictions based on static trend lines never take guys like Norman Borlaug into consideration. Or things like this*. No matter how many books Steven Pinker writes showing humankind’s incredible ability to improve our surroundings the message is always this: “Cower in fear! Crawl under your bed in the fetal position and await disaster.”

    About five years ago one of the Little Fireflies was enamored of Ms. Thunberg so I had her watch a 90 minute youtube interview of Boyan Slat. Around the age of 27 he invented several incredible machines that clean up plastic in the ocean and from river sources. He was about Greta’s age when he began his research and design. One teen-ager heard about pollution, panicked and is screaming that humanity must stop and go backwards. Another teen-ager heard about pollution and started improving his mind and understanding of the subject then used creativity to make tremendous inroads into solving the problem. Who is happier 5 years later; Greta or Boyan. Who has helped more people? Who is actually “saving the planet?”

    *Big Data is using AI to brute force protein sequences from data on 280 million different proteins to engineer new proteins with beneficial uses.

  3. Glenn Reynolds recently linked to something about plans in the works to deploy some kind of space garbage collection service. Seems like it’s much needed.

    Sorry, I don’t remember details and have no link.

  4. Kate,

    Glenn posts on this often. It’s been a concern of his for years, and it is a valid concern. As I wrote, it’s a hard problem to solve regarding the existing debris, and, despite the best efforts of scientists, there will be more.

    Cataloging the debris has gotten good and continues to improve. Clean up is a tricky challenge, F=MA and at large As even a tiny M has a huge F. But it’s only been 80 years that we’ve been putting stuff in orbit.

  5. Laser ablation. What could go wrong? Maybe
    generate a cloud of deadly micro debris from one larger deadly particle?

  6. @Rufus T. Firefly

    It was less that Ehrlich got population growth wrong; it was that he hadn’t noticed the ongoing Green Revolution. That is, food production was going way, way up.

    On the other hand, it’s true either way that people react to trends, and pretending that doesn’t happen is the heart of it.

  7. Boobah,

    My point on Ehrlich is he assumed people’s behavior is static. Just like many people who make dire predictions about climate change ignore human adaptation. Humans are very clever monkeys.

  8. The speeds of orbital objects are indeed “faster than a speeding bullet.” However, for recovery or garbage collection, the speed you have to worry about is *relative* speed. That’s the difference in your speed and the speed of the object in question. If you are traveling the same speed and direction as that bullet, then you should be able to just reach out and grab it. The problem is that there are so many smallish objects out there it becomes tougher to collect them all. We won’t even touch on the differences between circular and elliptical orbits. Really, though, all you need to do is slow an object down enough so that it will reenter the atmosphere on its own and burn up. Sounds simple. Right?

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