The Elusive Peril of Space Junk | Hacker News Reader

The Elusive Peril of Space Junk

newyorker.com

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My favorite space junk mag, Orbital Debris Quarterly:

https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/quarterly-news/

And if you haven't seen or read Planetes, I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's the best anime/manga on the subject.

Especially interesting since it is technically the "intro" or "B plot." (Most of the series is a mini-version of The Right Stuff.) But the first third of the series is an oddball fusion of an office sitcom with a "dirty jobs" style documentary. (That is, JANITORS IN SPAAAAAAACE!)

I thought it was extremely consequential. It was so mich based in physics — I'd recommend ro watch it for that alone

I was motivated to watch it after reading a review with a frame-by-frame analysis of how it got the physics right.

I thought it was crazy to read a huge article on space junk and no reference to Planetes.

In the discussion of space junk, and kessler syndrome, there is a large bias that needs to be addressed. Most commentators operate under the impression that most of the stuff up there is "junk" from human activities, that space was essentially clean until we got there. It wasn't. It isn't. There are literally tons of natural rock falling onto earth every day. By some measurements over 100 metric tons per day. That is only the stuff actually landing on earth. Exponentially more of it passes by without striking the planet but nevertheless still passes through the orbits of our satellites and space stations. Worse yet, because we have a large moon, much of that will have itself entered into some form of orbit around earth. Any discussion of the dangers associated with human-created space junk must occur in that context.

Why hasn't the kessler syndrome started already? Why has the ISS not been sandblasted after 20+ years in orbit? Those are great questions.

I'd imagine there's a difference in risk between orbiting debris and stuff that's just passing through, like when we have a meteor shower as we pass through a residual debris trail. The really tiny grain-of-sand stuff can be fairly effectively shielded against, as well; bigger chunks are more difficult.

Satellites definitely get sandblasted to some extent; here's a hole made in the SolarMax satellite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SMM_panel_hole.jpg

The ISS cupola got hit and repaired, too: http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/space-debris/kessler-synd...

True, but generally most the "natural" debris are much smaller objects (micro-meteoroids). These are on the order of micrometers in size. Smaller micro-meteoroids are much more prevalent [0]. These do still cause damage to spacecraft but it is on a much smaller scale. The effects are typically things like cracked solar arrays, tears in multi-layer thermal insulation. This is still a a concern and when things like meteor showers occur some spacecraft will try and optimize the orientation of their solar arrays so that they are not normal to the ram direction (i.e. the solar arrays are facing in the direction of travel which gives a greater chance of hitting something at high velocity)

Larger debris does tend to come from satellites. And things such as satellite collisions cause a noticeable effect on the number of objects (of a size that we can track) [1].

[0] https://www.nap.edu/openbook/0309051258/xhtml/images/img0001...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris#/media/File:Space...

>Why has the ISS not been sandblasted after 20+ years in orbit?

While "sandblasted" might be hyperbolic, micrometeoroid and orbital debris (MMOD) is a known risk to the ISS and they have a variety of shields to try on protect it.[1]

[1]https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/E_Christianse...

Are you suggesting the strike rate for the ISS doesn’t match expectations? What could explain that?

The ISS must regularly change position in orbit to avoid debris.

The show The Expanse has some interesting scenes involving loose items inside ships as well as junk/ballistics ripping through ships that this reminded me of. Interesting to see that fiction was inspired by the reality.

The movie Gravity also starts with a space debris-related catastrophe. At least the concept is gaining traction in popular culture.

It's a shame that only plotty debris is addressed in The Expanse. What about the front of the ship colliding with uncharted rocks at 1800km/s?

Makes me wonder if sane interstellar travel requires a warp drive in order to bend debris around the vehicle. See the speculated UFO propulsion observed in the USS Nimitz incident.

I find that the page's decision to hide the scrollbar and force smooth scrolling to be user-hostile.

Sometimes I feel HN should have two separate comment sections. One to discuss the content of the article, and one to discuss everything else.

They also seem to have done something that breaks Control-F, at least on Firefox. On top of that the page seems to randomly scroll while I'm reading, which I'd assume is unintentional

umatrix + reader mode fixes many things

Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics gave a great talk at the CfA on this topic a few years back. He created GCAT, a database that attempts to track all artificial space objects. https://planet4589.org/space/gcat/web/cat/index.html

I'm looking forward to Public Observatory Night resuming in person someday. :(

> “People are not really worrying about this, because it is inconvenient to act responsibly,” Darren McKnight, who works as a technical director at the aerospace-services company Centauri, told me.

Reading this article about space garbage just after reading the article about plastic garbage also currently on the HN front page was interesting and the quote could have fit well into the other article, too.

Our species seems incredibly good at making things and incredibly bad at cleaning up.

> Our species seems incredibly good at making things and incredibly bad at cleaning up.

I think it's fundamentally an entropic phenomenon. You mine rocks (easy rel.), then you refine them into minerals (less easy) and materials, then you arrange those into complex objects with perhaps thousands of materials (difficult).

Obs: difficulties vary with material, product, etc.

Finally, reverting this complex arrangement back into materials (very difficult) generally has at least as much energy cost as manufacturing did. If you were religious about it, it would probably take orders of magnitude more energy (trace materials add the difficulty); the cost would probably scale as a function of purity (99% purity easy, 99.999% purity hard), diverging to infinity as you approach 100% purity.

We have a discount because the purity of rocks we can easily find is generally greater than the purity left by our complex products. So we can just discard everything. Eventually, this will catch up to us. Eventually productive mineral deposits (for some select elements first) will get increasingly hard to access, and we'll be forced into processing our own waste to obtain it. It seems our energy costs will grow and grow.

What is truly incredible is that organic life has managed to largely enter a steady state into this process. Every substance used by life has a cycle (usually some lifeform plays a role in that cycle), from water to carbon, to sulfur, nitrogen, and so on. Organic life has entered a steady state of recycling its own waste, assembling itself from ashes of its ancestors. Life tolerates impurity very well. This is all driven by sunlight.

Maybe technological civilization can approach it as well. In time, we'll certainly have to (or face perish).

Yes, space debris is a problem and we are likely not doing enough to keep up with the growth of the space industry. But I dislike the rhetoric of "People are not really worrying about this..."

This was really true in the early arenas of space and we can still see the effects of that today. But every person that launches a satellite now in order to get a communications license for their satellite from the FCC or the ITU has to prove that their satellite will de-orbit within 25 years. With the start of the mega-constellations there have been discussions about tightening this rule [0]. Chief among the people who want to tighten the rule is the US DoD. When you invest a whole lot of money in putting something up in to space you want to make sure it is going to survive. So there are significant number of people working on tighter restrictions for future satellites launched in to space.

From the side of removing debris from space, there are multiple people working on technologies to remove debris from space [1]. Part of the problem here is the economics of it do not currently add up. However, considering the investment in the prevention of creating more debris the economics of this might come around soon. The other problem is the actual technology of removing debris without creating more debris. To catch a piece of debris you essentially have to maneuver a satellite "rendezvous" with the debris. Otherwise the relative velocities might turn an instance of "catching debris" in to "debris collision". Maneuvering between objects takes fuel which means more mass launched and more money to remove something smaller.

[0] https://breakingdefense.com/2020/04/fcc-reconsiders-tighteni...

[1] https://www.nanalyze.com/2019/06/space-debris-removal/

> “People are not really worrying about this, because it is inconvenient to act responsibly,”

Universal truth, it's now my quote of the day. Climate. Infrastructure. Technical Debt in Code. You name it.

My messy room.

I approach these articles from a point of skepticism (but still open minded).

It seems to me to any venture mankind takes on has to fit into this narrative of man sinning against nature. It’s kind of like original sin for non religious folks.

Kessler syndrome is the example of this for space. It’s hard to find arguments against man expanding into space but oh wait you could pollute low earth orbit so better stay on earth.

When you start looking for it you’ll see it everywhere.

But we have been "sinning" against nature, eh? I mean, the record of human history is the record of the destruction of the bounty of nature.

In the USA we had herds of bison that took days to pass by, clouds of birds that blocked out the sun, rivers so thick with fish you could walk across them, trees so huge they break the mind, and all of it was destroyed with hardly a thought. We took the Great Plains and made the Dust Bowl.

Today our industrial agriculture creates dead zones in the oceans, our energy system is toxic, oil spills regularly destroy life over vast areas, we are fishing the oceans to death, and about to start mining the sea floors, our topsoil is blowing and washing away, I could go on and on.

That’s my point though. That narrative is already in your head because it’s the prevailing belief system. Any criticism of humanity fits neatly into it.

Here are a few things we’ve done really well on IMO that don’t fit with the narrative:

All the nations got together and fixed the ozone layer.

We created the national park system and NWR’s with surprisingly large tracts of land.

Whaling is banned in the USA and many other countries AFAIK.

No more orca shows at sea world after black fish and it seems like we’re moving in the right direction with captive whales and dolphins?

Acid rain is way better. (That was a huge deal in the 80s)

We’re getting close to completely getting off coal as a power source (in the US)

A large portion of new power capacity is renewable.

Recycling looks like it doesn’t actually work well but it’s amazing that almost every household does it in an effort to help.

> That narrative is already in your head because it’s the prevailing belief system.

My point is it's not a belief system, it's history. Those things I mentioned really happened and continue to happen, eh? E.g. the Aral Sea really did vanish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_sea

Most of your examples serve my point better than yours, it seems to me:

> fixed the ozone layer

We literally poisoned the sky.

> Whaling is banned

After we nearly hunted them to extinction.

> black fish

We imprisoned and tortured some whales for entertainment. We do that less now.

> Acid rain

We poisoned the sky another way.

> coal

We poisoned the sky a third way. We do that less now.

> A large portion of new power capacity is renewable.

Yes, but a generation or two too late to prevent global warming due to a couple of additional ways we poisoned the sky.

> national park system and NWR

Okay, I'll give you that one. We're not actually orcs, we just act like it when we're not paying attention.

(In re: space, I'm pro-spaceflight, so I won't mention how much poison each rocket launch dumps into the sky.)

- - - -

If you want to point to an example of humans improving an area we could talk about the Loess Plateau which was destroyed and then revived:

> The plateau was highly fertile and easy to farm in ancient times, which contributed to the development of early Chinese civilization around the Loess Plateau, but centuries of overgrazing, subsistence farming, deforestation for fuel wood gathering and cultivation of crops on slopes, exacerbated by China's population increase, have resulted in degenerated ecosystems, desertification, and poor local economies.

> To reverse this trend, the Loess Plateau Watershed Rehabilitation Project was launched in 1994 to rehabilitate the land and improve the people's livelihoods. The project guided the people living on the plateau to change animal husbandry practices; encouraged natural regeneration of grasslands, tree and shrub cover on slope-lands previously used for farming; and land restoration through terracing and replanting. These efforts allowed the perennial vegetation cover to increase from 17 to 34 percent, and "[e]ven in the lifetime of the project, the ecological balance was restored in a vast area considered by many to be beyond help"; in addition, more than 2.5 million people were lifted out of poverty by doubled incomes.

> Restoration has occurred over an area of about 35,000 square kilometers (about 5% of the plateau's total area).

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loess_Plateau#Agriculture_and_...

> it’s amazing that almost every household does it in an effort to help.

I agree, FWIW, my personal narrative is that humans are nature-accelerators and not intrinsically evil (no "original sin" in other words), we just haven't been paying attention.

It's a popular narrative amongst the 'intellectual' class in the US, which traces its roots back to the initial wave of Puritanism in New England. It's easy to trace the path from Mather to Emerson/Thoreau to Silent Spring. This is also why American Liberalism is different from anything a European would call Liberalism- hard to get too worked up about the plight of the proletariat when deep down you secretly believe the dirty sinners must deserve it.

Working on https://space-search.io to better visualize the risks of space junk!

I think it's interesting that the RORSAT satellites mentioned in 3 or 4 places in the article (although not always by name) were at one point responsible for something like a ridiculously large percentage of space junk (maybe even a majority, although I cant find the numbers easily).

http://www.stuffin.space/

Very good article, but on the meta side the scroll-jacking was unbearable.

Beautiful presentation!

Yes but it's so slow on Firefox for Android that it constantly overs rolls. Very hard to read because it keeps jumping to the wrong place.

Disable javascript, and it stops being a vanity art project, and magically turns into a web article.

Some people should not be allowed near web publishing.

I strongly disagree with this view -- the art is precisely what drew me into this article. Of course the content is the center here, but it adds so much. I wouldn't remember a generic article on Space Junk, but I'll sure remember this for a long time.

It's really important that it adds to the experience. It should have been tested on low performance devices, and so on. (I'm designing a few websites with those concerns in mind right now)

I think one approach is benchmarking and adjusting features based on that. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of good!

Please expand your horizons on the utility of art (integrated into our daily lives). It can be far from vain.

I used to make sites like this as a full time job; yeah until technology advances enough to make the jank disappear completely it's just a vanity project, it actually detracts from the substance of the article

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