4 ms·
It would take a lot of sand to mine all of the useful orbital space, and that's just LEO. Nope. You just need to make it a high enough probability of your spac
by onion2k 11d ago
It would take a lot of sand to mine all of the useful orbital space, and that's just LEO.
Nope. You just need to make it a high enough probability of your spaceship being damaged that people won't take the risk. For humans that's very low. For anything moderately expensive it's quite low.
There's tons of room in higher orbits.
You have to go through the lower orbits to get there.
- JumpCrisscross 11d ago> You have to go through the lower orbits to get there Math doesn't math. The closest solution I've seen is putting 10^6 to 10^9 kg fragmented debris in the 700 to 1,000 km band to create a 5% failure rate at fastest transit, which is economically devastating. But that assumes away grain-grain collisions. I think when I last ran the math, you'd need to sustain 5 to 10 Starship loads of fragmented debris to that orbit a week to create a proper barrier–near 100% hazard. At which point the solution becomes shooting down those launch vehicles. In a couple years (3 to 10, depending on the solar cycle), the skies would clear to about 1% hazard. That hazard, however, would persist for some time–how long is anybody's guess.