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Removing these 50 objects from orbit would cut danger from space junk in half
- john01dav 1y agoThis sounds like a classic 80/20 rule (change the numbers to your liking). This applies to many things. Notable examples are the majority of misinformation on social media coming from a few people and a relatively small number of words getting you most of the way there when learning a language
- SanjayMehta 1y agoIt's just a hit piece playing with statistics. How convenient that the key culprits are Russia (and the scary Soviet Union) and China. Especially when Trump wants to take on China while handing off The Ukraine to Europe.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> How convenient that the key culprits are Russia (and the scary Soviet Union) and China Uh, it’s widely known that the Soviets before and Chinese now abandon rocket bodies in orbit.
- SanjayMehta 1y agoMaybe so. I'm just fascinated by the convenient propaganda of the West. And I point it out to observe the reaction online. It's consistent across Reddit, Slashdot and here: US good, RoW bad.
- Dylan16807 1y agoThere's only a few major space players. The US is bound to be well ahead in several ways and well behind in several other ways. The level of "convenience" here is like rolling a particular number on a 6 sided die. It would be weird if it didn't happen often.
- boxed 1y agoThe list would most likely look very similar if you did top 20, 30, 40, or whatever cutoff you want. China is especially bad with many videos easily available on youtube of them just dumping entire stages on random villages in their own country.
- defraudbah 1y agowhoa, your comment got whiter than germany in forties, how did you do it
- SanjayMehta 1y ago[flagged]
- defraudbah 1y agonah, reddit is king, HN has been garbage for years
- veunes 1y agoIt's like the universe is sneakily efficient in some areas, if we're willing to look for the leverage points
- westurner 1y agoWhat would it cost to deorbit those rogue and derelict 50 safely and with intentional consensus, maybe as a post-orbital insertion deployment secondary mission? When will it be safe and cost-efficient to - instead of deorbiting toward Earth's atmosphere - Capture and Haul and Rendezvous and gently Land orbital scrap on non-earth locations like the Moon or Mars or a thrust-retrofitted asteroid for later processing? Would ISS be more useful as an oxygen tank in earth-moon orbit than in Earth's atmosphere and ocean?
- totetsu 1y agoJust get the space debris section on the case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes
- rlt 1y agoIf Starship achieves full and “rapid” reusability then it seems like it would be a lot more feasible to collect and deorbit space junk.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- masklinn 1y agoMost of the list is rocket bodies which are quite large, and rendezvous is already challenging when everybody is collaborating, rendezvous with a tumbling uncontrolled giant piece of junk is even more difficult. Astroscale is working on that in collaboration with various space agencies, they're currently planning a mission (ADRAS-J2) to connect to an uncontrolled rocket body and deorbit it circa 2027: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/02/astroscale-aced-the-worlds-first-rendezvous-with-a-piece-of-space-junk/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/02/astroscale-aced-the-wo...
- schiffern 1y agoTheoretically, a cheap option is to modify Starlink with enlarged argon tanks to rendezvous and "shepherd" large debris into lower orbits. Add LiDAR (DragonEye) and "Push Me Pull You" argon thrusters and it can exert a gentle push even when the debris object is uncontrolled and tumbling. I'm somewhat surprised SpaceX hasn't tackled this problem yet. Even including just one StarCleaner every 2-3 Starlink launches could make a huge difference. SpaceX even has the perfect test satellite. RatSat was their first successful launch in 2008, and it's barely decayed despite saying it would only last five to ten years. https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=44753.0 https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=44753.0
- giardini 1y ago[flagged]
- alluro2 1y agoAfter some thinking, I've concluded that I'd actually like if there was a large collision that resulted in a chain reaction and took out most of the military and commercial satellites. It's obviously needed, in order for people to reassess their priorities, and whether additional garbage will be left with every mission. (if we're imagining, without damage to ISS and scientific projects, of course)
- TheCowboy 1y agoMaybe we shouldn't wish widespread harm on society to force them to "reassess their priorities" and engage in civilized dialogue instead.
- Dylan16807 1y agoWhat priorities do you have in mind here? Let's say all commercial satellites explode: A bunch of people have to change internet or TV provider and a few percent of them are stuck without for a while. It gets harder to make calls in certain areas. Our maps update somewhat less often. What does that accomplish? What's being reassessed at the large scale?
- fragmede 1y agoIf you find yourself rooting for the system to burn, it’s usually a sign the analysis stopped one layer too soon. It’s tempting to think a big crash would finally wake people up, but that’s not how it works. When things fall apart, folks just rebuild the same broken setup, only shakier. Look at the Internet. It was supposed to change everything. And it did! Except we just ended up mostly reinventing the same old power structures we had before, just with different players. (There are some really good exceptions tho!) The real move is to figure out what makes people change and get them to do to, before it all goes up in flames.
- knappe 1y agoThis reminded me to go look up what Japan was doing with their space junk net. Turns out it failed to deploy in 2017, and nothing has really been done with the idea since. :| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094576520301429 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00945...
- JumpCrisscross 1y agoPaper: https://iris.cnr.it/retrieve/3c9394c7-a04f-431a-976d-cdc65afd0b9d/prod_443448-doc_159316.pdf https://iris.cnr.it/retrieve/3c9394c7-a04f-431a-976d-cdc65af... > China launched 21 of the 26 hazardous new rocket bodies over the last 21 months, each averaging more than 4 metric tons (8,800 pounds). Two more came from US launchers, one from Russia, one from India, and one from Iran What are the American ones? > most of the rockets used for Guowang and Thousand Sails launches have left their upper stages in orbit Are they in the same orbit as the satellites? If so, China is effectively mining their own constellations. (Side note: Ars is usually much better at citing its sources. This is terribly written by their standards.)
- dmurray 1y ago> Are they in the same orbit as the satellites? If so, China is effectively mining their own constellations This is LEO, so it's everyone's orbits. And in any case the big worry about space junk is not so much that it takes out one or one thousand existing satellites - which China could replace - but that it makes the orbits unusable by future spacecraft.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> which China could replace - but that it makes the orbits unusable by future spacecraft The point is that having junk in your own orbits is an interesting self goal. It opens the window to hybrid war strikes, for example.
- notahacker 1y agoThe junk being in everyone's orbits means it isn't particularly useful for the purposes of warfare though. If major spacefaring powers want to take out adversary satellites they have the capabilities to do it in a more targeted manner to various levels of deniability without background junk adding anything to the equation.
- veunes 1y agoThere's definitely a "tragedy of the commons" vibe to all of this. No one wants to bear the cost, and everyone assumes someone else will eventually clean it up. Meanwhile, space gets more crowded and fragile
- szundi 1y ago[dead]
- hsbauauvhabzb 1y agoImagine if humanity ending is not because we cannot exit the planet that we have destroyed for a better one, but because we’ve also polluted earths orbit so much that it becomes impossible to escape.
- gchamonlive 1y agoEven if a few would manage to escape a dying world, billions would perish. "Humanity" will have been lost anyways.
- hsbauauvhabzb 1y agoCurrently yes, but let’s imagine we have a few hundred years to plan our escape.
- newsclues 1y agoThe people in charge will spend the time and resources ensuring their comfort and security, they won’t ensure that normal people are saved. The elites will send their art collection to space before the poor
- netsharc 1y agoHeh, there's a story to be written there about a spaceship carrying art crewed by LLMs. "Full self-flying", said the salesman CEO. It'd also be interesting if what gets sent to space is an SQL database which most important table has the columns account_owner, account_balance..
- fedeb95 1y agoPlanetes is a great anime on the topic of space junk, recommended.
- defraudbah 1y ago[flagged]
- fluidcruft 1y ago> The same basic technologies needed for space debris cleanup—rendezvous and docking systems, robotic arms, and onboard automation—could be used to latch on to an adversary's satellite. And here we have the basic requisite military-industrial pitch to develop this dual-use tech and git er done.
- mr_toad 1y agoIf it’s anything like the SLS it’ll cost 100 times as much and take 3 times longer than if was outsourced to the private sector.
- Tuna-Fish 1y agoThe military does not use or want the sls. They have been notable (and vocal) early users of commercial lift.
- callamdelaney 1y agoThe private industry incentive must be in rubbish removed though rather than expensive, overuning and overbudget contracts for useless space providers like Northrop & Boeing (who are having the floor mopped with them by SpaceX).
- postpawl 1y agoBoeing was the prime contractor for the SLS core stage and upper stages, and Northrop Grumman builds the solid rocket boosters. The entire rocket was outsourced to private industry.
- V__ 1y agoI can't find the source, but one reason why SpaceX can reduce costs more than NASA, is that SpaceX is allowed to fail. NASA has to underpromise and overdeliver on everything. Else it will result in budget cuts for not meeting targets or wasting money. Having such constraints, results in much higher costs. If NASA could "fail-fast" without fear of cuts, it would look very different. Another point is that NASA also works as a job program for a lot of states.
- metalman 1y agoHow is it that the US can put thousands of objects into LEO, but somehow they have no collision risk?
- firesteelrain 1y agoSpace is big, man.
- golol 1y agoSpaxeX does clean work.
- metalman 1y agoyes they do! though what has not been brought up is the several ways that everything space x is flying, can be bricked simultaneously, so there failure modes present unique risks
- goatsi 1y agoThey actively move to avoid collisions rather than tumbling uncontrollably.
- gordonhart 1y agoTo give an earnest answer, SpaceX deorbits its second stages, and the vast majority of those thousands of satellites are Starlinks which are in a quite low orbit (naturally decaying) and are intentionally deorbited when they reach EOL.
- npteljes 1y agoTangential, but if you're interested in orbital debris and anime, I warmly recommend Planetes. It's a "hard sci-fi" anime partially about how fantastic, and at the same time mundane, space can be.
- Gravityloss 1y agoBoyan Slat could expand the plastic collection to space. In future it would of course probably be technically easiest to attach a deorbit package (tether for example) to satellites at launch...
- SirMaster 1y agoA 50% reduction isn't really a useful metric. What, does it reduce the risk from 0.001% chance to 0.0005%?
- N19PEDL2 1y ago> The European Space Agency's Envisat satellite launched in 2002 and failed in 2012. It is the second-most hazardous object in the Top 50 list. As a European, I would be happy if ESA planned a mission to deorbit Envisat. Besides making the orbit safer, I'm thrilled by the engineering challenge of capturing a large uncontrolled spacecraft.
- schiffern 1y agoThere was a mission planned, but it was cancelled in 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.Deorbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.Deorbit