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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,
by 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 agoAn 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 ago1) 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 agoObviously 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 agoI should still pre-emptively trash some valuable Sun-Synchronous orbits before anyone else launches. Incentive is still there!
- dotancohen 5y ago6) Shadow satellite corporation contracted to destroy Beidu navigation system.
- Zanni 5y agoWell, 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 agoSomeone is coding themselves a minivan I see.
- kbenson 5y agoOnly 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 agoExcept 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.