Hacker News Reader

Comment by DantesKite | Hacker News Reader

It's a problem, but I don't think it's that intractable of a problem, since any company launching products into space has an incentive not to have them destroyed by a ring of planetary trash.

Cool essay by the way. Learned something new.

View on HN

I'll just leave this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

We usually solve the tragedy of the commons situations by adding a regulating authority. One could argue that that's one of the main reasons for having governments. Of course we don't have a world government to appeal to here and the number of nations with launch capabilities is rapidly growing. But as private organizations lose profit from worsening Kessler Syndrome they will push for a solution, since this a everyone-looses situation, not winner-takes-all. I would predict we wind up with another UN organization, similar to the ITU.

I don't think that applies in this context, since any space debris will damage space ventures, cutting into profits.

The private sector might disregard long term risk for short term profit, as they did countless times with the environment. This was mentioned in the article.

I think they will too. There won't be any incentive in the short-term to do anything about it. I just don't think it's an intractable problem (as in, impossible to solve over the span of a century).

The author addressed that exact point explicitly near the end of the article; you may want to reread.

Isn't that addressed in the last 3 paragraphs of the article - that companies are incentivized to be too short sighted to care?

Or are you saying you think companies will invent/build more resilient satellites in response to junk? I am not an expert but I wonder how feasible that would be given the weight constraints and extreme speeds involved.

I'm ignorant of the problem, but since it was compared to "rings of trash" (you know, like Saturn, but trashier) might it eventually solve itself? I expect the debris would pulverize itself and all sort of fall in lock-step until it was just so much dust we had to pass through?

Perhaps that would take thousands of years....

If you have to travel by chemically-propelled rocket your only chance of escaping Earth's gravity well without falling back is to obtain an escape velocity of 11km/s (~40,000km/h) within a short time span before the fuels burn up. Anything that orbits Earth has a comparable speed, only directions will differ. Meaning "just so much dust" is a particulate stream that will hit you with a speed of many thousands of kilometers per hour. At that speed even the lightest insects hitting your windshield turn into non-trivial projectiles because of E=mv². It's not like idling through a cloud of dust, it's more like being subject to a very powerful sandblaster. That will wear off that pretty NASA logo pretty fast.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com