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cbelt3 wrote:
West Ford was small potatoes compared to the accidental Iridium collision, and then the stupid Chinese just HAD to wave their weenies and blow up a satellite IN ORBIT (rather than during re-entry).
There *are* a large number of DARPA class projects looking into the issue, but as Paul F so aptly paraphrased Douglas Adams, Space is big. It's all about the volume.
Imagine if your entire living room was filled with carpet and kittens in all three dimensions and you had to vacuum up the cat hairs. Individually. Using a process that would require you to aim the vacuum from your office across town.
It's worse than that...
Imagine the average football stadium was filled with 1000 kittens...
Now try to capture them all with a remote controlled helicopter from your office across town. The kittens get to change course at will, naturally...
And don't even get me started on that Chinese ASAT "test"... :villagers:
At least OUR Aegis-based ASAT "test" was aimed at a satellite that was deorbiting anyway, and none of the pieces that resulted in the kill survived more than a few days before reentering.
The Iridium collision was dang unfortunate... In some ways forgiveable, in some ways not.
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Paul covered it. Even "crowded" LEO is a huge space, and it takes a lot of energy to change orbits and rendezvous with anything up there, to say nothing of getting your cosmic Electrolux up there in the first place, and then imparting enough energy to any particular bit of space junk to de-orbit it.
It's not a trivial problem.
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The notion hit me that maybe we could use lasers to vaporize a lot of the stuff up there, so I did a Google search. From what I gather, it's probably not practical to build a system that can completely vaporize much of the debris, but lasers could feasibly be built that had the capacity to "nudge" the debris out of the way of potential collisions with spacecraft we want to protect. Another article mentioned that by heating just a small part of a piece of debris with a laser, they could slow it down enough (turning that small part into a gas that propels the remainder) to cause it to enter the atmosphere.
Here's a couple of the articles:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/1...unk-laser/
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110315/f...1.161.html
Of course, one of the obvious problems is that such a laser could be used as a weapon. Maybe that could be taken care of by having an international consortium of all spacefaring nations build and oversee the lasers.
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Time. Time will let all of it return home.
