The test flight of my debris retriever

[Echostatic]

I decided that, rather than leave debris floating up in space, I would build a ship to capture it and take it back down. This is what I came up with.

It's basically a large box with some essential bits stuck on it.

Lots of engines to get it into orbit.

And lots of struts to keep everything attached to everything else. The winch and electromagnet can be seen at the top of the box here.

Got it on the launch pad, Jeb is really excited to go back into space! This test has the objective of intercepting one piece of debris, bringing it into the cargobay with the electromagnet, and taking it back to Kerbal.

Aaaaaand no. Sorry Jeb, you will not go to space today. At least he survived, and still seems very excited about it all.

Turns out the launch clamps were clipping into the SRBs. The clamps were rearranged, the launch pad tidied up, and attempt two resulted in a successful liftoff!

Carefully thrusting away from the spent stage, which was left on a suborbital trajectory, of course.

In orbit! Now, to find a piece of debris.

Found one! Jeb made the necessary burns to get an intercept.

Looking good...

Ah, it's a large stack separator. This will make for an excellent test. Time to step outside Jeb.

Jeb needs to go inside the cargobay and retrieve the electromagnet.

So far so good, now he needs to stick it onto the ring. Anywhere will do.

'Atta boy!

Now, time to get back to the ship and reel it in!

He is so excited because he knows he is doing a very good job.

Start reeling carefully until it's in the bay...

There we go! Now just disengage the magnet and close the doors!

I don't have any screenshots, but I had to load from a quicksave after discovering that loose debris will not stay put in the bay if you time warp. The separator got lodged partway in the ship creating an uncontrollable spin and ruined everything.

So, after fixing that, and keeping the debris safely in the bay, it was time to come home.

Time to bail! Rotate the ship so it doesn't plow into you when you blow yourself free...

Aaaand detach!

Looks like a safe splashdown is in Jeb's future.

The garbage box keeps going.

The ring is still inside.

Moments before impact.

Somehow the electromagnet survived.

So that concluded the test. The craft is perfectly capable of collecting debris and returning it to Kerbin. The clipping during time warp is going to be a big problem if more than one piece is collected per flight, but I believe quantum struts will fix that. I should be able to use them to carry up to four pieces of debris at a time, if I can manage my fuel well enough to get that many. Overall, I would say it was a very successful flight!

[Specula]

It's a nice idea, but that's a lot of expenditure and effort to get rid of one decoupler...

[Echostatic]

It's a nice idea, but that's a lot of expenditure and effort to get rid of one decoupler...

That was just the first flight, to test if it was an effective method of debris removal. Turns out it is, or will be with some small changes.

[Sir Nahme]

psssh jeb DEMANDS such efforts

[BobTheYoungFish]

I've done something similar, but over Minmus and with something smaller. I launched it with a docking module for my station.

The debris was actually supposed to have a probe core onto it so I could deorbit it, but I forgot to put it on. Instead I had to push it, which worked quite well.

I was going to make a larger version to deorbit debris around Kerbin, but with the map-filtering in the next update I don't think I'll bother.

[Morokth]

As an alternative, you can grab your debris and move it into a decaying orbit, release it to burn up in the atmosphere/splashdown/touchdown and then return the collector back to a stable orbit. From there, go find more trash to pick up, or jus decouple Jeb and land him and send another pilot up to track a crack at it (would require a docking port to hold the cmd module instead a decoupler, but I think you get the idea). Course, there's always that persistence debris slider too, which is my personal favorite (although I've been working on keeping detached tanks and the like out of stable orbits)

[Cdr_Zeta]

Hi,

Kudos go out here to a job well done ! I was workin on a project of such magnitude and can I say it isnt easy.

For now we will be opting to lazer blast the stuff.

Cdr Zeta

[Echostatic]

As an alternative, you can grab your debris and move it into a decaying orbit, release it to burn up in the atmosphere/splashdown/touchdown and then return the collector back to a stable orbit. From there, go find more trash to pick up, or jus decouple Jeb and land him and send another pilot up to track a crack at it (would require a docking port to hold the cmd module instead a decoupler, but I think you get the idea). Course, there's always that persistence debris slider too, which is my personal favorite (although I've been working on keeping detached tanks and the like out of stable orbits)

I would love to just move stuff to a decaying orbit, but the physics don't work for that unless you are focused on that particular debris. I did that once, and it took forever for the thing to finally come down, with me not able to do anything else the whole time.

[Morokth]

I would love to just move stuff to a decaying orbit, but the physics don't work for that unless you are focused on that particular debris. I did that once, and it took forever for the thing to finally come down, with me not able to do anything else the whole time.

Hmm. Hadn't thought about that lol.

[Splode]

Unstable orbits don't work, but parabolic ones do! Shunt it until periapsis is below 0m, then burn prograde to restore your orbit. That way, you can use one craft for a whole lot of debris as long as you still have fuel.

[Finnerty]

Here is another idea for capturing and deorbiting more than one piece of debris per launch. Its a bit long, but successful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc9rP-gV_j4