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> “People are not really worrying about this, because it is inconvenient to act responsibly,” Darren McKnight, who works as a technical director at the aerospac

> “People are not really worrying about this, because it is inconvenient to act responsibly,” Darren McKnight, who works as a technical director at the aerospace-services company Centauri, told me. Reading this article about space garbage just after reading the article about plastic garbage also currently on the HN front page was interesting and the quote could have fit well into the other article, too. Our species seems incredibly good at making things and incredibly bad at cleaning up.

segfaultbuserr 6y ago
> “People are not really worrying about this, because it is inconvenient to act responsibly,” Universal truth, it's now my quote of the day. Climate. Infrastructure. Technical Debt in Code. You name it.
- high_5 6y ago
  My messy room.
dr_orpheus 6y ago
Yes, space debris is a problem and we are likely not doing enough to keep up with the growth of the space industry. But I dislike the rhetoric of "People are not really worrying about this..." This was really true in the early arenas of space and we can still see the effects of that today. But every person that launches a satellite now in order to get a communications license for their satellite from the FCC or the ITU has to prove that their satellite will de-orbit within 25 years. With the start of the mega-constellations there have been discussions about tightening this rule [0]. Chief among the people who want to tighten the rule is the US DoD. When you invest a whole lot of money in putting something up in to space you want to make sure it is going to survive. So there are significant number of people working on tighter restrictions for future satellites launched in to space. From the side of removing debris from space, there are multiple people working on technologies to remove debris from space [1]. Part of the problem here is the economics of it do not currently add up. However, considering the investment in the prevention of creating more debris the economics of this might come around soon. The other problem is the actual technology of removing debris without creating more debris. To catch a piece of debris you essentially have to maneuver a satellite "rendezvous" with the debris. Otherwise the relative velocities might turn an instance of "catching debris" in to "debris collision". Maneuvering between objects takes fuel which means more mass launched and more money to remove something smaller. [0] https://breakingdefense.com/2020/04/fcc-reconsiders-tightening-25-year-deadline-for-space-junk-disposal/ https://breakingdefense.com/2020/04/fcc-reconsiders-tighteni... [1] https://www.nanalyze.com/2019/06/space-debris-removal/ https://www.nanalyze.com/2019/06/space-debris-removal/
gnramires 6y ago
> Our species seems incredibly good at making things and incredibly bad at cleaning up. I think it's fundamentally an entropic phenomenon. You mine rocks (easy rel.), then you refine them into minerals (less easy) and materials, then you arrange those into complex objects with perhaps thousands of materials (difficult). Obs: difficulties vary with material, product, etc. Finally, reverting this complex arrangement back into materials (very difficult) generally has at least as much energy cost as manufacturing did. If you were religious about it, it would probably take orders of magnitude more energy (trace materials add the difficulty); the cost would probably scale as a function of purity (99% purity easy, 99.999% purity hard), diverging to infinity as you approach 100% purity. We have a discount because the purity of rocks we can easily find is generally greater than the purity left by our complex products. So we can just discard everything. Eventually, this will catch up to us. Eventually productive mineral deposits (for some select elements first) will get increasingly hard to access, and we'll be forced into processing our own waste to obtain it. It seems our energy costs will grow and grow. What is truly incredible is that organic life has managed to largely enter a steady state into this process. Every substance used by life has a cycle (usually some lifeform plays a role in that cycle), from water to carbon, to sulfur, nitrogen, and so on. Organic life has entered a steady state of recycling its own waste, assembling itself from ashes of its ancestors. Life tolerates impurity very well. This is all driven by sunlight. Maybe technological civilization can approach it as well. In time, we'll certainly have to (or face perish).

segfaultbuserr 6y ago

> “People are not really worrying about this, because it is inconvenient to act responsibly,” Universal truth, it's now my quote of the day. Climate. Infrastructure. Technical Debt in Code. You name it.

high_5 6y ago
My messy room.

dr_orpheus 6y ago

Yes, space debris is a problem and we are likely not doing enough to keep up with the growth of the space industry. But I dislike the rhetoric of "People are not really worrying about this..." This was really true in the early arenas of space and we can still see the effects of that today. But every person that launches a satellite now in order to get a communications license for their satellite from the FCC or the ITU has to prove that their satellite will de-orbit within 25 years. With the start of the mega-constellations there have been discussions about tightening this rule [0]. Chief among the people who want to tighten the rule is the US DoD. When you invest a whole lot of money in putting something up in to space you want to make sure it is going to survive. So there are significant number of people working on tighter restrictions for future satellites launched in to space. From the side of removing debris from space, there are multiple people working on technologies to remove debris from space [1]. Part of the problem here is the economics of it do not currently add up. However, considering the investment in the prevention of creating more debris the economics of this might come around soon. The other problem is the actual technology of removing debris without creating more debris. To catch a piece of debris you essentially have to maneuver a satellite "rendezvous" with the debris. Otherwise the relative velocities might turn an instance of "catching debris" in to "debris collision". Maneuvering between objects takes fuel which means more mass launched and more money to remove something smaller. [0] https://breakingdefense.com/2020/04/fcc-reconsiders-tightening-25-year-deadline-for-space-junk-disposal/ https://breakingdefense.com/2020/04/fcc-reconsiders-tighteni... [1] https://www.nanalyze.com/2019/06/space-debris-removal/ https://www.nanalyze.com/2019/06/space-debris-removal/

gnramires 6y ago

> Our species seems incredibly good at making things and incredibly bad at cleaning up. I think it's fundamentally an entropic phenomenon. You mine rocks (easy rel.), then you refine them into minerals (less easy) and materials, then you arrange those into complex objects with perhaps thousands of materials (difficult). Obs: difficulties vary with material, product, etc. Finally, reverting this complex arrangement back into materials (very difficult) generally has at least as much energy cost as manufacturing did. If you were religious about it, it would probably take orders of magnitude more energy (trace materials add the difficulty); the cost would probably scale as a function of purity (99% purity easy, 99.999% purity hard), diverging to infinity as you approach 100% purity. We have a discount because the purity of rocks we can easily find is generally greater than the purity left by our complex products. So we can just discard everything. Eventually, this will catch up to us. Eventually productive mineral deposits (for some select elements first) will get increasingly hard to access, and we'll be forced into processing our own waste to obtain it. It seems our energy costs will grow and grow. What is truly incredible is that organic life has managed to largely enter a steady state into this process. Every substance used by life has a cycle (usually some lifeform plays a role in that cycle), from water to carbon, to sulfur, nitrogen, and so on. Organic life has entered a steady state of recycling its own waste, assembling itself from ashes of its ancestors. Life tolerates impurity very well. This is all driven by sunlight. Maybe technological civilization can approach it as well. In time, we'll certainly have to (or face perish).