141–150 of 264 posts
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This is completely off topic but what accent is the narrator speaking? He pronounces "research" as "resorch"/"resauch", "greater" as "greator" etc. and in other regards it seems to flip between American to slightly British English. Never heard this accent before.
as a native english speaker I would guess dutch, norwegian, swedish or icelandic
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Maybe not hunting nets per say, maybe just a huge trawling net, or some sort of trawling-foam since we're in space. As high velocity objects begin to hit it, the foam will gain speed, but overtime, with presumably random speed-object collisions, the foam and its captured contents should have their speed reduced to 0 and fall. Doesn't need to be in foam or net form, but it does need to be a massive-entanglement-object…
I'm probably under thinking this, but wouldn't the overall momentum of the debris be conserved so you'd have a bias in debris velocity in whatever direction the original objects were orbiting (presumably not random)?
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Requiring de-orbiting at EOL would destroy their business no? Also EOL de-orbiting works great for low-altitude orbits, but becomes exponentially more difficult with higher orbits. It is pretty much impossible with the very valuable geostationary orbital slots.
I am by no means a rocket scientist, but wouldn't a de-orbiting requirement be as simple as including a few small chemical thrusters with a dedicated fuel source reserved for de-orbiting? I have no idea how much force it takes to actually move a given amount of mass out of orbit, and I assume it is different depending on the height of that orbit. So maybe doing this would simply add too much weight in the form of fue…
In addition, the bulk of the space-junk problem is not defunct satellites, but fragments from previous collisions, and stage-separations (screws, scraps, paint-chips, etc). Satellites (even defunct ones) are easily trackable, and have known trajectories. Random 10 cm pieces of metal are not.
While mandating EOL maneuvers for low-earth satellites is definitely a solution to part of the problem, it is not the full solution.
I always had this question, though maybe there's a simple answer why nobody is doing this. Why it's not mandatory to have some smallish engine attached, which at the end of satellite's life would lower the orbit enough until atmosphere picks it up and it will slow down significantly on it's own and burn up? Is it because most satellites will not fully burn and actually hit the ground, i.e. it's liability? Is it becau…
The engine is not the problem. It's the fuel. Large orbit changes take a lot. Lowering orbit is not easier than raising orbit, it takes the same delta-v. IMO what should happen is we should ban putting satellites in high orbits. Satellites in low orbit decay naturally within a few years due to atmospheric drag. Satellites in high orbit will stay there essentially forever. More importantly, any collision in high orbit…
Why is this? From a layman's perspective it seems like gravity would be a massive form of help here and therefore lowering orbit should require much less fuel.
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> The issue with space debris is that on our current trajectory, at some point in the future, there will be so much debris traveling so fast that future space exploration will be impossible The issue is keeping things in orbit not space exploration. Realistically going through is never going to be a problem. The worst that might happen is that you need some monitoring and manoeuverability on-board of your spacecraft…
The problem is the statistics. _Your_ launch will be very unlikely to be hit by debris, but _one of_ the 86400 manned spaceflights per day will be hit. And now you've lost not only the 200 souls onboard but also a portion of the city that the suborbital spacecraft was on a trajectory towards as the punctured hull falls short of the landing pad.
The problem is the viability of technology we actually rely on nowadays: global positioning, weather prediction, surveillance and satellite communication. Space exploration is pretty low on the list of reasons people should worry about debris in orbit.
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This is completely off topic but what accent is the narrator speaking? He pronounces "research" as "resorch"/"resauch", "greater" as "greator" etc. and in other regards it seems to flip between American to slightly British English. Never heard this accent before.
It's an American accent, but with rhotacism, a type of speech impediment. He sounds vaguely British at times because of the tendency for "R" to come out sounding like "W" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Arthur
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Bad news for all of us, to be frank.
Is it? Does it actually matter? Serious question.