Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New Calculation Finds we are close to the Kessler Syndrome [video]

youtube.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 162 posts

Re: New Calculation Finds we are close to the Kessler Syndrome [video]

#71

Post by immibis »

vlovich123 wrote: post #62
mapt wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Orbit is not a location. Orbit is a group of velocity-location vectors which form a stable loop around a body, without intersecting that body. Imagine a bullet circling your head at mach 25. Now imagine a second bullet, circling your head at a slightly different angle, at a slightly different distance from your head. There's a chance that they could collide, and the resulting explosion would leave a great deal of dus…

You’ve explained what Kessler syndrome is but not why my idea doesn’t work. I’m saying send reinforced rockets through the orbits that absorb the collision instead of generating more dust. That should let you clear a path through all orbits that intersect your path. It’s hard to do and the 3d aspect of it might make it expensive but conceptually it could be a solution. Or use super powerful lasers (potentially mounte…

It takes about 90 minutes to complete a low earth orbit. A rocket can't hover in place for 90 minutes at the same altitude, then increase its altitude by its height and repeat. It doesn't have enough fuel for that.

Re: New Calculation Finds we are close to the Kessler Syndrome [video]

#72

Post by jmward01 »

The parallels to global warming appear to be close enough that this could be a good area to study what actually changes behavior on a global scale for a global environmental problem. I suspect this is easier to 'fix' mainly because there are fewer entities involved so not a total parallel, but it still might be informative to see when in the crisis arc action actually starts happening and what messaging impacted that timing.

Re: New Calculation Finds we are close to the Kessler Syndrome [video]

#73

Post by immibis »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #60
mapt wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Invite them in. Launch their satellites for them, at 400km. Give them cash or territory. Give away the farm. How doesn't matter. What matters is that we start coexisting at 300-500km, and we mutually taboo launching large amounts to altitudes much higher than that. There is no stable Mutually Assured Destruction Nash equilibrium here, if either of us does this thing it causes dramatic harm to both. Not regarding that…

Or just destroy their rockets and launch complexes. It’s better than Kessler syndrome.

They, in turn, will destroy ours, and then you have basically caused the same outcome as Kessler syndrome: nobody can launch things to space.

Re: New Calculation Finds we are close to the Kessler Syndrome [video]

#74

Post by immibis »

mapt wrote: post #19
bamboozled wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way is for the the US to be more politically stable again (some how). Every country with an army will want its own star link now for trust reasons.

For how long? Because this thing is happening right now, it's happening fast, and it's happening without any effort to fight against the trend. If your answer is "let's revisit this in 2050", then it isn't an answer.

And it will continue to happen and nothing can be done about it. Except global nuclear war, I suppose. That's not off the table.

Re: New Calculation Finds we are close to the Kessler Syndrome [video]

#75

Post by tehjoker »

perihelions wrote: post #30
mapt wrote: post #8

The current trajectory is that SpaceX proved the commercial and military viability of an LEO megaconstellation, repeatedly lowering their target altitudes and raising their satellite count because of debris and cell size concerns... And now the rest of the world is trying to catch up in a sort of arms race, and not taking any care about debris concerns. The most tempting orbits are the ones in upper LEO that permit t…

Why would any of the US' adversaries agree to that? We have SpaceX, and they do not; lowering the altitude of megaconstellations is asymmetrically far more costly for them then it is for us. Stopping China's (highly strategic, military) satellite constellations isn't a "small amount of diplomacy". It's an impossibility. (It's even their declared planning that deliberate Kessler cascades are on the table [0]—to try to…

basically, it sounds like the U.S. should not treat China as a competitor and we should cooperate. this insane hypercompetition for literally no reason (other than US capitalists wanting to remain dominant) is going to destroy us all.

Re: New Calculation Finds we are close to the Kessler Syndrome [video]

#76

Post by tehjoker »

nradov wrote: post #58
mapt wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Invite them in. Launch their satellites for them, at 400km. Give them cash or territory. Give away the farm. How doesn't matter. What matters is that we start coexisting at 300-500km, and we mutually taboo launching large amounts to altitudes much higher than that. There is no stable Mutually Assured Destruction Nash equilibrium here, if either of us does this thing it causes dramatic harm to both. Not regarding that…

There is no world in which giving cash or territory to the Chinese Communist Party would be acceptable to US taxpayers, regardless of the consequences.

i think you mean war-hawk capitalists, this taxpayer thinks cooperation is fine

Re: New Calculation Finds we are close to the Kessler Syndrome [video]

#77

Post by hakfoo »

chrisnight wrote: post #41
leptons wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't know how to sell the urgency of this predicament. You can have as many satellites as you want, a million uncoordinated bodies, at 400km because direct collision potential scales with (satellite count / orbital lifespan) ^2 . At 1000km, satellites decay so slowly we are already too crowded; we have already overused the space. We are speed-running the end of the space age and we are doing it to save a small nu…

Having satellites orbiting the planet is more beneficial than just solving the first-world problem of “knowing where you are” or “having Internet”. NASA has done a large amount of work to use satellite data to forecast and then work to improve agricultural yields covering the entire planet. It definitely isn’t necessary, but to dismiss the improvement that has been made is crazy, and I’d hardly call “feeding people a…

We can and should have satellites, but we can certainly be thrifty with how we use them.

The megaconstellation concept isn't necessary for most of the "cool stuff you can do with satellites." You might need a handful of weather or GPS satellites, and you can be more selective for orbits and lifecycle management if you're a responsible government operator.

The Starlink fiasco (and its clones) solely exists because we're abysmal at getting telecom projects built. If 80% of the country had the network connection you'd expect by 2024-- something like symmetric 10Gbps FTTH for $150 per month, and the other 20% was on a "real soon now" waiting list, there's precious little business case for Starlink.

Think about it: It was easier to plan out and deliver DOZENS OF ROCKET LAUNCHES AND A GALAXY OF SATELLITES than to tie down our existing telecom firms until they actually built a decent network, using technology like "backhoes" and "fibre-optic cables" that have existed for decades, cost next to nothing, and don't require literal rocket scientists to deploy.

The American telephone network under Ma Bell was almost a Wonder of the World for its scale, resilience, and universal accessibility-- and in barely one generation we ripped it out and failed to replace it with anything comparable.

I would argue the case there's a marginal case for one modest capacity public data constellation. The business case is basically Iridium warmed over-- for the places where there is no other practical option (ships at sea, completely undeveloped territories)-- you can pay $10 per gigabyte for 128k down, or to support some form of 911 outside of cell ranges. Arguably, we already had the infrastructure for that with the pre-Starlink satellite products (Viasat/Hughesnet)

But we hardly need every major power (and probably a bunch of private competitive duplication) blasting crap into space to make the deluxe version that's still not as good as a fibre running to your home.

Re: New Calculation Finds we are close to the Kessler Syndrome [video]

#78

Post by nradov »

dangerwill wrote: post #66
nradov wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is politically stable already (by historical and international standards), and has been since 1865. If you ignore the rhetoric and focus on actions there has been very little substantiative difference in foreign policy across the last 7 presidential administrations.

The US civil war is not the only time the US has been politically unstable. The civil rights movement, the labor disputes of the 1970s, the economic shocks every decade or so from market crashes all have been moments of instability. What is January 6th if not a concrete example of recent political instability? As for foreign policy consistency, 7 administrations takes us back to Reagan... The entire movement to sell…

Stability doesn't mean statis. The USA has been remarkably resilient to those minor shocks you listed. It continues to be the most politically stable of all the countries that actually count for anything in international affairs.

Re: New Calculation Finds we are close to the Kessler Syndrome [video]

#79

Post by JumpCrisscross »

mapt wrote: post #49
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> until someone does some proper sort of 'true mapping' of space debris in the range somehow You look at which satellites poofed and then figure out the maximum extent their debris could have drifted.

That works a little bit when we're talking about one satellite poofing in a year based on a collision with another satellite, and not at all when we're talking about thousands of events a year, many of which are satellite-debris collisions too small to track (you only get one orbital vector), or between pieces of debris. Every collision generates hundreds, maybe thousands of pieces of debris, only the largest of whic…

Not really. There are uncertainty bands. But based on the collision you know which orbits are spoiled for about how long.

Re: New Calculation Finds we are close to the Kessler Syndrome [video]

#80

Post by shiroiushi »

immibis wrote: post #69
mapt wrote: post #8

The current trajectory is that SpaceX proved the commercial and military viability of an LEO megaconstellation, repeatedly lowering their target altitudes and raising their satellite count because of debris and cell size concerns... And now the rest of the world is trying to catch up in a sort of arms race, and not taking any care about debris concerns. The most tempting orbits are the ones in upper LEO that permit t…

We are currently in a low-trust, selfish world where all hope of collaboration has gone out of the window, so we are on an unchangeable trajectory towards things like Kessler Syndrome and climate hell.

Humanity is a failed species. The engineers were right to send the xenomorphs.
Post reply on HN