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Does anybody else worry about having Wall-E kind of situation, Commercial space launch being cheap, We might end up having lots of space junk. At least with the

by acd10j 9y ago

Does anybody else worry about having Wall-E kind of situation, Commercial space launch being cheap, We might end up having lots of space junk. At least with the previous price point, this was less probable.

gnclmorais 9y ago
That will probably create another industry sector, so I’m not worried.
stedaniels 9y ago
There are already companies our there that track all this junk (a percentage of it at the moment) and even companies proposing ways to clean it up.
Denzel 9y ago
Space is vast... far bigger than you're imagining. Probably the best analogy, that I've heard, to put your mind at ease: think about how many cars are on the road today. There are about 1 billion cars. Is the surface of Earth crowded? Well, not only is the surface area of a single sphere in low-earth orbit (LEO) bigger than the surface area of Earth, you have to remember we're dealing with volume. We can move in three dimensions and thus there are many "surfaces". There's an order of magnitude more space for things in space. ;) We're not even going to get close to delivering 1 billion objects to orbit anytime soon. And even then, it wouldn't be crowded.
- jessriedel 9y ago
  This is true, but the very high orbital speeds means there can be a surprisingly high frequency of collisions even at extremely low density.
  - Denzel 9y ago
    That's also true. Do you have any material I could read on how this frequency increases with the rate of spacecrafts deployed?
    - schiffern 9y ago
      A good place to start might be the original paper by Donald Kessler, "Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites: The Creation of a Debris Belt" http://webpages.charter.net/dkessler/files/Collision%20Frequency.pdf http://webpages.charter.net/dkessler/files/Collision%20Frequ...
- strgcmc 9y ago
  This is actually a really great analogy for not the reason you're thinking, because of the fairly common incidence of car accidents. Sure, the surface of the earth is not crowded due to the volume of cars. But that doesn't mean that car traffic is trivially easy to solve or travel is automagically safe. Space flight safety should mirror (or be better than) air travel safety (in accidents per mile terms); if space flight becomes more like cars, then space flight is probably screwed.
neolefty 9y ago
Crowded in LEO and the narrow ring of GEO, but elsewhere it's pretty open. An orbit that would be opened up by cheaper launch services is VLEO (very low earth orbit) where orbits decay in a year or two. There's virtually no debris there because of the decay, and if you can launch cheaply enough, you can treat your satellites in that orbit as disposable--an ongoing expense rather than a capital expense.

by acd10j 9y ago

gnclmorais 9y ago

That will probably create another industry sector, so I’m not worried.

stedaniels 9y ago

There are already companies our there that track all this junk (a percentage of it at the moment) and even companies proposing ways to clean it up.

Denzel 9y ago

Space is vast... far bigger than you're imagining. Probably the best analogy, that I've heard, to put your mind at ease: think about how many cars are on the road today. There are about 1 billion cars. Is the surface of Earth crowded? Well, not only is the surface area of a single sphere in low-earth orbit (LEO) bigger than the surface area of Earth, you have to remember we're dealing with volume. We can move in three dimensions and thus there are many "surfaces". There's an order of magnitude more space for things in space. ;) We're not even going to get close to delivering 1 billion objects to orbit anytime soon. And even then, it wouldn't be crowded.

jessriedel 9y ago
This is true, but the very high orbital speeds means there can be a surprisingly high frequency of collisions even at extremely low density.
- Denzel 9y ago
  That's also true. Do you have any material I could read on how this frequency increases with the rate of spacecrafts deployed?
  - schiffern 9y ago
    A good place to start might be the original paper by Donald Kessler, "Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites: The Creation of a Debris Belt" http://webpages.charter.net/dkessler/files/Collision%20Frequency.pdf http://webpages.charter.net/dkessler/files/Collision%20Frequ...
strgcmc 9y ago
This is actually a really great analogy for not the reason you're thinking, because of the fairly common incidence of car accidents. Sure, the surface of the earth is not crowded due to the volume of cars. But that doesn't mean that car traffic is trivially easy to solve or travel is automagically safe. Space flight safety should mirror (or be better than) air travel safety (in accidents per mile terms); if space flight becomes more like cars, then space flight is probably screwed.

neolefty 9y ago

Crowded in LEO and the narrow ring of GEO, but elsewhere it's pretty open. An orbit that would be opened up by cheaper launch services is VLEO (very low earth orbit) where orbits decay in a year or two. There's virtually no debris there because of the decay, and if you can launch cheaply enough, you can treat your satellites in that orbit as disposable--an ongoing expense rather than a capital expense.