Good housekeeping: LKO cleanup project

[Jarin]

So, with a permanent refueling station in low (120km) orbit, I started getting a bit paranoid about the piles of debris littering the 100-200 range from all my earlier testing. Not being forward-thinking, none of my castoffs have docking ports (addendum: would this even be a good idea? I'm not sure) and certainly don't have RGS units, so I had to find an alternate way to deal with them.

Enter the Deorbiter Mk 1!

Heavy landing gear makes a surprisingly good stabilizer, which means I can basically treat this like a less-fiddly docking maneuver and then just slowly accelerate to keep the spent booster in place while turning to retrograde. The only real issue is if I hit too far away from center of gravity (note to self: most of the mass in a spent booster is the engine) and not having the turning force to counteract the imbalance.

As this was a proof of concept, I already have plans for the Mk2. The prototype's flight managed to deorbit two boosters, but ran low on monoprop. I plan on giving the Mk2 a second monoprop tank, and better solar/electrical support (the Mk1 tended to die about 2/3 across the dark side orbit, which screwed up a third rendezvous). I'm considering developing a sort of offshoot Mk3 as an orbital "Tugboat" as well, slapping one of each size docking port on it and keeping it docked at my refueling station.