4 ms·

once space is a battlefield, won't that largely salt the earth for economic uses? I watched the movie Gravity, so I know that it wouldn't take that much for how

once space is a battlefield, won't that largely salt the earth for economic uses? I watched the movie Gravity, so I know that it wouldn't take that much for however many trillion dollars of equipment is up there to be magically transmuted into an orbiting debris cloud

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JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
> I watched the movie Gravity In case you're being serious, Gravity is a notoriously unrealistic illustration of orbital debris.
- conartist6 3mo ago
  Is it unrealistic in depicting the idea that debris could cause a cascade which would create more debris?
  - m4rtink 3mo ago
    For one the timeframe was far too short - it takes time for stuff in orbit to go around so it can collide with stuff. Not to mention having all those space stations in the same orbit about 200 meters apart.
    - rbanffy 3mo ago
      In the most realistic scenario, the movie would be a short. The debris cloud would hit the shuttle and they’d die immediately.
  - JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
    > Is it unrealistic in depicting the idea that debris could cause a cascade which would create more debris? Kessler cascades are real. Kessler cascades taking out wide ranges of orbits in a matter of hours is not. The intuitive fix is to understand that the volume of space around Earth is enormous–LEO is about 200x more voluminous than commercial airspace. It's entirely possible to trash a single orbit. But that would take months to years to manifest. And in LEO, it would tend to only last years. To my knowledge, there is no solution to efficiently denying orbits by purposely triggering Kessler cascades. If it's cheaper for a military to shoot down individual satellites rather than trigger self-replicating cascades, it's not going to happen accidentally. (Exception: GEO. That's a single orbit. It's also high up, which means it clears very slowly. It would be entirely possible for us to screw up geostationary orbit for generations.)
    - preisschild 3mo ago
      AFAIK it is also possible for the Kessler syndrome to propagate into other intersecting orbits (Highly elliptical orbits) and from there into yet other intersecting orbits, but that seems unlikely
      - JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
        > it is also possible for the Kessler syndrome to propagate into other intersecting orbits (Highly elliptical orbits) and from there into yet other intersecting orbits Countably, yes. Broadly, no–the energies prohibit it. (Plane changes are expensive.) If orbital mechanics permitted such cascades, solar systems wouldn't exist. Everything would be scattered clouds of constantly-colliding debris–not a neat plane.
    - m4rtink 3mo ago
      Actually, GEO sats start to drift quite quickly do to IIRC interaction with the Sun, Moon & Solar pressure. It won't massively change the orbit (e.g. it won't either come down or escape to Solar orbit for tens of thousands of years), but in will change the orbit inclination quite a bit and also the period IIRC. And given how thin the usable GEO belt is (so that the GEOM comsat does not move from the ground PoV, it should be basically self cleaning - any dead sat or debris will quite quickly exit the thin GEO belt. You might just need to watch for the cloud of stuff around it when maneuvering or if it ends up intersecting once in a while.

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JumpCrisscross 3mo ago

> I watched the movie Gravity In case you're being serious, Gravity is a notoriously unrealistic illustration of orbital debris.

conartist6 3mo ago
Is it unrealistic in depicting the idea that debris could cause a cascade which would create more debris?
- m4rtink 3mo ago
  For one the timeframe was far too short - it takes time for stuff in orbit to go around so it can collide with stuff. Not to mention having all those space stations in the same orbit about 200 meters apart.
  - rbanffy 3mo ago
    In the most realistic scenario, the movie would be a short. The debris cloud would hit the shuttle and they’d die immediately.
- JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
  > Is it unrealistic in depicting the idea that debris could cause a cascade which would create more debris? Kessler cascades are real. Kessler cascades taking out wide ranges of orbits in a matter of hours is not. The intuitive fix is to understand that the volume of space around Earth is enormous–LEO is about 200x more voluminous than commercial airspace. It's entirely possible to trash a single orbit. But that would take months to years to manifest. And in LEO, it would tend to only last years. To my knowledge, there is no solution to efficiently denying orbits by purposely triggering Kessler cascades. If it's cheaper for a military to shoot down individual satellites rather than trigger self-replicating cascades, it's not going to happen accidentally. (Exception: GEO. That's a single orbit. It's also high up, which means it clears very slowly. It would be entirely possible for us to screw up geostationary orbit for generations.)
  - preisschild 3mo ago
    AFAIK it is also possible for the Kessler syndrome to propagate into other intersecting orbits (Highly elliptical orbits) and from there into yet other intersecting orbits, but that seems unlikely
    - JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
      > it is also possible for the Kessler syndrome to propagate into other intersecting orbits (Highly elliptical orbits) and from there into yet other intersecting orbits Countably, yes. Broadly, no–the energies prohibit it. (Plane changes are expensive.) If orbital mechanics permitted such cascades, solar systems wouldn't exist. Everything would be scattered clouds of constantly-colliding debris–not a neat plane.
  - m4rtink 3mo ago
    Actually, GEO sats start to drift quite quickly do to IIRC interaction with the Sun, Moon & Solar pressure. It won't massively change the orbit (e.g. it won't either come down or escape to Solar orbit for tens of thousands of years), but in will change the orbit inclination quite a bit and also the period IIRC. And given how thin the usable GEO belt is (so that the GEOM comsat does not move from the ground PoV, it should be basically self cleaning - any dead sat or debris will quite quickly exit the thin GEO belt. You might just need to watch for the cloud of stuff around it when maneuvering or if it ends up intersecting once in a while.