Space Junk; What will we do about it?

[Mr. Peabody]

New space missions, both commercial and for exploration are launched quite frequently leaving spent stages or damaged equipment orbiting the earth. Recently, China created the largest orbiting debri cloud ever when they tested their satellite capable of destroying other satellites. Decommissioned satellites also contribute to space junk. So that begs the question, how are we going to clean up this huge orbiting mess? A good start would be to require commercial rockets to be equipped with remote control cores and be staged while they still have enough fuel to be de-orbited. That would slow the build up of space junk, but cleaning up our current space junk would require something similar to an orbiter with a lot of fuel and cargo capacity. The orbiter could rendezvous with large pieces of space junk and attach small solid rockets to de-orbit them. The orbiter could also use a claw to grab space junk and place it in the cargo bay. Another option would be to use a small pod equipped with an electromagnet and launched from a medium sized rocket. Once in orbit and in a large cloud of smaller space debris the pod's electromagnet could engage and once the debris was secured to the pod the entire pod could be re-entered incinerating the space debris. Both of these options would be relatively expensive and would likely need to be enforced by an international space counsel. So the question is, what will we do about the space junk problem? I'd be interested to hear your responses.                 

[munlander1]

I think the most effective way to do it is, as you said attach small solid rockets and deorbit them.

Edited March 1, 2017 by munlander1
Terms

[wumpus]

Depends where it is.  The main cloud you can see close to the Earth is likely to be gone (albeit replaced by new space junk) by the time you send anything up to deal with it.  There is also the "graveyard orbit" near GSO that is used explicitly to store space junk (it is way too far to deorbit).  In between lies the problem.

I'd also expect little cooperation before its too late, and unexplained difficulties getting things to work thanks to three-letter agencies (although Russians may like four) that are hiding military satellites as space junk.

[kerbiloid]

( Somebody just ought to leave this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes )

Unless 1 per 100 small solid rockets (tm) bursts and turns 1 per 100 unused satellites into a chaotic cloud of 1000 pieces of metal scrap, increasing the danger 10 times.

Electromagnets are not very good with aluminium. And fuel tanks are mostly made of it.

My vision: they must use snots. And lasers.
If a satellite is big, rendez-vous with it and stick a ball of sticky slime on its side. Then get away and heat it by a laser. Slime will vapourize and produce delta-V -100 m/s. The snotted sat will deorbit. Without rockets and bursts.
If scraps are small, rendez-vous with them and make them stick to a ball of slime. Then release the slime ball with sticked scraps and heat it with a laser to deorbit.

ISS-based tow truck (in colloquial Russian - "thief girl") is in order for that,

Edited March 1, 2017 by kerbiloid

[Nibb31]

It's not as big a deal as some people think. Space is big. There's lots of room out there. The best we can do is track and avoid the big stuff.

[RCgothic]

The big stuff is just a source for the little stuff, which is the real threat. The big stuff can be tracked and avoided. A cloud of little stuff is lethal. Big stuff spawns little stuff whenever it is struck by anything.

Enforce an 'everything must be de-orbited at end of life' regulation. That takes away new debris sources. Lasers are the means to get rid of the smaller stuff, but it requires very good tracking and an exceptional power source.

[kerbiloid]

42 minutes ago, Nibb31 said:

Space is big. There's lots of room out there.

Until one realizes that any piece of junk is not a tiny thing 1 meter in diameter, but a torus with minor diameter 1 m and major diameter 14000 kilometers (for a 500 km high orbit), and most of these tori intersect overlap.

Comparing to civil aviation safety standards about minimal distance between aircrafts, these pieces of junk become tori ~5 km in minor diameter and still 14000 km in major. Invariant to their real mass and size.

Edited March 1, 2017 by kerbiloid

[YNM]

What will we do ?

 

Nothing !

 

Let the atmosphere do it's share of work (it's well-proven). AFAIK the hazardous ones (not appreciably decaying) are those higher than 600 km - at that point, recover established things become somewhat unfeasible.

If anything, sending any new missions would increase the amount of debris, not reducing it. (unless a hot massive giant orbital lasers is in, then I doubt most schemes.)

Edited March 1, 2017 by YNM

[tater]

 

 

[kerbiloid]

Just because somebody should post it

Spoiler

 

[Bill Phil]

Nothing, really. It's only a problem in the smaller orbits, and those orbits happen to decay quickly. 

Worst comes to worst, we add mass for a shield.

[munlander1]

I think spent stages and old satellites should have to be deorbited. There should be some financial penalty of s country does not abide by it. I think that was one of the reasons why the space shuttle was important. About the only one though.

Edited March 1, 2017 by munlander1

[Ultimate Steve]

2017: Nothing.

2017-2030: Make everything new de-orbitable and/or reusable.

2345: We build a GEO ringstation/space elevator and clean up everuthing so we won't hit it.

~2700: We rebuild the now obsolete ringstation, along with one at Mars.

~3573: Ringbase II is destroyed by aliens and/or space pirates creating a ring system around Earth. Earth is abandoned in favor of Mars.

~4000: We all move to the Trappist system because all of the solar system's planets have been ringed with debris from the ringstations.

[Camacha]

13 hours ago, Nibb31 said:

It's not as big a deal as some people think. Space is big. There's lots of room out there. The best we can do is track and avoid the big stuff.

There is something called Big Sky. It is what aviation depended on to prevent collisions before controlled air space. The sky is so incredibly huge and aircraft are so very tiny, that collisions are mathematically impossible. Yet they happened, and kept happening more and more. Before that, humans followed the same thought process when it comes to the pollution of sea and air. They are vast expanses of water and air. It is absolutely impossible that these tiny trickles of pollutants have any effect. In all those cases, our reasoning also happened to be the most convenient way of dealing with the matter. My little drop in the ocean will not do us in. Yet in all cases, we were utterly wrong.

Human hubris never ceases to exist. We make a mistake, only to make it a hundred times more. This time, we say, this time it is impossible it bites us. Go figure. Humans are pretty good at recognizing immediate and frequent dangers. Do not step in front of moving cars. Do not linger on high ledges. That sort of stuff. When it comes to recognizing slow moving dangers or ones that require action as a group, we are dismally bad. It is not something that was required in hour earlier evolution, so we pay the price every time.

 

[Camacha]

 

36 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

Worst comes to worst, we add mass for a shield.

How could that ever be viable? It will make space flight even more impossibly expensive and you cannot protect all relevant parts of a satellite. Especially solar panels seem vulnerable. Even if you could, you would knock a satellite into another orbit, plus that these shielded satellites would require ever more shielding on subsequent satellites, as more and more heavily armoured behemoths are circling the Earth.

I do not really see how sending up the equivalent of the armour of a T-34 for a cube sat makes sense.

[Nibb31]

1 hour ago, Ultimate Steve said:

2017: Nothing.

2017-2030: Make everything new de-orbitable and/or reusable.

It isn't "Nothing". Everything that goes to orbit is already required to either deorbit or boost itself to a graveyard orbit. Regulations for that have been in place since the 80's at least.

Most debris these days is accidental. By definition, there isn't much you can do to prevent that.

You can't reasonably require everything to deorbit. It takes quite a heavy upper stage to get a comsat into GEO. It would take pretty much the same dV to deorbit, so unless you triple the size of every single comsat, and require a Falcon Heavy for every launch, it's not gonna happen. 

 

Edited March 1, 2017 by Nibb31

[Camacha]

5 minutes ago, Nibb31 said:

You can't reasonably require everything to deorbit. It takes quite a heavy upper stage to get a comsat into GEO. It would take pretty much the same dV to deorbit, so unless you triple the size of every single comsat, and require a Falcon Heavy for every launch, it's not gonna happen. 
 

Why not? It becoming more expensive changes the business model, but it is far from impossible. That is like saying that having safety standards for oil fields makes things too expensive. A lot of money is put into safety gear and regulations, but it has become the norm - for good reason. Besides, obligating companies that deal in communication satellites to take care of their mess ensures that it is a sustainable business, rather than leaving the check for their future successors.

[Nibb31]

19 minutes ago, Camacha said:

Why not?

Because graveyard orbits are perfectly adequate.

[Camacha]

Just now, Nibb31 said:

Because graveyard orbits are perfectly adequate.

Please elaborate, taking the points in this post into account.

[Slam_Jones]

16 hours ago, Nibb31 said:

It's not as big a deal as some people think. Space is big. There's lots of room out there. The best we can do is track and avoid the big stuff.

I can only imagine hundreds of years ago, when they said things like "the ocean is big!  There's plenty of room to dump stuff!  What's the worst that could happen?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch

2 hours ago, Camacha said:

There is something called Big Sky. It is what aviation depended on to prevent collisions before controlled air space. The sky is so incredibly huge and aircraft are so very tiny, that collisions are mathematically impossible. Yet they happened, and kept happening more and more. Before that, humans followed the same thought process when it comes to the pollution of sea and air. They are vast expanses of water and air. It is absolutely impossible that these tiny trickles of pollutants have any effect. In all those cases, our reasoning also happened to be the most convenient way of dealing with the matter. My little drop in the ocean will not do us in. Yet in all cases, we were utterly wrong.

Human hubris never ceases to exist. We make a mistake, only to make it a hundred times more. This time, we say, this time it is impossible it bites us. Go figure. Humans are pretty good at recognizing immediate and frequent dangers. Do not step in front of moving cars. Do not linger on high ledges. That sort of stuff. When it comes to recognizing slow moving dangers or ones that require action as a group, we are dismally bad. It is not something that was required in hour earlier evolution, so we pay the price every time.

I wholeheartedly agree with these statements.

Edited March 1, 2017 by Slam_Jones

[Bill Phil]

2 hours ago, Camacha said:

 

How could that ever be viable? It will make space flight even more impossibly expensive and you cannot protect all relevant parts of a satellite. Especially solar panels seem vulnerable. Even if you could, you would knock a satellite into another orbit, plus that these shielded satellites would require ever more shielding on subsequent satellites, as more and more heavily armoured behemoths are circling the Earth.

I do not really see how sending up the equivalent of the armour of a T-34 for a cube sat makes sense.

You are aware that we already do this for micrometeoroid protection,  right? 

Shielding can actually be pretty light, and if it's not, we'll come up with something. Most satellites are fairly stationary. Heck, we might see more large space stations as smaller satellites become less practical.

54 minutes ago, Slam_Jones said:

I can only imagine hundreds of years ago, when they said things like "the ocean is big!  There's plenty of room to dump stuff!  What's the worst that could happen?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch

Sure. Except that space is vastly larger and we're putting much less  mass into space than trash into the ocean. At most this'll be a problem for the far future, but by then we should have high performance propulsion that lets us use shields to get through it, if not get rid of it.

[Bill Phil]

3 hours ago, Camacha said:

There is something called Big Sky. It is what aviation depended on to prevent collisions before controlled air space. The sky is so incredibly huge and aircraft are so very tiny, that collisions are mathematically impossible. Yet they happened, and kept happening more and more. Before that, humans followed the same thought process when it comes to the pollution of sea and air. They are vast expanses of water and air. It is absolutely impossible that these tiny trickles of pollutants have any effect. In all those cases, our reasoning also happened to be the most convenient way of dealing with the matter. My little drop in the ocean will not do us in. Yet in all cases, we were utterly wrong.

Human hubris never ceases to exist. We make a mistake, only to make it a hundred times more. This time, we say, this time it is impossible it bites us. Go figure. Humans are pretty good at recognizing immediate and frequent dangers. Do not step in front of moving cars. Do not linger on high ledges. That sort of stuff. When it comes to recognizing slow moving dangers or ones that require action as a group, we are dismally bad. It is not something that was required in hour earlier evolution, so we pay the price every time.

 

Sure. That all applies to the ocean and the sky, but not so for space. Why, you ask? Because space is so huge, and satellites so small, that collisions are extremely unlikely. Have they happened? Yes. Will they happen? Yes. Will it be a problem? No. Space is fundamentally different, in that it's so much bigger.

But even so, you're model is too simple. Aircraft collisions are excruciatingly unlikely, but they happen. Why is this, you ask? Is it because people were wrong about  Big Sky? No, it's due to a few things: 

1. More planes in the air increases likelihood of collision

2. Most planes have to land eventually, and thus there are high traffic regions of the sky. Here is where most collisions occur.

In space, we have very few vehicles and no ports to speak of. Until a far future scenario plays out, this issue will not exist. 

[DrLicor]

Well, what KSP doesn't teach you, is that even outside the atmosphere, for earth we like to use 140km, there's drag, everything in LEO is slowing down. Satellites do have to reposition constantly. 
So that thick grey mass around the earth, that's all coming back eventually. A funny example is the first Chinese space-station which is out of control right now and will re-enter somewhere this year. (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/21/chinas-tiangong-1-space-station-out-of-control-crash-to-earth)

But indeed, everything further away will take hundreds of years to fall back to earth and burn into the atmosphere. What the Apollo mission used to do is to crash their stages into the Moon. Has to advantages, you don't have those debris and they used the data from the impacts for research.  

But I think in the future the amount of debris will only decrease, since they want to make everything re-usable. And everything in the world has to become sustainable these days, even space flight. 

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, Bill Phil said:

Except that space is vastly larger and we're putting much less  mass into space than trash into the ocean.

Oceanic trash doesn't move with several km/s speed.

People who underestimate the space junk problem, should first study this (keeping in mind that sats are not planes and cannot perform evasive actions)
http://www.skybrary.aero/index.php/Separation_Standards

Edited March 2, 2017 by kerbiloid

[Camacha]

1 hour ago, Bill Phil said:

Sure. That all applies to the ocean and the sky, but not so for space.

This is exactly the hubris I described in my post. We never thought aircraft could collide mid-air and mid-flight, yet they did very early on. Ignoring the risk of collisions, just because it does not really suit us at the moment, means making the same exact mistake yet again. Your argument that aircraft tend to bunch up in certain areas is equally true for space. LEO and GEO are much more crowded than other regions. Space might be a bit bigger, but our hubris will inevitably be the biggest of all. Rinse, repeat. Maybe we should finally stop putting our children in charge of dealing with the mess we were too lazy to deal with.
 

1 hour ago, Bill Phil said:

You are aware that we already do this for micrometeoroid protection,  right? 

Shielding can actually be pretty light, and if it's not, we'll come up with something. Most satellites are fairly stationary. Heck, we might see more large space stations as smaller satellites become less practical.

Micrometeorites are grains of sand at best. Just a small nut will do an exponential amount of damage. We are not even talking about being hit by something much more substantial, like a cube sat or even full size satellite. Good luck with current day shielding. Speeches in your honour will be held.
 

 

1 hour ago, Bill Phil said:

Sure. Except that space is vastly larger and we're putting much less  mass into space than trash into the ocean. At most this'll be a problem for the far future, but by then we should have high performance propulsion that lets us use shields to get through it, if not get rid of it.

Gambling on future solutions being cheap is a rather risky course. We do not really see cheap and easy solutions to put carbon back into the ground either. That is going to cost insane amounts of effort and money, right at the moment the cheap energy has gone. Let us not make things even worse.