8 ms·

So here's a potential business model for this: salvage rights. When ships sink, the owner generally still retains ownership of any property. Sometimes the loca

by cletus 5y ago

So here's a potential business model for this: salvage rights. When ships sink, the owner generally still retains ownership of any property. Sometimes the location of the wreck is known. Sometimes it needs to be found. It can cost a lot of money to find a wreck and recover any property. So salvage rights are a principle of maritime law such that whoever does this is entitled to a reward commensurate with the value of the goods recovered (eg 10%). I imagine there are orbital slots that are essentially unusable because of space debris (eg Project West Ford [1]). If orbital slots are sufficiently scarce then these could have value. At some point it may become commercial to spend the effort cleaning up an orbit and making it available. Companies could then be compensated for the value they create this way. I do believe this will still require a dramatic decrease in launch costs, as in orders of magnitude more. But we'll see. My personal belief (and hope) is that the future of getting into orbit is orbital rings [2]. If so, that completely changes the game because cleaning up an orbit essentially becomes a problem of just holding up a giant "paddle" (for lack of a better word) that is fixed to a point on Earth (essentially) and just letting the debris hit it. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E

SonicScrub 5y ago
This could work, but would limit effectiveness to the orbits that MUST be very specific to work. For most satellites this doesn't matter. If 500 km is clogged, you design your mission to work at 505 km. I could see something like this working for geostationary orbits and sun-synchronous orbits as they require specific altitudes and inclinations, but not for much else.
- mcdonje 5y ago
  An incentive appears to exist to wait for collisions every once in a while so that there's more junk at different levels to clean up, and to prove the need for cleaning up junk.
  - SonicScrub 5y ago
    1) Be Space debris company 2) Setup shadow satellite corporation 3) Satellite corp launches satellite to valuable orbit, and intentionally separates into 2-3 easily caught pieces. "Oops! Our satellite failed" 4) space debris company cleans up the orbit quickly and easily, receives bounty from government agency 5) Profit A little far-fetched maybe, but there's a good sci-fi short story wrapped up in there.
    - spockz 5y ago
      Obviously the fix for this is to let the one that wants to have the satellite in that orbit pay for the cleaning of that orbit instead of some government.
      - SonicScrub 5y ago
        I should still pre-emptively trash some valuable Sun-Synchronous orbits before anyone else launches. Incentive is still there!
    - dotancohen 5y ago
      6) Shadow satellite corporation contracted to destroy Beidu navigation system.
    - Zanni 5y ago
      Well, if we're imagining dystopian science-fiction stories in this vein, let's say that the salvage company automates their cleanup with an AI approximately as sophisticated as YouTube. Now every satellite launch is subject to malicious "take down" requests from competitors along with the whimsies of the algorithm.
    - AtlasBarfed 5y ago
      Someone is coding themselves a minivan I see.
  - kbenson 5y ago
    Only because space debris are a negative externality at this time. If there was an (international) way to fine companies based on the trash they left in orbit, this would all be very straightforward. There's thankfully a very obvious repercussion to leaving stuff in orbit that anyone planning to put something in orbit can see in obvious ways, unlike the delayed and hard to account for impact on the climate any one company will have.
- myself248 5y ago
  Except orbits are neither that precise nor that static, without active control. Look up the "Gabbard diagram" of any orbital collision. Some of the debris ends up in rather elliptical orbits, with an apogee considerably higher than the orbit of either object that went into the collision. That means it presents a risk to satellites even in higher orbits. Also, orbits decay. The atmosphere doesn't just stop at a line; there's thinner and thinner wisps of gas out there, ever so slightly dragging on orbiting objects. So higher orbits slowly get lower, and lower orbits rapidly get lower still, until the orbit turns into an entry trajectory. The properties of the exosphere are fickle and change rapidly, influenced by the solar wind and other forces. So while it's certain that orbiting objects experience drag, it's very uncertain how _much_ drag. An object in an elliptical orbit spends some of its time with a very low perigee and thus a lot of atmospheric drag and thus its orbit changes rapidly in ways that're hard to predict, even if its apogee is high enough that it also crosses orbits of interesting things that're trying to avoid it. And the less predictable it is, the harder it is to avoid.
mc32 5y ago
At the speeds those things whiz by, what sort of materials are there that can withstand impacts and not create more debris? Or do they try to do it via relative speeds and say let them hit the "paddle" at 50mph? And in that case, might it not be more effective to have hunting "nets" to collect the objects?
- MichaelMoser123 5y ago
  if you are moving with the almost the same speed and in the same direction as the debris, then there is a very small impact.
  - fsloth 5y ago
    I imagine orbital velocities of debris is all over the place. It sound like you would need a magic source of thrust for all that delta-v to match orbits and whatnot.
    - MichaelMoser123 5y ago
      they might try out solar powered ion engines. Deep space one is powered by an engine of this type, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_electric_propulsion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_electric_propulsion
    - ben-schaaf 5y ago
      The closest we have to that would probably be solar sails. Considering that cleanup usually isn't time sensitive it could be a very cheap and effective solution.
  - gowld 5y ago
    Everything in an orbit moves at exactly the same speed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler's_laws_of_planetary_motion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler's_laws_of_planetary_m... You can only collide with an orbiting object if one of you is changing orbits. It's very difficult to force to objects to meet in orbit with nearly the same velocity; it requires complex active maneuvering.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
genericone 5y ago
Given enough debris at different orbital heights, maybe Woz company can collect it at one location and use it as a launch platform, using the debris as the reaction-mass, then they can use solar power as the energy source to launch to higher orbits, rather than ejecting rocketfuel for thrust. Does this seem feasible? Given certain rocket trajectories, the debris could be made to fall back to earth, solving 2 problems at once - escape velocity energy needs as well as excessive space debris. *Using space debris as railgun payload, but the railgun (rocket ship) is what you want to accelerate.
quelltext 5y ago
This is completely off topic but what accent is the narrator speaking? He pronounces "research" as "resorch"/"resauch", "greater" as "greator" etc. and in other regards it seems to flip between American to slightly British English. Never heard this accent before.
- walrus01 5y ago
  as a native english speaker I would guess dutch, norwegian, swedish or icelandic
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- robgibbons 5y ago
  It's an American accent, but with rhotacism, a type of speech impediment. He sounds vaguely British at times because of the tendency for "R" to come out sounding like "W" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Arthur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Arthur
  - quelltext 5y ago
    Thanks a lot. I wasn't aware of this speech impediment and how it causes the vaguely British at times.
  - joshmarlow 5y ago
    I actually have the same impediment but never knew the term `rhotacism` - thanks!
- werdnapk 5y ago
  American, but he has a speech impediment.
- mLuby 5y ago
  It's a speech impediment; he has trouble saying R's (and has improved as he's narrated more and more videos). Isaac's earlier videos would show Elmer Fudd with the message "Having problems understanding me? Turn on CC." Example: https://youtu.be/gOu3zGfP-TQ?t=40 https://youtu.be/gOu3zGfP-TQ?t=40 Source: I've watched lots of his videos and highly recommend them—mind expanding ideas!
orbital-decay 5y ago
Even if someone solves the technical part (cheap recovery), there are multiple practical problems with salvaging. 1. Satellites don't have much to salvage at EoL, they are typically obsolete at this point, at least for their main purpose. Their components degrade as well - space is a fairly aggressive environment and they aren't designed to be reusable. 2. They often contain highly regulated components that have tight export restrictions. 3. They might contain state or trade secrets and recovering by a third party is highly undesirable.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- spankalee 5y ago
  I think the thing you're salvaging is the orbital itself. That has value and the salvager should get a percentage of that. This requires international regulation we don't have though.
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    At least right now any particular "orbit space" does not have a meaningful value, as equivalent orbit spaces are available for free; while they aren't unlimited theoretically, they are essentially "first come first served" and there is no possible market for those spaces because current international treaties essentially permit any country to allow a launch in any free orbit and no country is permitted to make any exclusive claims to any parts of space that they are not actively using right now. So even if some country e.g. USA would pass some laws allowing to reserve some spot in a with an option to resell it, that would only mean that USA would prohibit their own launches to that orbit, but any other country (China, France, Russia, etc) could still authorize anyone to launch to that orbit and once the orbit is taken it would be illegal for the USA buyer to launch there, and there would be no right to any compensation from whoever took that spot, because according to current international law there can be no exclusive right to that spot.
failuser 5y ago
Crazy idea: can new satellites be assembled from the parts of old ones: the parts are already in orbit, you can’t reuse chips, but you can reuse solar panels, wires, external walls, etc.
- delecti 5y ago
  Even if you assume there are sufficient working parts in orbit to construct working satellites, doing that reconstruction in space would require gathering them together in space either by people (super expensive) or by a sufficiently flexible robot, in which case we're already sending up something, just send up the desired new satellite instead. Alternatively we could deorbit components without them burning up and assemble new ones down here, but that would also be vastly more expensive than just making new ones down here to begin with.
- dcgudeman 5y ago
  Crazy idea: can new boats be assembled from the wrecks of old boats: the parts are already in the ocean, you can't reuse metal, but you could reuse masts, wood, and hulls, etc.
  - Closi 5y ago
    So you are saying it’s possible?
    - effingwewt 5y ago
      Yea this thread hurts my brain, I legitimately can't tell. But I believe it would be, Water World style. Why not re-purpose scrap parts, you could even make other helper robots with the scrap. I'm reminded of Seveneves with the robots that make more robots tk make more and bigger robots. Man I'm gonna re-read that now.
      - Closi 5y ago
        Sorry my “so you are saying it was possible?” was supposed to just be a little joke to the guy talking about ships. I think what you are describing might one day be possible, but it’s so far in the distant future that technology would have to move along way before we start to think of this outside of science fiction. The level of processing and manufacture required to turn junk into a robot is huge, and would require a large facility on land. You would need to be able to melt and smelt metal, remove impurities, cast parts etc and doing all this in space with tiny robots rather than a floating mega-factory would require a level of technology that we don’t yet have. Note that you can’t just reassemble parts because they won’t fit together unless they are all standardised, they could be damaged, and they likely suffer from metal fatigue and wear (eg to the boat point, this is why we make boats from fresh wood rather than reuse rotten wood from a shipwreck).
izzydata 5y ago
I've seen this kind of things in many works of science fiction, but it makes a lot of sense when you think about it even for non-space related salvage.
thornygreb 5y ago
Reminds me of Salvage 1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvage_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvage_1), Andy Griffith goes to the moon in 1979!
A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
Thank you. I could not figure out the business proposition behind it from the release.
laumars 5y ago
There was a Korean movie about a vaguely similar topic: salvaging space debris that I enjoyed https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12838766/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12838766/
- hosh 5y ago
  That's a great movie! There's also Japanese anime series set in the near-future sci-fi about a small company that cleans up space debris, called "Planet ES"
  - vladTheInhaler 5y ago
    Its actually called Planetes, which means "wanderers", and was the term the ancient Greeks used for the "wandering stars", i.e. other planets. I cannot recommend it highly enough! It starts out pretty slapstick, but if you're looking for something more thoughtful, just stick it out until after the ninja episode. I promise it's worth it.
    - Lorin 5y ago
      Slice o' life in space, cleaning up trash. What's not to like? :)
    - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      Planets is amazing, through-out singe-season story with an unexpected bit of drama and similarly unexpected resolution with a twist.
  - aeturnum 5y ago
    Planetes is one of my favorite anime series. I think it's very well done. I highly recommend it! Edit: If you have trouble finding a way to watch it [it's a bit obscure] please shoot me a dm and I can probably help you out.
  - laumars 5y ago
    Thanks for the suggestion. I do like Anime so I’ll definitely be tracking this show down
deepdmistry 5y ago
Orbital tolls :)
mch82 5y ago
Key West fun fact, Florida’s first millionaire made his fortune as a wrecker https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Curry https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Curry

by cletus 5y ago

SonicScrub 5y ago

This could work, but would limit effectiveness to the orbits that MUST be very specific to work. For most satellites this doesn't matter. If 500 km is clogged, you design your mission to work at 505 km. I could see something like this working for geostationary orbits and sun-synchronous orbits as they require specific altitudes and inclinations, but not for much else.

mcdonje 5y ago
An incentive appears to exist to wait for collisions every once in a while so that there's more junk at different levels to clean up, and to prove the need for cleaning up junk.
- SonicScrub 5y ago
  1) Be Space debris company 2) Setup shadow satellite corporation 3) Satellite corp launches satellite to valuable orbit, and intentionally separates into 2-3 easily caught pieces. "Oops! Our satellite failed" 4) space debris company cleans up the orbit quickly and easily, receives bounty from government agency 5) Profit A little far-fetched maybe, but there's a good sci-fi short story wrapped up in there.
  - spockz 5y ago
    Obviously the fix for this is to let the one that wants to have the satellite in that orbit pay for the cleaning of that orbit instead of some government.
    - SonicScrub 5y ago
      I should still pre-emptively trash some valuable Sun-Synchronous orbits before anyone else launches. Incentive is still there!
  - dotancohen 5y ago
    6) Shadow satellite corporation contracted to destroy Beidu navigation system.
  - Zanni 5y ago
    Well, if we're imagining dystopian science-fiction stories in this vein, let's say that the salvage company automates their cleanup with an AI approximately as sophisticated as YouTube. Now every satellite launch is subject to malicious "take down" requests from competitors along with the whimsies of the algorithm.
  - AtlasBarfed 5y ago
    Someone is coding themselves a minivan I see.
- kbenson 5y ago
  Only because space debris are a negative externality at this time. If there was an (international) way to fine companies based on the trash they left in orbit, this would all be very straightforward. There's thankfully a very obvious repercussion to leaving stuff in orbit that anyone planning to put something in orbit can see in obvious ways, unlike the delayed and hard to account for impact on the climate any one company will have.
myself248 5y ago
Except orbits are neither that precise nor that static, without active control. Look up the "Gabbard diagram" of any orbital collision. Some of the debris ends up in rather elliptical orbits, with an apogee considerably higher than the orbit of either object that went into the collision. That means it presents a risk to satellites even in higher orbits. Also, orbits decay. The atmosphere doesn't just stop at a line; there's thinner and thinner wisps of gas out there, ever so slightly dragging on orbiting objects. So higher orbits slowly get lower, and lower orbits rapidly get lower still, until the orbit turns into an entry trajectory. The properties of the exosphere are fickle and change rapidly, influenced by the solar wind and other forces. So while it's certain that orbiting objects experience drag, it's very uncertain how _much_ drag. An object in an elliptical orbit spends some of its time with a very low perigee and thus a lot of atmospheric drag and thus its orbit changes rapidly in ways that're hard to predict, even if its apogee is high enough that it also crosses orbits of interesting things that're trying to avoid it. And the less predictable it is, the harder it is to avoid.

mc32 5y ago

At the speeds those things whiz by, what sort of materials are there that can withstand impacts and not create more debris? Or do they try to do it via relative speeds and say let them hit the "paddle" at 50mph? And in that case, might it not be more effective to have hunting "nets" to collect the objects?

MichaelMoser123 5y ago
if you are moving with the almost the same speed and in the same direction as the debris, then there is a very small impact.
- fsloth 5y ago
  I imagine orbital velocities of debris is all over the place. It sound like you would need a magic source of thrust for all that delta-v to match orbits and whatnot.
  - MichaelMoser123 5y ago
    they might try out solar powered ion engines. Deep space one is powered by an engine of this type, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_electric_propulsion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_electric_propulsion
  - ben-schaaf 5y ago
    The closest we have to that would probably be solar sails. Considering that cleanup usually isn't time sensitive it could be a very cheap and effective solution.
- gowld 5y ago
  Everything in an orbit moves at exactly the same speed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler's_laws_of_planetary_motion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler's_laws_of_planetary_m... You can only collide with an orbiting object if one of you is changing orbits. It's very difficult to force to objects to meet in orbit with nearly the same velocity; it requires complex active maneuvering.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

genericone 5y ago

Given enough debris at different orbital heights, maybe Woz company can collect it at one location and use it as a launch platform, using the debris as the reaction-mass, then they can use solar power as the energy source to launch to higher orbits, rather than ejecting rocketfuel for thrust. Does this seem feasible? Given certain rocket trajectories, the debris could be made to fall back to earth, solving 2 problems at once - escape velocity energy needs as well as excessive space debris. *Using space debris as railgun payload, but the railgun (rocket ship) is what you want to accelerate.

quelltext 5y ago

This is completely off topic but what accent is the narrator speaking? He pronounces "research" as "resorch"/"resauch", "greater" as "greator" etc. and in other regards it seems to flip between American to slightly British English. Never heard this accent before.

walrus01 5y ago
as a native english speaker I would guess dutch, norwegian, swedish or icelandic
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
robgibbons 5y ago
It's an American accent, but with rhotacism, a type of speech impediment. He sounds vaguely British at times because of the tendency for "R" to come out sounding like "W" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Arthur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Arthur
- quelltext 5y ago
  Thanks a lot. I wasn't aware of this speech impediment and how it causes the vaguely British at times.
- joshmarlow 5y ago
  I actually have the same impediment but never knew the term `rhotacism` - thanks!
werdnapk 5y ago
American, but he has a speech impediment.
mLuby 5y ago
It's a speech impediment; he has trouble saying R's (and has improved as he's narrated more and more videos). Isaac's earlier videos would show Elmer Fudd with the message "Having problems understanding me? Turn on CC." Example: https://youtu.be/gOu3zGfP-TQ?t=40 https://youtu.be/gOu3zGfP-TQ?t=40 Source: I've watched lots of his videos and highly recommend them—mind expanding ideas!

orbital-decay 5y ago

Even if someone solves the technical part (cheap recovery), there are multiple practical problems with salvaging. 1. Satellites don't have much to salvage at EoL, they are typically obsolete at this point, at least for their main purpose. Their components degrade as well - space is a fairly aggressive environment and they aren't designed to be reusable. 2. They often contain highly regulated components that have tight export restrictions. 3. They might contain state or trade secrets and recovering by a third party is highly undesirable.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
spankalee 5y ago
I think the thing you're salvaging is the orbital itself. That has value and the salvager should get a percentage of that. This requires international regulation we don't have though.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  At least right now any particular "orbit space" does not have a meaningful value, as equivalent orbit spaces are available for free; while they aren't unlimited theoretically, they are essentially "first come first served" and there is no possible market for those spaces because current international treaties essentially permit any country to allow a launch in any free orbit and no country is permitted to make any exclusive claims to any parts of space that they are not actively using right now. So even if some country e.g. USA would pass some laws allowing to reserve some spot in a with an option to resell it, that would only mean that USA would prohibit their own launches to that orbit, but any other country (China, France, Russia, etc) could still authorize anyone to launch to that orbit and once the orbit is taken it would be illegal for the USA buyer to launch there, and there would be no right to any compensation from whoever took that spot, because according to current international law there can be no exclusive right to that spot.

failuser 5y ago

Crazy idea: can new satellites be assembled from the parts of old ones: the parts are already in orbit, you can’t reuse chips, but you can reuse solar panels, wires, external walls, etc.

delecti 5y ago
Even if you assume there are sufficient working parts in orbit to construct working satellites, doing that reconstruction in space would require gathering them together in space either by people (super expensive) or by a sufficiently flexible robot, in which case we're already sending up something, just send up the desired new satellite instead. Alternatively we could deorbit components without them burning up and assemble new ones down here, but that would also be vastly more expensive than just making new ones down here to begin with.
dcgudeman 5y ago
Crazy idea: can new boats be assembled from the wrecks of old boats: the parts are already in the ocean, you can't reuse metal, but you could reuse masts, wood, and hulls, etc.
- Closi 5y ago
  So you are saying it’s possible?
  - effingwewt 5y ago
    Yea this thread hurts my brain, I legitimately can't tell. But I believe it would be, Water World style. Why not re-purpose scrap parts, you could even make other helper robots with the scrap. I'm reminded of Seveneves with the robots that make more robots tk make more and bigger robots. Man I'm gonna re-read that now.
    - Closi 5y ago
      Sorry my “so you are saying it was possible?” was supposed to just be a little joke to the guy talking about ships. I think what you are describing might one day be possible, but it’s so far in the distant future that technology would have to move along way before we start to think of this outside of science fiction. The level of processing and manufacture required to turn junk into a robot is huge, and would require a large facility on land. You would need to be able to melt and smelt metal, remove impurities, cast parts etc and doing all this in space with tiny robots rather than a floating mega-factory would require a level of technology that we don’t yet have. Note that you can’t just reassemble parts because they won’t fit together unless they are all standardised, they could be damaged, and they likely suffer from metal fatigue and wear (eg to the boat point, this is why we make boats from fresh wood rather than reuse rotten wood from a shipwreck).

izzydata 5y ago

I've seen this kind of things in many works of science fiction, but it makes a lot of sense when you think about it even for non-space related salvage.

thornygreb 5y ago

Reminds me of Salvage 1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvage_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvage_1), Andy Griffith goes to the moon in 1979!

A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago

Thank you. I could not figure out the business proposition behind it from the release.

laumars 5y ago

There was a Korean movie about a vaguely similar topic: salvaging space debris that I enjoyed https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12838766/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12838766/

hosh 5y ago
That's a great movie! There's also Japanese anime series set in the near-future sci-fi about a small company that cleans up space debris, called "Planet ES"
- vladTheInhaler 5y ago
  Its actually called Planetes, which means "wanderers", and was the term the ancient Greeks used for the "wandering stars", i.e. other planets. I cannot recommend it highly enough! It starts out pretty slapstick, but if you're looking for something more thoughtful, just stick it out until after the ninja episode. I promise it's worth it.
  - Lorin 5y ago
    Slice o' life in space, cleaning up trash. What's not to like? :)
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    Planets is amazing, through-out singe-season story with an unexpected bit of drama and similarly unexpected resolution with a twist.
- aeturnum 5y ago
  Planetes is one of my favorite anime series. I think it's very well done. I highly recommend it! Edit: If you have trouble finding a way to watch it [it's a bit obscure] please shoot me a dm and I can probably help you out.
- laumars 5y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion. I do like Anime so I’ll definitely be tracking this show down

deepdmistry 5y ago

Orbital tolls :)

mch82 5y ago

Key West fun fact, Florida’s first millionaire made his fortune as a wrecker https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Curry https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Curry