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Cleaning up the garbage in space One of the issues that comes up with a space that no-one owns, as in private property, is the so-called “tragedy of the commons”. As no-one has to bear the long-run costs of pollution or reaps the rewards of rising property values, so there is an incentive for people to over-farm, or over-fish, or pollute and generally muck things up. This occured to me when I read this article about the amount of junk that there now is in orbit around the Earth. The article, at Wired, also contains some rather cunning ways to deal with the problem. We cannot assume, for instance, that all this stuff eventually falls down and burns up during re-entry (although a lot does). There have been some potentially catastrophic near-misses in space.
So if any of you are star-gazers and think you have spotted a new planet, it might instead be an old satellite that is now out of commission.
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This shall not pass, something must be done. Maybe we can charge both BP and Carbide with the cleanup costs? And Haliburton too, while we are at it. Talk it over, I have to get back to the golf course.
Presumably the danger here is in debris orbiting the opposite direction?
This got me thinking – do satellites tend to orbit the earth in the same direction? I assume so because the launch systems use the earth’s own velocity to boost them; are there also lots of satellites orbiting from east to west?
Unfortunately, space garbage runs in various different orbital directions and velocities.
If either the direction or the velocity is substantially different then some form of collision and therefore damage is likely.
Even if the two satellites were orbiting in the exact same orbit then any difference in velocity would result in one object colliding with the other in a ‘rear-end’ shunt.
The only reason that the Shuttle is able to dock with the ISS without damage is that the shuttle is carefully nursed into a parallel orbit and equal velocity before closing in for the dock.
Manuel:
There are very very few orbiting in the opposite direction, but except for geostationary satellites (35,000 km up) there are not very many that orbit exactly around the equator.
Many satellites are in an orbit that goes approximately the same distance both sides of the equator as their launch point was, swinging north and south once every orbit. That’s the most natural and cheapest orbit, which you get by launching due east. It’s 28.5º for things launched from Kennedy Space Center, or 51.6º for things launched from Russia.
The “russian” 51.6º orbit includes ISS and Shuttle flights to ISS as it’s relatively cheap to launch into a higher inclination orbit than the launch site, but very very expensive to launch into a lower inclination orbit. (You have to fly towards the equator and then do a turn.
Things launched into the natural orbit from KSC can hit each other at an angle of up to 50 degrees or so, which is a pretty big hit when you’re doing orbital speeds. Things launched into the natural Russian orbit can hit each other at anything up to 90 degrees or even a bit more.
Then you have the satellites (mostly military) that are launched into orbits of 87 or 90 degrees or so, passing over both poles. That’s quite expensive to do, but some organizations find it worthwhile.
GPS satellites are in orbits of 55 degrees inclination, which is different (and a different height) to pretty much anything else.
The amount of stuff SI people know is truly amazing.
Let’s not forget also that whilst it is usually desirable to put satellites into circular orbits, space debris can also occupy elliptical orbits which can cross circular orbits at great differential velocity.
Laird, Dale had you fooled: he posts all these comments under different names:-)
🙂
Near hits, Johnathan.
I go out to lunch and you guys get off into space policy. I tell you…
As to space debris, two points. One, there has been a very serious collision that took out an operational satellite. If you have enough stuff, even though it is ‘small bullet, big sky’, eventually one bullet is going to hit another and spray off lots of little bullet fragments. If the numbers get big enough, it is theoretically possible to get the LEO equivalent of a fission cascade, where each collision provides enough fragments to raise the probability of further fragment causing collisions, etc. We aren’t there yet and I doubt we will go that way as current standards dictate amelioration of the things which cause such problem.
One big cause used to be the leftover fuel in lower stage tanks that made it to orbit… and eventually blew up. Now they make sure they vent and if at all possible that they are directed into a controlled re-entry after some number of orbits. In GEO, when a comsat is past its sell-by date, the last commands to it are to raise it into a higher parking orbit that is not a threat to critical assets. The higher things are, the less likely a collision is going to be; also the closing velocities in that class of orbit tend to be pretty low, relatively speaking.
As to LEO though, my other point is that you can see this as a problem… or you can see it as a business opportunity! Garbage men in spaaacccceeeee!!
Okay, so who’s gonna corner the market for robotic orbital debris sweepers launched from ISS?
There was a Japanese anime series named PlanetES built around this premise. World governments chipped in to a big fund which then paid by the kg for private companies to remove junk from LEO.
Seemed like a not-totally-unreasonable premise to me.
Spot the working satellites.
Of course, all the junk may provide cover for hostile
actions. Plausible deniability. Wouldn’t be surprised if
attempts made to make a new one look like an old
dead one, either.
All spacefaring nations, even China, are now part of a convention that requires that all the launches from their soil include the capacity to deorbit if in LEO, or move to a graveyard orbit, if in GEO.
So this issue will become decreasingly important provided india and china don’t get into a contest over testing asat weaponry in orbit.
As for whats already up there, the current Solar Minimum is extending the life of everything in orbit because the lack of solar radiation is cooling the upper atmosphere, causing it to contract and reduce thereby the drag on LEO spacecraft.
That said, any attempts to gather up spacejunk are more likely to create more spacejunk than reduce it. Plane change maneuvers eat up a tremendous amount of fuel, so without refuelling depots in orbit (another source of space junk), few dedicated spacecraft for the job will last more than 2-3 plane changes.
No, the best solution is to ban ASAT weaponry, enforce the deorbit capacity convention now in place, and simply wait out whats already up there. Within 5 years more than half the junk in LEO will be gone.
“Ban ASAT weaponry” – and ban bow and arrows, and the knife while we are at it?
(of course in Britain “enlightened” opinion believes that knives can, and should, be banned – I suppose the future would be everyone going to government feeding centres because nasty metal things could not be allowed in the home in case people stab each other).
However, China (just to give one example) has no intention of giving up ASAT development – although I have no doubt that they would sign any “ban” want (it is called “lying” – in the hopes that other powers are stupid enough to actually stop military research in this area, both in attack and in defence).
As for space junk – J.P. is correct, the basic problem is lack of PRIVATE PROPERTY.
If people really want healthy forests, clean rivers and unpoluted sea then they would support private property. For example they would oppose the 19th century Wensleydale judgement that stated that the private property rights in air supply were trumped by the “public interest” (in America it would be the “general welfare”) so factories need not guard against polluting the air of property owners because they added to “national wealth” (no surprise that Oakeshott hated this judgement).
That they oppose private property (at least oppose it in practice – even if they do not formally say they oppose the concept of private property) – and just rely on yet more thousands of pages of government regulations (in spite of the failure in the BP case and so on) indicates a lack of sincerity among the education system and “mainstream” media people.
A bit of a sidebar:
“[T]he current Solar Minimum is extending the life of everything in orbit because the lack of solar radiation is cooling the upper atmosphere, causing it to contract and reduce thereby the drag on LEO spacecraft.”
Could you please clarify this, Mike? I’m no physicist, but it would seem to me that if the atmosphere “contracts” (which I understand to mean that it becomes more dense) it would increase the drag and thus accellerate the rate of orbital decay. What am I missing here?
Oh, and what Paul Marks said.
John Galt- two objects in the exact same orbit cannot orbit at different speeds. So technically, no rear-end collisions possible. If you were precisely following another object and you speed up, your orbital altitude increases; you’ll see the object that was leading you pass beneath.
This is definitely an opportunity for the first private space travelers. It costs immense amounts to lift material to orbit: some of that “trash” will be incredibly valuable raw and semi-finished materials for space colonies at some point. Much like early unmanned Lunar and Martian expedition left-overs will almost certainly be scavenged by the first desperate person to find them. I think theat designs for these early expeditions should even take that into account, and help those hardy souls who make that leap.
Joeseph Carroll at tetherapplications has a couple of proposals for using electrodynamic tethers to rendezvous with large debris and tow it to a collection point – where it could be re-used. We’ve paid a lot to get that stuff into orbit, it ought to be recycled in space instead of just destroyed.
The big problem is ownership, most of this is not officially abandoned property, so cannot be salvaged without permission from the owner governments.