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Steve Wozniak announces private space company to clean up space debris in orbit

independent.co.uk

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Re: Steve Wozniak announces private space company to clean up space debris in orbit

#171

Post by Beached »

SonicScrub wrote: post #14

I'm very skeptical of the technical challenges associated with this problem (business model and financing aside). The amount of delta-v required to perform maneuvers to repeatedly "dock" with different pieces of space junk, and then again to de-orbit is very high. You MIGHT be able to de-orbit on the order of magnitude of ~10 pieces of low-earth orbit debris per mission. Maybe. If you're really good. And low-earth or…

not likely that they will have one craft that is used to deorbit multiple items. more likely there will be one craft with 100 micro/cub satellites in orbit. once junk identified, mother craft ejects micro sat, micro sat performs one single burn to rendevu with junk over a very long period of time. passively connects to it somehow, like magnets or or something, then once connected, then does a single. deorbit burn to change the trajectory of the junk to deorbit significantly faster than normal. sacrifice itself with the deorbit

Re: Steve Wozniak announces private space company to clean up space debris in orbit

#172

Post by joshmarlow »

robgibbons wrote: post #134
quelltext wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I actually have the same impediment but never knew the term `rhotacism` - thanks!

Re: Steve Wozniak announces private space company to clean up space debris in orbit

#173

Post by SahAssar »

vasco wrote: post #39

At some point I guess the world will have to regulate orbits similarly to how we regulate the electromagnetic spectrum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_auction Once you're assigned an orbit space I would assume it'd be your duty to keep it "clean" and as such owners of orbits would need to either do their own cleanup or contract companies like this. That being said it feels like a company like this is 50 to 100…

The big difference from EM is that if you turn of your transmitter the "junk" disappears while space junk can persist for a long time in any orbit that is not extremely close. It is also very unknown how much it will cost to clean up the junk and how spread out it will be (both because space-cleaning is new and that space accidents tend to spread out). It sounds great to have those requirements conceptually but it is also extremely hard to even start to think about what those requirements would be and how to enforce them globally.

Re: Steve Wozniak announces private space company to clean up space debris in orbit

#174

Post by [deleted] »

orbital-decay wrote: post #170
cletus wrote: post #18

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…

Even if someone solves the technical part (cheap recovery), there are multiple practical problems with salvaging. 1. Satellites don't have much to salvage at EoL, they are typically obsolete at this point, at least for their main purpose. Their components degrade as well - space is a fairly aggressive environment and they aren't designed to be reusable. 2. They often contain highly regulated components that have tigh…

[deleted]

Re: Steve Wozniak announces private space company to clean up space debris in orbit

#175

Post by spankalee »

orbital-decay wrote: post #170
cletus wrote: post #18

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…

Even if someone solves the technical part (cheap recovery), there are multiple practical problems with salvaging. 1. Satellites don't have much to salvage at EoL, they are typically obsolete at this point, at least for their main purpose. Their components degrade as well - space is a fairly aggressive environment and they aren't designed to be reusable. 2. They often contain highly regulated components that have tigh…

I think the thing you're salvaging is the orbital itself. That has value and the salvager should get a percentage of that. This requires international regulation we don't have though.

Re: Steve Wozniak announces private space company to clean up space debris in orbit

#176

Post by failuser »

cletus wrote: post #18

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…

Crazy idea: can new satellites be assembled from the parts of old ones: the parts are already in orbit, you can’t reuse chips, but you can reuse solar panels, wires, external walls, etc.

Re: Steve Wozniak announces private space company to clean up space debris in orbit

#178

Post by delecti »

failuser wrote: post #176
cletus wrote: post #18

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…

Crazy idea: can new satellites be assembled from the parts of old ones: the parts are already in orbit, you can’t reuse chips, but you can reuse solar panels, wires, external walls, etc.

Even if you assume there are sufficient working parts in orbit to construct working satellites, doing that reconstruction in space would require gathering them together in space either by people (super expensive) or by a sufficiently flexible robot, in which case we're already sending up something, just send up the desired new satellite instead.

Alternatively we could deorbit components without them burning up and assemble new ones down here, but that would also be vastly more expensive than just making new ones down here to begin with.

Re: Steve Wozniak announces private space company to clean up space debris in orbit

#179

Post by advisedwang »

trymas wrote: post #91

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 FCC _is_ working on making orbital cleanup mandatory: https://www.fcc.gov/document/mitigating-orbital-debris-new-s...
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