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I read about this first when I saw the movie "Gravity". I think if it really becomes that bad, given enough resources mankind can solve it.
by 0xcafecafe 8y ago
I read about this first when I saw the movie "Gravity". I think if it really becomes that bad, given enough resources mankind can solve it.
- DennisP 8y agoMaybe, but it'd be way cheaper to prevent it.
- thinkcontext 8y agoIt's a really hard problem. It costs over $100m to build and launch a spacecraft. Then the spacecraft has to catch up to the piece of junk, then do something to deal with the junk. We don't know what exactly it would do to deal with the junk. Then the spacecraft would have to catch up to another piece of junk. That's hard because it's expensive in terms of fuel to change orbit. Thus the spacecraft would only be able to deal with a very limited number of pieces of junk before it ran out of fuel and became junk itself. So, it would cost $millions per piece of junk. With hundreds of thousands now and millions in a Kessler scenarios it would be fiendishly expensive.