4 ms·

collecting objects at orbital speed from any direction is a tricky engineering challenge.

• bell-cot 2y ago
  Understated. A Falcon 9 can put ~20,000kg into LEO for ~$40M - so $2/g. The cost of deorbiting little space junk is many orders of magnitude higher than that. And deorbiting is far cheaper than capturing and recycling.
  • sebzim4500 2y ago
    Not sure where you are getting the $40M. That's much less than the sticker price, and probably much more than the actual marginal cost of a launch.
    • bell-cot 2y ago
      You are correct (as far as I know), but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem No point to looking up the current exact price, nor payload, when removing orbital junk is multi-million-dollar ante game, and state-of-the-art is "a few engineering prototypes exist". The bottom line (that we're many orders of magnitude away from economically recovering small space junk as raw material) would be true whether the cost of launch was $20/g or $0.20/g.
  • asadotzler 2y ago
    Falcon 9 can put 17.4 t to LEO (demonstrated with a 2023 Starlink launch) for ~$20 million (estimated SpaceX cost, not retail price) which is closer to $1.15/g. Again, that's cost not price. That's what the state of the art can do in a best case, but probably highly repeatable and reliable scenario, today.