Recycling space junk.

[Hyperspace Industries]

There is a lot of discussion about disposing of space junk, but what about reusing it? Broken satellites may still have solar panels which could be used to power stuff. Fuel can be salvaged, and if none of these are available you could still use the scrap metal to build stuff. Spent rocket stages could be turned into stations, ships, or be refueled with resources from the earth.

What could we do with all the space junk in orbit? How much metal and other materials are there? Could you build a skyhook? Orbital beamed power mirrors? What could you do, and how?

I'm thinking of the drones being ion propelled.

Or using solar thermal propulsion, because you could then harvest and use fuel from any satellites.

[DDE]

1 hour ago, Hyperspace Industries said:

There is a lot of discussion about disposing of space junk, but what about reusing it? Broken satellites may still have solar panels which could be used to power stuff. Fuel can be salvaged, and if none of these are available you could still use the scrap metal to build stuff.

Reuse of salvaged parts involves you accepting the unpredictable risks that come with that. Producing new parts from scrap materials, meanwhile, involves setting up the spaceborne equivalents of massive industrial chains of production involved in modern electronics.

[kerbiloid]

How much energy can produce the second-hand solar panel compared to the energy required for a transorbital transfer of the gatherer?

[Hyperspace Industries]

24 minutes ago, DDE said:

Reuse of salvaged parts involves you accepting the unpredictable risks that come with that. Producing new parts from scrap materials, meanwhile, involves setting up the spaceborne equivalents of massive industrial chains of production involved in modern electronics.

By building stuff I mean more simple structures, such as the main arms of a skyhook, or the pressure vessel of a station/ship, the electronic components and complicated to manufacture parts would need to be shipped from earth (or be cheaper to).

[DDE]

55 minutes ago, Hyperspace Industries said:

By building stuff I mean more simple structures, such as the main arms of a skyhook, or the pressure vessel of a station/ship, the electronic components and complicated to manufacture parts would need to be shipped from earth (or be cheaper to).

Do not underestimate the mass of machinery that goes into the manufacturing of "simple" metal parts, or overestimate the ability of 3D printing to replace it.

Edited January 8, 2022 by DDE

[StrandedonEarth]

The biggest difficulty of orbital salvage is the dV required to rendezvous the bits, especially between different inclinations, as hinted at by kerbiloid. So the best place for salvage is from the geostationary belt, for a few reasons:

1: It's a  common destination for most commsats, with plenty of large, retired assets Many of them simply have no more propellant and/or dead batteries (wait a sec... GEO birds should need smaller batteries than in LEO sats. wouldn't they? Any shaded periods out there should be much shorter, I would think).
2: In a nice, co-planar belt
3: "Relatively easy" (YMMV) to reach from other orbits, using a lunar assist.

Unfortunately, the most problematic space junk consists of smaller fragments in the 1g-10kg range (my own guesstimate range, sounds about right to me) in medium orbits in the (guessing again) 1000-10,000 km range  that don't decay very quickly. So the reward is small and the dV to gather most of it is high. Possibly the best thing to do with that debris is to hit it with  high-power lasers in the right spot at the right time to cause some ablative retro-thrust, accelerating the orbital decay.

OTOH, there should (data needed) be some larger bodies in that range, probably mostly spent stages. These objects are the ones that, if struck by the smaller fragments, could spawn thousands more small, hard-to-track junkeroids** crossing the lower orbits of crewed vessels. If an omnivorous* engine could be developed,  perhaps part of these larger pieces could be used as propellant to power a tug back out to the "salvage station" parked in the graveyard belt above the GSO belt. Or perhaps a solar-sailing tug could be developed to provide a substantial portion of the dV.

*Omnivorous engine meaning one able to use many materials to generate impulse ranging from a mass driver to whatever can be vaporized and fed into an ion engine. But there would be risks shooting raw mass around, and I'm not sure if flinging a lot of metallic ions around is a good idea either.

**Junkeroids... I don't believe I've heard/seen that word before, so I think I've coined a new word. What would be the best way to get this word popularized to refer to small pieces of human-made junk in space, wherever it orbits?

[Hyperspace Industries]

16 minutes ago, StrandedonEarth said:

Junkeroids... I don't believe I've heard/seen that word before, so I think I've coined a new word. What would be the best way to get this word popularized to refer to small pieces of human-made junk in space, wherever it orbits?

Really popular sci fi story/short essay (think Andy Weir's the egg)?

That's a really good word by the way. I like it! 

[StrandedonEarth]

6 minutes ago, Hyperspace Industries said:

Really popular sci fi story/short essay (think Andy Weir's the egg)?

That's a really good word by the way. I like it! 

Whoops, yeah, Google first, crow later

google.ca

https://books.google.ca › books

Resurrection and Reclamation: The Collected Works of S. Darnbrook ...

 

Elrod Stanton — 2005 · Fiction

I probably should have seen the ending coming 'round the Junkeroid Belt of Venussian Maggnuis, but I didn't and that's a plus for you (nice touch, .

 

So maybe I can’t claim it, but it needs to be popularized!

Edited January 8, 2022 by StrandedonEarth

[NFUN]

44 minutes ago, StrandedonEarth said:

Junkeroids... I don't believe I've heard/seen that word before, so I think I've coined a new word

something that is like an old POS car? I guess that works for dead satellites, less so for their fragments

[StrandedonEarth]

32 minutes ago, NFUN said:

something that is like an old POS car? I guess that works for dead satellites, less so for their fragments

Trying to find a word for human-made small debris in orbit, not so much derelict craft or spent stages. Scrapperoid sounds more like a gladiator-sat. Junkeroids and mini-junkeroids? That's what you get when the German Junkers company moves into the spacecraft business, if the haven't already. Shrapneloids...?  That sounds descriptive enough, yeah, shrapneloids, that's the ticket, yeah!

[kerbiloid]

A fog cloud moving in the opposite direction and making them burn at 16 km/s speed.

Or a nuclear tug with a pump and a water tank on that orbit, spraying the water around to make them hit the droplets.

[Gargamel]

9 hours ago, Hyperspace Industries said:

By building stuff I mean more simple structures, such as the main arms of a skyhook,

A skyhook arm is far from a simple structure. First off, even if you recycled every single piece of material we’ve put into orbit so far, I doubt it would account for more than 1% of the material required, along with the added burden, as mentioned, of establishing the capability to produce it in the first place.     Secondly, it will need to be made of exotic materials, and by the time we’ve launched enough of this material and had cause to recycle it, it would have been far simpler to build an elevator/hook to start with.  

[Spacescifi]

 

I have said before in a thread of my own that orbital shipyards would be little more than assembly yards (attach a bunch of pre-made parts, which is exactly how the ISS was made).

To contruct/machine things in space itself is more expensive and won't actually provide any savings unless much of your resources come from space. Yet that is impossible in LEO, which is why do orbital assembly.

 

Even the moon with it's ice would give you more to help with construction than LEO would.

 

Second... space tends to wreck stuff over time by radiation, so it may take some processing to ensure using all that space junk as a radiation shield is even safe and won't radiate you more.