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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

#231

Post by AtlasBarfed »

SonicScrub wrote: post #52
mcdonje wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An incentive appears to exist to wait for collisions every once in a while so that there's more junk at different levels to clean up, and to prove the need for cleaning up junk.

1) Be Space debris company 2) Setup shadow satellite corporation 3) Satellite corp launches satellite to valuable orbit, and intentionally separates into 2-3 easily caught pieces. "Oops! Our satellite failed" 4) space debris company cleans up the orbit quickly and easily, receives bounty from government agency 5) Profit A little far-fetched maybe, but there's a good sci-fi short story wrapped up in there.

Someone is coding themselves a minivan I see.

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

#232

Post by danielheath »

whoisthemachine wrote: post #136
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…

A couple of ideas that come with little knowledge, so take it with a big grain of salt: 1. "Electromagnetic Missile" with trajectory who's apogee is just below the targeted space junk. Turn on the electromagnet when just below the space junk to drag down its trajectory slightly, or even down to a de-orbit trajectory. Obviously, this only works with satellites built with magnetic materials. It may just be my outsider'…

Relevant bits of space junk are moving at tens of kilometers per second relative to the earths surface.

Both of those ideas involve getting (and staying) close to them for several seconds.

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

#233

Post by awillen »

samirillian wrote: post #226

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.

Finding an excuse? He doesn't need an excuse. He's got the money/ability to raise the funds to do it.

He's choosing to do it for a reason that's going to be generally beneficial, if it works, at least. That's pathetic?

I'm just generally baffled by people criticizing these billionaires - the ones who are putting their money into making America a clear leader in what is going to be an increasingly strategic industry, while creating thousands upon thousands of high-quality, high-paying jobs. You know there's a bunch of billionaires who just spend they money on art that they then store in vaults, while they vacation on yachts, right? Why not criticize them instead of the guy spending his money trying to clean up space, a shared resource for our species?

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

#234

Post by pvg »

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/

And schlocky 70's American TV:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvage_1

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

#235

Post by grapist420 »

jimbob21 wrote: post #147
modeless wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Lowering orbit is not easier than raising orbit, it takes the same delta-v. 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.

Gravity is already helping all it wants to. Gravity is constantly redirecting the velocity in the circular orbit. A velocity change will push it into a new orbit, that will be slightly offset from the old one. You need so much velocity change to offset the orbit so much, and then you are still orbiting - still in something of a a steady state trajectory, just a slightly different one. It’s symmetric in fact

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

#236

Post by danwills »

danielheath wrote: post #232
whoisthemachine wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of ideas that come with little knowledge, so take it with a big grain of salt: 1. "Electromagnetic Missile" with trajectory who's apogee is just below the targeted space junk. Turn on the electromagnet when just below the space junk to drag down its trajectory slightly, or even down to a de-orbit trajectory. Obviously, this only works with satellites built with magnetic materials. It may just be my outsider'…

Relevant bits of space junk are moving at tens of kilometers per second relative to the earths surface. Both of those ideas involve getting (and staying) close to them for several seconds.

Indeed that does seem incredibly difficult, my imagination goes to a cloud of poly-bots, perhaps powered by surface-based laser(s) and solar, such that they could be made to gradually approach the target orbit, attach to the object, and any that attach could help the others by accelerating the debris towards them.. then hopefully once enough were on, you'd have enough control on the object to de-orbit it? (Total space/engineering layperson here, just thought it might be a way around some of the tricky parts?)

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

#237

Post by Dylan16807 »

jimbob21 wrote: post #147
modeless wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Lowering orbit is not easier than raising orbit, it takes the same delta-v. 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.

Gravity 'helps' too much, by making you go faster as you get lower, and then you slingshot right back up to your original height.

That's why a lopsided orbit is stable. It wouldn't be if down was easier than up.

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

#238

Post by Dylan16807 »

mlindner wrote: post #213
advisedwang wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes but the FCC is going the wrong direction with that. Firstly it treats constellations differently than individual satellites which makes no sense from a statistical and mathematical perspective and it would also completely kill off the smallest of satellites that students learn with that are primarily launched by universities.

> For purposes of calculating the probability of successful post-mission disposal, we define successful post-mission disposal for spacecraft in LEO as re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere within 25 years or less following completion of the spacecraft mission.

I don't see the problem.

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

#239

Post by Closi »

effingwewt wrote: post #188
Closi wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are saying it’s possible?

Yea this thread hurts my brain, I legitimately can't tell. But I believe it would be, Water World style. Why not re-purpose scrap parts, you could even make other helper robots with the scrap. I'm reminded of Seveneves with the robots that make more robots tk make more and bigger robots. Man I'm gonna re-read that now.

Sorry my “so you are saying it was possible?” was supposed to just be a little joke to the guy talking about ships.

I think what you are describing might one day be possible, but it’s so far in the distant future that technology would have to move along way before we start to think of this outside of science fiction.

The level of processing and manufacture required to turn junk into a robot is huge, and would require a large facility on land. You would need to be able to melt and smelt metal, remove impurities, cast parts etc and doing all this in space with tiny robots rather than a floating mega-factory would require a level of technology that we don’t yet have.

Note that you can’t just reassemble parts because they won’t fit together unless they are all standardised, they could be damaged, and they likely suffer from metal fatigue and wear (eg to the boat point, this is why we make boats from fresh wood rather than reuse rotten wood from a shipwreck).

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

#240

Post by dotancohen »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #148
dotancohen wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If we were able to economically produce and sustain 86400 manned spaceflights per day cleaning space junk wouldn't be an issue. 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.

We have more airplane flights than that today, and nobody would have thought that possible in November 1903.
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