3 ms·

With a vehicle, probably not. Moving form one satellite's orbit to another is extremely fuel-intensive (you'd typically need ~thousands of km/h of velocity chan

With a vehicle, probably not. Moving form one satellite's orbit to another is extremely fuel-intensive (you'd typically need ~thousands of km/h of velocity change to do it), so it's not really practical to have a single vehicle up there moving from satellite to satellite. But maybe there'd be some other way to do it? There have been proposals for de-orbiting little pieces of debris from the ground with lasers, and I suppose it's possible that those approaches would scale to bigger objects (or maybe you could do it with lasers from other satellites whose orbits were fixed, or something).

MichaelCollins 4y ago
In the far future, perhaps orbit-cleaners could eat dead satellites and space debris, atomizing the debris and turning it into reaction mass.
dmckeon 4y ago
A set of satellites that could do laser ablation of debris or EOL sats would be great, but would need safeguards to not become a weapon of economics or war. Avoiding splash-over or collateral damage to other sats in or near the line-of-sight would be an issue, especially if any of those other sats might have capabilities that their nation/owner might want to keep secret. Perhaps an arrangement of vetos over particular ablation shots would suffice. Countries wanting to hide their interests in some sats could veto N times as many shots as needed, making uncovering which sats are special more difficult. In any case, laser ablation would need much less delta-V than the usual imagery of plucky space-cowboys chasing errant sats with a net, or some such. Who knew that _Planetes_ would have such a strong effect on our collective imagination.