Now that we had ...

[WinkAllKerb'']

a NASA partnership with asteroid redirect mission, can we expect for a ESA removing the resulting kessler garbage one ?

(1/3 sarcastic within the humour rainbow colours scheme not speaking of unseeable spectrum)

Edited July 1, 2014 by WinkAllKerb''
oh, and possibly without glassbox gonga line ... due to EA failure

[moeggz]

Haha I know my save could use a kessler syndrome removing focused update

[Blind Dead McJones]

I don't know, how do they actually handle that in reality? Because I'm pretty sure in reality most stuff gets deorbited in a few months if it's in a low Earth orbit, due to the fact that the atmosphere doesn't just abruptly end at a certain altitude like it does in the game. I know that the vast majority of the garbage in my program ends up in a suborbital trajectory anyway (often by design).

[redmario14]

Tractor beams perhaps?

[SkyRender]

Most LEO debris are in orbits that are high enough above the bulk of the atmosphere to cause their eventual deorbit to take decades at minimum. Much of that debris is also small enough that it takes much longer (less surface area plus rarified atmosphere equals less drag, meaning much slower speed loss than something as massive as the ISS). On a long enough timeline, everything in LEO will deorbit due to a combination of 1.) micro-atmospheric alterations, 2.) gravitational inconsistencies, and 3.) human inattention or inability to station-keep, but that timeline could easily span thousands of years for some of that debris. Kessler Syndrome can easily cause near-space to be untenable for launches for the entire lifespan of a civilization if allowed to manifest on a large enough scale.

[Pecan]

A Whackjob vacuum cleaner!

Wait, it is a vacuum!

Turn it round - Whackjob leaf blower!

[Rowsdower]

If the ESA got in touch with us with interest to work on something in the same way NASA did, I don't think it'd be out of the realm of possibility. It's not every day you hear from agencies like that.

[Pecan]

...It's not every day you hear from agencies like that.

Awww, go on, you're just being modest. I bet you have them on the 'phone all the time now :-)

[Barklight]

Awww, go on, you're just being modest. I bet you have them on the 'phone all the time now :-)

If not, I bet you anything that a 12 hour KSP session is part of the first week of Astronaut training

[KasperVld]

I would love to see an ESA cooporation... perhaps they could give us an alternate launch site modeled after the one on French Guiana

Or perhaps we could make satellites more interesting by incorporating things like Figaro (ESA's GPS equivalent) or mapping satellites or telescopes or other awesome stuff ESA is working on: it's a long list

[Sky_walker]

Yes, please. ESA got tons of amazing technologies, some of which are completly whacky (Philae harpoons in a comet), other simply: jawdropping (eg. Cassini–Huygens or Ariane programm).

Partnership with ESA could add so much more into Kerbal... I'd love to see some iconic projects with ESA involvement (James Webb, please ) along with sole ESA achievements - whole new world of discoveries in Kerbal.