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A space race to Mars is a fun, if monstrously wasteful economically, way for the nations to one-up each other. A space race to build weapons to destroy each ot

A space race to Mars is a fun, if monstrously wasteful economically, way for the nations to one-up each other. A space race to build weapons to destroy each other's satellites is not fun, and not good news. I don't see the higher probability of armed conflict with Russia or China as a good trade-off for development of space technologies. And going to war because "we damn well deserve it" is a terrible reason.

wlesieutre 11y ago
As with anything about blowing up satellites, the potential for a runaway chain reaction of debris collisions should be mentioned. It's not pretty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
- patrickmn 11y ago
  That's how the movie Gravity starts.
- forkerenok 11y ago
  I'm wondering if it is feasible to create an autonomous/remotely piloted Garbage Collector that would be knocking the junk down into atmosphere?
  - wlesieutre 11y ago
    Maybe, but you'd need to make sure when it gets hit by a flake of paint at a relative velocity of 8-10 km/s that it doesn't make any new fragments. Space debris is fast. And space is very, very big. Similar problems to cleaning up the ocean. Even if someone comes up with an effective solution, now you need to launch a million of them to get the job done. Maybe small space debris could be cleaned up by vaporizing it or pushing it around with lasers?
    - forkerenok 11y ago
      Those are good points. A followup thought I had is that it (the Garbage Collector) doesn't have to clean everything up in predetermined constant time once it's been deployed. Performance would be sufficient, if, for a given interval of time, it would knock down at least as many pieces of junk, as there were collisions and new launches for the same period, plus some "margin"/"premium" to keep the counter going down.
  - bengali3 11y ago
    some sort of aerogel?
    - logfromblammo 11y ago
      I always envisioned a sort of huge, sticky balloon. You launch it, and it inflates into a large sphere, covered with balloonlets that each support a pad of debris capture material. It would look like a huge raspberry. When enough of the balloonlets are destroyed by collisions, you de-orbit the thing. Obviously, a lot depends on the as-yet-unknown debris capture material. It would have to be very elastic, sticky, and UV-resistant. If the capture material is sort of a slimy foam that can expand greatly in volume without losing cohesiveness, the inflatable support structure might not even be necessary. You launch the mother slime, then add the foaming agent in orbit. Anything that hits it either sticks to it or slows down while passing through, without generating additional debris.
  - yellowapple 11y ago
    Or, better yet, actually recycle that junk to build spacecraft and such. One of the biggest expenses of maintaining any sort of orbital infrastructure in the short term is the cost of sending raw material to space, but with all the raw material already floating around in space doing nothing but being a hazard to spacecraft, that could be readily solved.
    - artmageddon 11y ago
      There are a couple things to consider though - one, it's not just raw material floating around, it's actual debris: a screw, a paint chip, maybe a panel for some sort of satellite, and for awhile there was even a glove[0] floating around in orbit. Even if it were feasible to use some of the debris floating up there, retrieving it would be akin to building a car by walking a few thousand miles from your starting point and then trying to catch bullets that have been fired from a gun. [0] http://www.wired.com/2009/02/spacestuff/ http://www.wired.com/2009/02/spacestuff/
      - yellowapple 11y ago
        > it's not just raw material floating around Not with that attitude it ain't. :) Any metallic or plastic bits can likely be melted down and turned into new parts. And even totally-unusable stuff - like perhaps that glove - can always be ground up and used as propellant in some sort of crude thruster (perhaps by ionizing the resulting bits of junk and pumping it out an ion engine, or perhaps by vaporizing it into various pressurized gases). And there are plenty of abandoned satellites up there, too. If a satellite breaks down (often because of the sheer quantity of space junk pelting it every waking moment, by the way), it's not really feasible to go and repair it, so the usual approach is to wait for its orbit to eventually decay (which isn't entirely feasible in higher orbits) while possibly launching a replacement. There are likely whole satellites or significant fragments thereof ready for repurposing. This isn't to mention the presence of things like launch stages sitting in orbit (at least one Saturn V launch stage, for example, is in a near-Earth heliocentric orbit and is tracked as if it were a near-Earth asteroid; Apollo 10's lunar ascent module is also - as far as we know - intact and in a heliocentric orbit, though its location has been unknown since 1969). That's a lot of stuff that's probably recyclable. > it would be akin to building a car by walking a few thousand miles from your starting point and then trying to catch bullets that have been fired from a gun IIRC, thousands (I forget the exact figure, and I'm too lazy to look it up at the moment) of grapefruit-sized-or-larger chunks of space junk are actively tracked on radar by the likes of NASA and USAF (or maybe NORAD; I forgot exactly who manages the data) in order to be able to warn the ISS and satellite operators of possible collisions. The ISS also gets pelted by golf-ball-sized-or-smaller bits of debris regularly enough that all the modules are built with whipple armor designed to withstand such constant pelting. It's really closer to walking a few thousand miles in a world where all the air molecules are replaced by bullets. The tiny bits can likely be caught pretty easily by setting out a large, flat ablative shield to catch them with. The bigger bits are tracked on radar and can therefore be sought after specifically by a recovery craft.
zalzane 11y ago
I honestly think a space race to Mars is a huge waste of time and effort. Literally the only reason to establish a colony on Mars right now is research, and that can be performed cheaper by robots. I think the Moon would be a much better prospect. Lunar regolith can be refined into silicon, oxygen, iron, alumnium, and other metals. With hydrogen and a few other key metals imported from Earth, the Moon could become the center of space manufacturing for satellites, spacecraft, and other products that require an ultra-clean environment during manufacturing. If a space war means putting mass into LEO/GEO is much more expensive because of armoring, mining the moon for resources becomes that much more appealing - especially considering it costs 1/20th the fuel to put an object in LEO from the Moon than from the Earth.
jotm 11y ago
But why would war-minded people want to go to Mars? There's no one to attack or defend there :-) And I meant if some dumbasses start a war over some spy satellites, there's little hope for the civilization that's been built so far...
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Because if they have a Mars facility that can't easily be nuked, they can threaten to nuke everyone on Earth using their terrestrial stockpiles, and you can't threaten them back. MAD breaks down into madness.
  - jotm 11y ago
    That is actually an awesome, albeit terrifying, idea. You should pitch it to some generals :-)
drjesusphd 11y ago
What makes you say it would be so wasteful? It's not like the money just disappears into space. It goes to people doing jobs and paying taxes.

wlesieutre 11y ago

As with anything about blowing up satellites, the potential for a runaway chain reaction of debris collisions should be mentioned. It's not pretty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

patrickmn 11y ago
That's how the movie Gravity starts.
forkerenok 11y ago
I'm wondering if it is feasible to create an autonomous/remotely piloted Garbage Collector that would be knocking the junk down into atmosphere?
- wlesieutre 11y ago
  Maybe, but you'd need to make sure when it gets hit by a flake of paint at a relative velocity of 8-10 km/s that it doesn't make any new fragments. Space debris is fast. And space is very, very big. Similar problems to cleaning up the ocean. Even if someone comes up with an effective solution, now you need to launch a million of them to get the job done. Maybe small space debris could be cleaned up by vaporizing it or pushing it around with lasers?
  - forkerenok 11y ago
    Those are good points. A followup thought I had is that it (the Garbage Collector) doesn't have to clean everything up in predetermined constant time once it's been deployed. Performance would be sufficient, if, for a given interval of time, it would knock down at least as many pieces of junk, as there were collisions and new launches for the same period, plus some "margin"/"premium" to keep the counter going down.
- bengali3 11y ago
  some sort of aerogel?
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    I always envisioned a sort of huge, sticky balloon. You launch it, and it inflates into a large sphere, covered with balloonlets that each support a pad of debris capture material. It would look like a huge raspberry. When enough of the balloonlets are destroyed by collisions, you de-orbit the thing. Obviously, a lot depends on the as-yet-unknown debris capture material. It would have to be very elastic, sticky, and UV-resistant. If the capture material is sort of a slimy foam that can expand greatly in volume without losing cohesiveness, the inflatable support structure might not even be necessary. You launch the mother slime, then add the foaming agent in orbit. Anything that hits it either sticks to it or slows down while passing through, without generating additional debris.
- yellowapple 11y ago
  Or, better yet, actually recycle that junk to build spacecraft and such. One of the biggest expenses of maintaining any sort of orbital infrastructure in the short term is the cost of sending raw material to space, but with all the raw material already floating around in space doing nothing but being a hazard to spacecraft, that could be readily solved.
  - artmageddon 11y ago
    There are a couple things to consider though - one, it's not just raw material floating around, it's actual debris: a screw, a paint chip, maybe a panel for some sort of satellite, and for awhile there was even a glove[0] floating around in orbit. Even if it were feasible to use some of the debris floating up there, retrieving it would be akin to building a car by walking a few thousand miles from your starting point and then trying to catch bullets that have been fired from a gun. [0] http://www.wired.com/2009/02/spacestuff/ http://www.wired.com/2009/02/spacestuff/
    - yellowapple 11y ago
      > it's not just raw material floating around Not with that attitude it ain't. :) Any metallic or plastic bits can likely be melted down and turned into new parts. And even totally-unusable stuff - like perhaps that glove - can always be ground up and used as propellant in some sort of crude thruster (perhaps by ionizing the resulting bits of junk and pumping it out an ion engine, or perhaps by vaporizing it into various pressurized gases). And there are plenty of abandoned satellites up there, too. If a satellite breaks down (often because of the sheer quantity of space junk pelting it every waking moment, by the way), it's not really feasible to go and repair it, so the usual approach is to wait for its orbit to eventually decay (which isn't entirely feasible in higher orbits) while possibly launching a replacement. There are likely whole satellites or significant fragments thereof ready for repurposing. This isn't to mention the presence of things like launch stages sitting in orbit (at least one Saturn V launch stage, for example, is in a near-Earth heliocentric orbit and is tracked as if it were a near-Earth asteroid; Apollo 10's lunar ascent module is also - as far as we know - intact and in a heliocentric orbit, though its location has been unknown since 1969). That's a lot of stuff that's probably recyclable. > it would be akin to building a car by walking a few thousand miles from your starting point and then trying to catch bullets that have been fired from a gun IIRC, thousands (I forget the exact figure, and I'm too lazy to look it up at the moment) of grapefruit-sized-or-larger chunks of space junk are actively tracked on radar by the likes of NASA and USAF (or maybe NORAD; I forgot exactly who manages the data) in order to be able to warn the ISS and satellite operators of possible collisions. The ISS also gets pelted by golf-ball-sized-or-smaller bits of debris regularly enough that all the modules are built with whipple armor designed to withstand such constant pelting. It's really closer to walking a few thousand miles in a world where all the air molecules are replaced by bullets. The tiny bits can likely be caught pretty easily by setting out a large, flat ablative shield to catch them with. The bigger bits are tracked on radar and can therefore be sought after specifically by a recovery craft.

zalzane 11y ago

I honestly think a space race to Mars is a huge waste of time and effort. Literally the only reason to establish a colony on Mars right now is research, and that can be performed cheaper by robots. I think the Moon would be a much better prospect. Lunar regolith can be refined into silicon, oxygen, iron, alumnium, and other metals. With hydrogen and a few other key metals imported from Earth, the Moon could become the center of space manufacturing for satellites, spacecraft, and other products that require an ultra-clean environment during manufacturing. If a space war means putting mass into LEO/GEO is much more expensive because of armoring, mining the moon for resources becomes that much more appealing - especially considering it costs 1/20th the fuel to put an object in LEO from the Moon than from the Earth.

jotm 11y ago

But why would war-minded people want to go to Mars? There's no one to attack or defend there :-) And I meant if some dumbasses start a war over some spy satellites, there's little hope for the civilization that's been built so far...

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Because if they have a Mars facility that can't easily be nuked, they can threaten to nuke everyone on Earth using their terrestrial stockpiles, and you can't threaten them back. MAD breaks down into madness.
- jotm 11y ago
  That is actually an awesome, albeit terrifying, idea. You should pitch it to some generals :-)

drjesusphd 11y ago

What makes you say it would be so wasteful? It's not like the money just disappears into space. It goes to people doing jobs and paying taxes.