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Why would private companies do this? Who is paying them and how would the cost structure work? Debris in orbit is not like trash on a field. It is moving at se

Why would private companies do this? Who is paying them and how would the cost structure work? Debris in orbit is not like trash on a field. It is moving at several km/s and is thousands of miles away. Good luck finding, intercepting, and then spending enough energy to de-orbit anything large, let alone tiny objects you can't see. I can't even imagine doing this millions of times.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
Ground based debris tracking (military and private [Leo Labs]) can provide excellent rough estimates where orbital de orbiting systems should look to hone in on with sensors. From there, use lasers to ablate or push with photons direct debris to more optimal de orbit trajectories. Your cleanup volume is limited by the equipment service life and energy budget (more platforms, faster cleanup). You’re right a private company isn’t going to do this for free unless it’s to protect their own orbiting assets, and a sponsor or several would need to be found for this “commons cleanup”.
- DuskStar 6y ago
  > You’re right a private company isn’t going to do this for free unless it’s to protect their own orbiting assets, In other news, SpaceX will be clearing out the 550km shell in a few years. (Mostly kidding, but they do have the motivation now)
vimacs2 6y ago
The simple answer to this of course is you do not "de-orbit anything large". In fact, such a thing is catastrophically wasteful since anything of significant mass that has already paid the heavy kinetic energy toll required to get itself to orbit should be recycled for construction material. The economics work out very differently from the ground where normally the energy required to recycle something far exceeds that required to get a fresh supply. Anything too small for such use or too small to be directly targeted with ablating lasers (as another commentor suggested) can be de-orbited with normal light. It just takes a tiny amount of net momentum to send something on crash course for the atmosphere and since most debris lie on fairly well defined orbital bands, we can use reflectors to bath those swaths of space with enough light to gentle push anything there into oblivion. For anything that lies outside those bands, by the time we have enough infrastructure up there for those to have any significant chance of collision, we will likely have launch assist technologies like rotavators and orbital rings which means that station and vessels hulls can be made far thicker than the necessarily spartan standards of today.
consumer451 6y ago
> Why would private companies do this? Who is paying them and how would the cost structure work? Gen. David Thompson: “I’ll pay by the ton if they can remove debris” [0] > Good luck finding... “the military announced that its space fence is fully operational and can now track items that are 10 centimeters or larger in size.” [1] [0] https://spacenews.com/u-s-space-force-would-support-commercial-services-to-remove-orbital-debris/ https://spacenews.com/u-s-space-force-would-support-commerci... [1] https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-main/2020/11/dod-wants-industrys-help-in-taking-out-space-trash/ https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-main/2020/11/dod-want...

toomuchtodo 6y ago

Ground based debris tracking (military and private [Leo Labs]) can provide excellent rough estimates where orbital de orbiting systems should look to hone in on with sensors. From there, use lasers to ablate or push with photons direct debris to more optimal de orbit trajectories. Your cleanup volume is limited by the equipment service life and energy budget (more platforms, faster cleanup). You’re right a private company isn’t going to do this for free unless it’s to protect their own orbiting assets, and a sponsor or several would need to be found for this “commons cleanup”.

DuskStar 6y ago
> You’re right a private company isn’t going to do this for free unless it’s to protect their own orbiting assets, In other news, SpaceX will be clearing out the 550km shell in a few years. (Mostly kidding, but they do have the motivation now)

vimacs2 6y ago

The simple answer to this of course is you do not "de-orbit anything large". In fact, such a thing is catastrophically wasteful since anything of significant mass that has already paid the heavy kinetic energy toll required to get itself to orbit should be recycled for construction material. The economics work out very differently from the ground where normally the energy required to recycle something far exceeds that required to get a fresh supply. Anything too small for such use or too small to be directly targeted with ablating lasers (as another commentor suggested) can be de-orbited with normal light. It just takes a tiny amount of net momentum to send something on crash course for the atmosphere and since most debris lie on fairly well defined orbital bands, we can use reflectors to bath those swaths of space with enough light to gentle push anything there into oblivion. For anything that lies outside those bands, by the time we have enough infrastructure up there for those to have any significant chance of collision, we will likely have launch assist technologies like rotavators and orbital rings which means that station and vessels hulls can be made far thicker than the necessarily spartan standards of today.

consumer451 6y ago

> Why would private companies do this? Who is paying them and how would the cost structure work? Gen. David Thompson: “I’ll pay by the ton if they can remove debris” [0] > Good luck finding... “the military announced that its space fence is fully operational and can now track items that are 10 centimeters or larger in size.” [1] [0] https://spacenews.com/u-s-space-force-would-support-commercial-services-to-remove-orbital-debris/ https://spacenews.com/u-s-space-force-would-support-commerci... [1] https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-main/2020/11/dod-wants-industrys-help-in-taking-out-space-trash/ https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-main/2020/11/dod-want...