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FCC Approves 5 Year Satellite Deorbiting Rule

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Re: FCC Approves 5 Year Satellite Deorbiting Rule

#91

Post by jccooper »

kirillzubovsky wrote: post #83

Does this actually have any impact on Space? In other words, FCC can regulate what American companies have to do, but Papua New Guinea would come out and launch 50k satellites tomorrow, and it would be out of FCC control. If that's the case, then space junk removal is just a financial obstacle that will make it more prohibitive to launch new sats, and cause the business to move to other counties. If anyone knows the…

If you're interested in the US market you have to play by these rules. And almost everyone is.

If you're willing to forgo the US market you can jurisdiction shop... though I'd expect the Europeans won't be too far behind.

It's also not a really high bar. Most sats are in a regime where this happens naturally or already have propulsion. It's mostly going to bother SSO birds, and most of them are government owned anyway.

Re: FCC Approves 5 Year Satellite Deorbiting Rule

#92

Post by haimez »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #37
mikeyouse wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The timeframe varies widely based on the shape of the object and the altitude. There are something like 5 orders of magnitude pressure difference between an object at 100km and one at 500km which is the difference between deorbiting in days vs years.

There's probably more than 5 orders of magnitude difference between throwing an apple core into the woods and a city's worth of sewage, but both are organic waste. I think the analogy is fairly sound.

While true, there’s also an asymmetry here in that a city can expand their landfill or sewer system capacity- orbital space has a fixed capacity

Re: FCC Approves 5 Year Satellite Deorbiting Rule

#93

Post by [deleted] »

fooker wrote: post #89
ultra_nick wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's like trying to cool your house with a pinch of dust. Bus = 0.0002 km² Earth = 510.1 million km² (Earth / Bus) / 100 = 25,000,000,000 bus sized satellites needed to cover 1% of the sky.

You're a bit off, you have to calculate the area considering the height of satellites.

[deleted]

Re: FCC Approves 5 Year Satellite Deorbiting Rule

#94

Post by kirillzubovsky »

jccooper wrote: post #91
kirillzubovsky wrote: post #83

Does this actually have any impact on Space? In other words, FCC can regulate what American companies have to do, but Papua New Guinea would come out and launch 50k satellites tomorrow, and it would be out of FCC control. If that's the case, then space junk removal is just a financial obstacle that will make it more prohibitive to launch new sats, and cause the business to move to other counties. If anyone knows the…

If you're interested in the US market you have to play by these rules. And almost everyone is. If you're willing to forgo the US market you can jurisdiction shop... though I'd expect the Europeans won't be too far behind. It's also not a really high bar. Most sats are in a regime where this happens naturally or already have propulsion. It's mostly going to bother SSO birds, and most of them are government owned anywa…

Got ya. I guess I was thinking of a "Delta-V" (a book) type of scenario, where space exploration becomes conducted in space, and regulation from Earth get circumvented in order to achieve a much bigger outcome in the orbit and beyond.

I guess if indeed it's not a big deal though, then probably not an issue to worry about. Thank you for your answer!

Re: FCC Approves 5 Year Satellite Deorbiting Rule

#95

Post by bryanlarsen »

haimez wrote: post #92
bryanlarsen wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's probably more than 5 orders of magnitude difference between throwing an apple core into the woods and a city's worth of sewage, but both are organic waste. I think the analogy is fairly sound.

While true, there’s also an asymmetry here in that a city can expand their landfill or sewer system capacity- orbital space has a fixed capacity

WTF? Space is incomprehendibly big. The number of potential landfill locations are very limited.

Re: FCC Approves 5 Year Satellite Deorbiting Rule

#96

Post by Retric »

Ferrotin wrote: post #88
Retric wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huge constellations with stable orbits under active control are irrelevant. It’s really the a pair of uncontrolled satellites colliding that’s a meaningful risk, and that risk grows exponentially with age. To the point where the difference between 1 day and 1 year is effectively meaningless while the difference between 5 years and 50 years is huge.

The risk grows quadratically in decay time, not exponentially. Actually less than that, as orbits with more decay time have more vertical space.

It seems like it should be quadratic in that double the satellites should get 4x the number of collisions, but satellite orbits don’t start out random. Without stationkeeping initially clear orbits become chaotic in that slight differences in initial position and velocity result in wildly different orbits. That transition results in an exponential increase in risk.

This is most obvious with geostationary orbit. Over a single year you could have say 10,000 satellites in geostationary orbit with essentially zero risk of collision, but without station keeping risk continues to grow every year those 10,000 satellites drift around.

Re: FCC Approves 5 Year Satellite Deorbiting Rule

#97

Post by ericbarrett »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #30
elliekelly wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Debris don't really accumulate dangerously in this zone and collision avoidance is a well-studied problem with a lot of people doing great work. I think this line of thinking is dangerously incorrect. Sure it’s not a problem right now but we’re poised to have a lot more stuff in orbit than we’ve ever had before. Plastic waste didn’t initially “accumulate dangerously” either but once it became more widely used (and…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQT5aMa_7iI "Gabbard Diagram for Low Earth Orbit 1959-2021" See how the stuff in the lower left corner speeds up towards the lower left corner? That's low flying debris falling out of space.

Everybody interested in the topic should watch this video (it's just an animated graph, no music). You will get a better intuition for the lifetime of orbital debris, and the impact of various incidents, in a few minutes than in hours of reading.

Re: FCC Approves 5 Year Satellite Deorbiting Rule

#98

Post by saghm »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #95
haimez wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While true, there’s also an asymmetry here in that a city can expand their landfill or sewer system capacity- orbital space has a fixed capacity

WTF? Space is incomprehendibly big. The number of potential landfill locations are very limited.

Isn't this thread discussing a very specific orbital range? The 450k-800k range is big, but I'm not sure I'd classify it as "incomprehensibly big".

Re: FCC Approves 5 Year Satellite Deorbiting Rule

#99

Post by MobiusHorizons »

saghm wrote: post #98
bryanlarsen wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WTF? Space is incomprehendibly big. The number of potential landfill locations are very limited.

Isn't this thread discussing a very specific orbital range? The 450k-800k range is big, but I'm not sure I'd classify it as "incomprehensibly big".

It’s at least bigger than the surface of the earth :)

Re: FCC Approves 5 Year Satellite Deorbiting Rule

#100

Post by saghm »

MobiusHorizons wrote: post #99
saghm wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this thread discussing a very specific orbital range? The 450k-800k range is big, but I'm not sure I'd classify it as "incomprehensibly big".

It’s at least bigger than the surface of the earth :)

Landfills can go underground though! Although I agree that it's unlike we can dig several hundred thousand kilometers :)
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