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ESA report shows unsustainable levels of orbital debris

payloadspace.com

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Re: ESA report shows unsustainable levels of orbital debris

#41

Post by naikrovek »

spartanatreyu wrote: post #34
rzimmerman wrote: post #3

Active debris removal (harpoon satellites, magnet arms, whatever) are not a solution to this problem and are a huge waste of money. These missions answer the question "could one dock with debris and deorbit it?" To which the answer is "obviously yes, but at enormous cost" and you don't need to spend 50M euros to prove it. The answer is exactly what governments and industry have been doing for at least two decades now…

> Active debris removal (harpoon satellites, magnet arms, whatever) are not a solution to this problem and are a huge waste of money. This is wrong because it's based on a flawed assumption. That assumption being: Propellant is required to deorbit debris, and the rocket equation makes launching all that propellant prohibitively expensive. And while we can't do anything about the rocket equation, we don't actually nee…

I would think that solar sails in such an environment would be as bad of an idea as walking through a thick hedgerow in a silk dress.

The dress would not survive unscathed, and neither would the solar sail.

Re: ESA report shows unsustainable levels of orbital debris

#42

Post by naikrovek »

mandevil wrote: post #12
rzimmerman wrote: post #3

Active debris removal (harpoon satellites, magnet arms, whatever) are not a solution to this problem and are a huge waste of money. These missions answer the question "could one dock with debris and deorbit it?" To which the answer is "obviously yes, but at enormous cost" and you don't need to spend 50M euros to prove it. The answer is exactly what governments and industry have been doing for at least two decades now…

And make sure that even in the most unhappy cases, you vent your tanks! Vent vent vent vent! Tank explosions are where the really nasty debris numbers come from.

I’ll make sure I remind all of my satellite control room employee relatives. We all will, right?

Re: ESA report shows unsustainable levels of orbital debris

#43

Post by naikrovek »

WatchDog wrote: post #32

No one wants to de-orbit anything, because of the small chance that it hits something important on the ground, and the added fuel cost, it's easier and cheaper to just leave things in a graveyard orbit. Maybe if starship achieves it's goals of rapid re-usability, then active debris removal could be affordable. In the mean time it would make sense for some kind of international agreement that requires all launches pla…

Graveyard orbits are not the problem. Low earth orbits are the problem.

Debris in LEO will be slowed by the atmosphere and will fall to earth naturally, but it will be dozens of decades for the higher altitude stuff and many dozens of years for all but the lowest altitude stuff.

The only feasible way to clean this up that I’m aware of, really, is to stop making new debris and wait.

Re: ESA report shows unsustainable levels of orbital debris

#45

Post by spyspy »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #18

Tangentially related: Could this be weaponized? What's stopping a malicious actor from purposely creating a lot of debris in orbital space for the purposes of knocking communications down? Is there a plan in place?

Sure, but it’d be a hell of a lot easier for said actor to attack infrastructure on the ground, like an oil rig, and the powers that be don’t take kindly to that sort of thing, either. Before anyone could do any outsized damages they’d have their manufacturing lines, launch platforms, and any citizen with an aerospace degree pulverized.

Re: ESA report shows unsustainable levels of orbital debris

#46

Post by ohnoitsahuman »

theK wrote: post #15
thijson wrote: post #4

I guess talking about Kessler Syndrome is worth while here. A chain reaction where one collision, leads to more, which leads to more. It may be a slow motion chain reaction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome We definitely do need a way to clean things up, it is a shared resource. Unfortunately that means it suffers from tragedy of the commons.

One more good reason to start strengthening the idea of global governance?

No

Re: ESA report shows unsustainable levels of orbital debris

#47

Post by aeternum »

robotomir wrote: post #8
rzimmerman wrote: post #3

Active debris removal (harpoon satellites, magnet arms, whatever) are not a solution to this problem and are a huge waste of money. These missions answer the question "could one dock with debris and deorbit it?" To which the answer is "obviously yes, but at enormous cost" and you don't need to spend 50M euros to prove it. The answer is exactly what governments and industry have been doing for at least two decades now…

You can deorbit debris without physical contact, but you could argue the method results in a weapon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_broom

Anything that can deorbit debris can be used as an anti-satellite weapon almost by definition.

Re: ESA report shows unsustainable levels of orbital debris

#48

Post by panick21_ »

spartanatreyu wrote: post #34
rzimmerman wrote: post #3

Active debris removal (harpoon satellites, magnet arms, whatever) are not a solution to this problem and are a huge waste of money. These missions answer the question "could one dock with debris and deorbit it?" To which the answer is "obviously yes, but at enormous cost" and you don't need to spend 50M euros to prove it. The answer is exactly what governments and industry have been doing for at least two decades now…

> Active debris removal (harpoon satellites, magnet arms, whatever) are not a solution to this problem and are a huge waste of money. This is wrong because it's based on a flawed assumption. That assumption being: Propellant is required to deorbit debris, and the rocket equation makes launching all that propellant prohibitively expensive. And while we can't do anything about the rocket equation, we don't actually nee…

The actual solution is reducing cost to orbit. That reduces propellant cost.

And more importantly, just having laws that require people to deorbit sats and force them to pay for deorbit if they fail to make something deorbit.

> 2. Propulsion-less drone satellites.

Nowhere near enough thrust for this.

Re: ESA report shows unsustainable levels of orbital debris

#49

Post by pjscott »

1oooqooq wrote: post #40

any chance it will take down Elon ISP star Link and we will have a dark LEO for astronomy again? (fingers crossed)

Those de-orbit in just a few years because of how exceptionally low they fly. SpaceX’s business plan is to just be so efficient at launching things to orbit that it doesn’t matter if they lose a huge number of satellites each year to planned atmospheric drag. It’s a pretty bold way of combating space junk, but it seems to be working out for them, and the FAA has looked over the math and given their blessing.

Worry about the other satellites.

Re: ESA report shows unsustainable levels of orbital debris

#50

Post by gpm »

mandevil wrote: post #33
rx_tx wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you do with the added deltaV from the venting? (not sure if significant) It could send the already-out of control rocket stage/object to a weirder or worse orbit, increasing the changes of collision.

Ideally you have several vents perpendicular to the orbital path and open them at the same time, so the vectors cancel out. That's the happy case. If, because we are in the sad case, we can't get that, it's still better to have one piece of debris versus thousands.

Shouldn't the happy case be "we know the orientation of the stage so we can vent in the direction we are travelling to accelerate deorbiting"?
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