The Kessler Syndrome: Space junk in orbit
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The Kessler Syndrome: Space junk in orbit
1–10 of 47 posts
Re: The Kessler Syndrome: Space junk in orbit
#2Isn't part of the beauty of low earth orbit the fact that it is less susceptible to this, as free flying debris in LEO tends to encounter drag and get caught by the atmosphere? Because of this I'm not sure recent and upcoming LEO satellite deployments really factor into Kessler Syndrome that much, despite how numerous they will be.
So, it seems a bit disingenuous for the article to make a big deal of LEO satellites.
Re: The Kessler Syndrome: Space junk in orbit
#3It's a problem, but I don't think it's that intractable of a problem, since any company launching products into space has an incentive not to have them destroyed by a ring of planetary trash.
Cool essay by the way. Learned something new.
Re: The Kessler Syndrome: Space junk in orbit
#4I’d love to see an international orbit allocation similar to how the fcc regulates spectrum.
Also with the cost of sending a satellite to space about to potentially plummet (starship?), wouldn’t it just make sense to make a lot of cheap satellites that you throw up in a low enough orbit that a collision would only require a few years til the shattered pieces de orbit and burn up? We may be on the cusp of a revolution on satellite technology as the engineering work going into each individual satellite drops precipitously and the turnaround time becomes weeks not years. I could see a similar Cambrian explosion in satellite tech from cheap space access similar to when we went from mainframes to pcs. Thoughts?
Re: The Kessler Syndrome: Space junk in orbit
#5So where's the "ecological" part? There is no ecology to wreck. There are concerns about the metallic dust from burning up on reentry, but no mention of it in this article.
Re: The Kessler Syndrome: Space junk in orbit
#6Steve Wozniak’s startup that has been working on mapping the stuff that’s out there in orbit: https://www.space.com/amp/steve-wozniak-privateer-hundreds-s...
Re: The Kessler Syndrome: Space junk in orbit
#7It's a problem, but I don't think it's that intractable of a problem, since any company launching products into space has an incentive not to have them destroyed by a ring of planetary trash. Cool essay by the way. Learned something new.
I'll just leave this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Re: The Kessler Syndrome: Space junk in orbit
#8It's a problem, but I don't think it's that intractable of a problem, since any company launching products into space has an incentive not to have them destroyed by a ring of planetary trash. Cool essay by the way. Learned something new.
The private sector might disregard long term risk for short term profit, as they did countless times with the environment. This was mentioned in the article.
Re: The Kessler Syndrome: Space junk in orbit
#9It's a problem, but I don't think it's that intractable of a problem, since any company launching products into space has an incentive not to have them destroyed by a ring of planetary trash. Cool essay by the way. Learned something new.
The author addressed that exact point explicitly near the end of the article; you may want to reread.
Re: The Kessler Syndrome: Space junk in orbit
#10It's a problem, but I don't think it's that intractable of a problem, since any company launching products into space has an incentive not to have them destroyed by a ring of planetary trash. Cool essay by the way. Learned something new.
Isn't that addressed in the last 3 paragraphs of the article - that companies are incentivized to be too short sighted to care?
Or are you saying you think companies will invent/build more resilient satellites in response to junk? I am not an expert but I wonder how feasible that would be given the weight constraints and extreme speeds involved.