Brane Craft
nasa.gov
nasa.gov
One of my favorite "low cost / unconventional" de-orbit ideas was candle soot clouds. Basically a cloud of carbon black that is deployed in orbit, it coats objects that pass through it asymmetrically resulting in asymmetric thermionic emissions when exposed to sunlight, creating a small net impulse which pushes the stuff out of orbit. Not sure how you would prevent it from killing stuff you wanted to keep though.
A new event propagation system available on npm today under the package name "nasa"
Isn't a 'brane' a mathematical object? Is there any basis in science for turning a physical 3d object into a M2-Brane?
At first read I thought he was just talking about a space probe in the form of a thin sheet that could propel itself in a novel way. Now I think he's talking about dropping the ship out of the third dimension.
Can anyone here ELI5?
That'd be 101 of space illustration.
Therefore:
The relevant Hugo winner has you & thousands of others uploading your personalities into on onboard "neural mesh", resulting in everyone calling it the "Brainship". An in-voyage accident due to forgotten space junk sends you somewhere unexpected in space and/or time. During the trip the onboard community fragments and develops in a petri dish of experimental post-corporeal societies that promptly go to virtual war over control of the craft. The Bra{in|ne}boat encounters strange new lifeforms, which by a series of loosely connected plot devices involving convoluted theoretical and/or fictional mathematics, enable one small motivated group on board to seize control and return the device to Earth, over the objections of another group. In the intervening thousands of years, humanity has evolved radically and is facing destruction due to techno-industrial political forces wielding unimaginable power. The inhabitants of the Brainevessel join forces and use the wisdom and/or alien friends they gained during their epic voyage to save humanity, and the warring factions are subsequently reconciled and redeemed. One faction stays behind to help humanity recover, whilst the other goes on an unspecified voyage back to the stars aboard the upgraded Mindyacht. The End.
(c) every science fiction author since Homer.
I can see the 'Mindyacht' being the superseding craft of choice ;)
0.https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/Debris-G...
A lot of it comes down to things just being far apart. We're used to the surface of the earth - a 2D surface, but space is 3D. There's orders of several orders of magnitude more room and not a lot of objects in it.
Secondly, the orbits of these objects are tracked and in a database. It's a pretty easy task to check if your planned launch path comes near anything.
Space will still be really, really big, but short of Jeltz showing up, kessler syndrome will close our access to space.
As a thought expiriment, consider the worst case - a hyper intelligent, pan dimensional being disassembles all spacecraft in high LEO. let's assume that's 1,000 US tons worth. ( I have no idea.) if these spacecraft pieces were spread into a sphere the size of the earth, that would be 1/40 billionth of a cm thick.
Since a sphere doesn't orbit, let's turn it into lethal 1cm cubes, all magically evenly distributed, orbiting at the same altitude, magically not colliding. That's one death cube every 4 square Km. What are the odd of flying a rocket through that layer? Pretty good actually. The layer is only certain death if you stay in it. We'd still have access to the solar system, geosynchronous orbit, and mid/low LEO even in the alien intelligence worst case Kessler syndrome.
( I have only worked this out on the back of a napkin. Corrections to math appreciated)
LEO trash collectors
[1] http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/news/orbital_debri...
Orbital Debris Quarterly is a good resource on the subject.
http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/newsletter/newsletter.html
The actors puting objects up in orbit are trying hard to be good neighbours these days. Our cubesat missions are designed such that should we completely lose control over a satellite the orbit will naturally degrade and re-enter the atmosphere on a ~10 year time scale. Our hardware deployed from the ISS is gone in less than two years. It's my understanding that it is required of us (and most groups in general) to plan our missions such that they will naturally de-orbit within 25 years.
If we don't do something, we will end up trapped on this ball of rock by lethal kessler syndrome.
Why isn't there legislation mandating that space operators tidy up after themselves?
Wait, stupid question, we can't get that right even on earth.