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It's not. First, it's not just satellites. There's hundreds of thousands of pieces the size of a marble that'll cause catastrophic damage. And even more smalle
by ashes-of-sol 5y ago
It's not.
First, it's not just satellites. There's hundreds of thousands of pieces the size of a marble that'll cause catastrophic damage. And even more smaller pieces, even millimetre long bits of paint have caused damage to vessels.
Second, harvesting (presuming you mean recovery) or just killing (presuming you mean de-orbiting with atmospheric burn up) require expending deltaV. There has been some interesting proposals for using laser ablation or tether based systems, but nothing that I know of that has gone past a paper proposal.
Detonating just adds to the problem.
- samstave 5y agoThanks for the reply... perhaps a good policy would be to not allow any launch off-planet without a recovery / disablement plan?
- vkou 5y agoAFAIK, all modern satellites launches require a plan for decommissioning them when they reach EOL. The problem is 'What happens when the plan fails due to design errors/bugs/accidents/breakages/etc'. Recovery of a satellite is incredibly expensive.
- samstave 5y agoSpace Satellite Recovery Startups are back on the menu boys! We need both space junk recovery and ocean plastic recovery robots. Recall that startup that tried to launch the ocean plastic/garbage gyre bot and it failed and no mega-corp tried to save them. if anyone should be forced to help on this effort, it should be amazon/bezos
- ctdonath 5y agoWell, ycombinator is a place to change the world by incentivizing profit for doing so. Get some creative actuaries to run the numbers, sell satellite collision insurance, and fund a for-profit orbital janitorial service to improve profit margin on premiums.