3 ms·

I mean just delta-v to do the intercept in the first place. I suppose you could choose space junk that is already on a near intercept with the aerogel dispense

I mean just delta-v to do the intercept in the first place. I suppose you could choose space junk that is already on a near intercept with the aerogel dispenser satellite or use something like spin deployment to launch the gels. Can aerogel be manufactured by the satellite itself? That would be pretty cool. It also seems nearly as effective as a weapon though, a spy satellite with a camera or solar panels caked with aerogel is as good as destroyed.

bell-cot 2y ago
I'm using "intercept" to mean "extremely near miss, at high relative velocities". With the quasi-chaotic nature of orbits, that's easy for our rack of orbit-calculating computers to arrange - using only a few well-timed little nudges from the Killer Satellite's ion thrusters. (Assume that the latter are in fairly elliptical orbits; some of those retrograde.) It's not critical that the killsats produce actual aerogel. A little cloud of snow, from a water tank and squirt nozzle, could also work. What matters is that it's cheap, reliable, low-mass, soft-ish, and collides head on-ish with Bit O'Junk - cutting the latter's orbital velocity by a few hundred meters per second. Done near apogee, that'd drop Mr. O'Junk's perigee enough for atmospheric drag to finish him off in very short order.