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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

#221

Post by aeturnum »

hosh wrote: post #193
laumars wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a Korean movie about a vaguely similar topic: salvaging space debris that I enjoyed https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12838766/

That's a great movie! There's also Japanese anime series set in the near-future sci-fi about a small company that cleans up space debris, called "Planet ES"

Planetes is one of my favorite anime series. I think it's very well done. I highly recommend it!

Edit: If you have trouble finding a way to watch it [it's a bit obscure] please shoot me a dm and I can probably help you out.

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

#222

Post by Ankaios »

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.

Good question—DARPA has asked it, too: https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/01/darpa-unveils-roboti...

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

#223

Post by JBorrow »

mlindner wrote: post #215
JBorrow wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure that SpaceX is enough of an environmental disaster already that they won't care.

If you don't know anything, don't open your mouth to make it clear to everyone.

I have a PhD in astronomy :)

SpaceX is an environmental disaster that I guarantee we will look back on in 50 years as the company that kick-started kessler syndrome.

They have already, objectively, caused huge environmental light-pollution based damage.

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

#224

Post by femiagbabiaka »

mlindner wrote: post #211
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does execution really matter? Elon Musk exists.

??? Execution on vision is the thing Elon Musk is most well known for, possibly more than anyone else in our current era.

This is the complete opposite of the truth on almost every front. Elon is really good at bluster and branding. The execution is never there at launch of one of his ventures and usually only halfway there years later, this applies to X.com, SolarCity, Tesla, and SpaceX, all of which were and in some cases still are failures even until this day. But surviving for long enough and with the right folks around you means that you can turn things around.

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

#225

Post by ClumsyPilot »

vladTheInhaler wrote: post #198
hosh wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great movie! There's also Japanese anime series set in the near-future sci-fi about a small company that cleans up space debris, called "Planet ES"

Its actually called Planetes, which means "wanderers", and was the term the ancient Greeks used for the "wandering stars", i.e. other planets. I cannot recommend it highly enough! It starts out pretty slapstick, but if you're looking for something more thoughtful, just stick it out until after the ninja episode. I promise it's worth it.

Planets is amazing, through-out singe-season story with an unexpected bit of drama and similarly unexpected resolution with a twist.

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

#226

Post by samirillian »

Wozniak finding an excuse to have a private space company is somehow the most...pathetic of all the rich guys compensating with space companies. A cigar may sometimes just be a cigar, but a rocket is never just a rocket with these people.

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

#227

Post by NL807 »

laumars wrote: post #190
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…

There was a Korean movie about a vaguely similar topic: salvaging space debris that I enjoyed https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12838766/

There is also a manga and anime, called Planetes, which is about salvaging and removing debris:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes

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

#228

Post by PeterisP »

dcgudeman wrote: post #182
failuser wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Crazy idea: can new boats be assembled from the wrecks of old boats: the parts are already in the ocean, you can't reuse metal, but you could reuse masts, wood, and hulls, etc.

The big difference is that it's very cheap to get something in the ocean, and quite expensive to get something up in orbit. For a mast on a boat, 99% of the cost is in the mast and 1% in getting it where it is; For a solar panel in orbit, the panel itself was cheap but the majority of cost was spent in pushing it to orbit.

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

#229

Post by PeterisP »

spankalee wrote: post #175
orbital-decay wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At least right now any particular "orbit space" does not have a meaningful value, as equivalent orbit spaces are available for free; while they aren't unlimited theoretically, they are essentially "first come first served" and there is no possible market for those spaces because current international treaties essentially permit any country to allow a launch in any free orbit and no country is permitted to make any exclusive claims to any parts of space that they are not actively using right now.

So even if some country e.g. USA would pass some laws allowing to reserve some spot in a with an option to resell it, that would only mean that USA would prohibit their own launches to that orbit, but any other country (China, France, Russia, etc) could still authorize anyone to launch to that orbit and once the orbit is taken it would be illegal for the USA buyer to launch there, and there would be no right to any compensation from whoever took that spot, because according to current international law there can be no exclusive right to that spot.

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

#230

Post by PeterisP »

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…

Orbits don't work that way.

First, many satellites share an orbit - for example, the whole GEO is a single orbital path, and it has hundreds, something like 25% of all the world's satellites spread over that path; and any junk that intersects that orbit is a threat to all of them, not any one in particular.

Second, a random piece of space junk is likely to be in a weird orbit where no satellite would want to be, but that potentially crosses/intersects many orbits where we would like to put satellites or have already done so, so again, it threatens many satellites (or "orbital slots"), not any one in particular. An orbit that's "clean" for this rotation might intersect a piece of space junk in the next rotation or a month afterwards; that junk is not "in that orbit" but it's still a threat to that orbit and many others because its path is crossing these orbits.

You could assign responsibility to sources of particular pieces debris; but there simply aren't cleanly separable areas of space for orbits to which you could assign responsibility like we do for radio spectrum.

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