101–110 of 264 posts
So here's a potential business model for this: salvage rights. When ships sink, the owner generally still retains ownership of any property. Sometimes the location of the wreck is known. Sometimes it needs to be found. It can cost a lot of money to find a wreck and recover any property. So salvage rights are a principle of maritime law such that whoever does this is entitled to a reward commensurate with the value of…
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At the speeds those things whiz by, what sort of materials are there that can withstand impacts and not create more debris? Or do they try to do it via relative speeds and say let them hit the "paddle" at 50mph? And in that case, might it not be more effective to have hunting "nets" to collect the objects?
if you are moving with the almost the same speed and in the same direction as the debris, then there is a very small impact.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler's_laws_of_planetary_m...
You can only collide with an orbiting object if one of you is changing orbits.
It's very difficult to force to objects to meet in orbit with nearly the same velocity; it requires complex active maneuvering.
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I think that will change very quickly when we have a collision in space. I imagine SpaceX, for instance, would be pretty interested in cleaning up space junk if two of their LEO satellites collide.
the point of SpaceX putting things into LEO (which we should really call SLEO or something, because it's super-low) is that the orbits are self-clearing on a reasonable timescale, months or single-digit years. GEO is likewise not a problem because things out there are really far apart and they generally don't cross each other's orbits. MEO (where GNSS services live) is the real danger. Thankfully there aren't a ton o…
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Space debris is exponential. It only takes one piece getting a good hit on a satellite to create thousands more.
> one piece getting a good hit on a satellite to create thousands more. ... and then what happens? Most of those pieces retain their location and momentum. "Blowing up a satellite" converts it into a cloud of smaller particles in the same orbit, possibly with some random spray, but this is not quite like billiard balls without friction.
Initially the particles are in roughly similar orbits to the two bodies that initially collided, but not precisely the same. Over time (exactly like billard balls without friction), those minor divergences mean they cover very wide areas.
Look up the "Gabbard diagram", which is a great way of depicting the outcome of a collision. There's a spray of different orbits, with some properties that resemble the original objects, but diverging significantly from them.
Edit: Here's an AMAZING 3d animated Gabbard diagram, that shows not only the altitude and period, but also the right ascension of each object. You can see the debris from the Fengyun booster sweeping around the whole planet, crossing the orbits of other objects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePuvJDVNJd0
Even if they did stay in the same orbit, a thousand objects in the same orbit presents a thousand times more collision risk than one object in orbit. But because the collision changes the momentum of all the objects involved, it's much worse than that -- the results end up all over, and some of them are too small to track but still large enough to do damage. Those are the ones you really have to worrry about.
So here's a potential business model for this: salvage rights. When ships sink, the owner generally still retains ownership of any property. Sometimes the location of the wreck is known. Sometimes it needs to be found. It can cost a lot of money to find a wreck and recover any property. So salvage rights are a principle of maritime law such that whoever does this is entitled to a reward commensurate with the value of…
*Using space debris as railgun payload, but the railgun (rocket ship) is what you want to accelerate.
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So the solution is to eject our atmosphere into space in order to eliminate space junk? Space junk constantly increases over time, so more and more pulses are required to clear out the junk, so more and more of our atmosphere is ejected into space for this purpose. There is absolutely no way that this could go wrong.
Bad news for you: The moon steals tons of our atmosphere every year ... Far more gets lost past that.
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How valuable are geostationary slots these days? LEO swarms have eaten some of the GEO lunch. What are the niches where LEO swarms aren't a workable replacement?
Communications over a specific geographic region and budget for only one bird and/or only one launch. That's pretty much most of the world's nations' telecommunication needs. SpaceX has put up at least half a dozen satellites for small nations meeting these very common requirements.