Senators introduce bill to thin out the 900k pieces of orbiting junk

Making sovereigns pay for trashing the commons is tricky for obvious reasons. But we don't have those problems with corporations.

I don't think it's a bad idea to be proactive about space cleanup, rather than reactive.

And if you can get them to agree to pay, who is a suitable body that they can be convinced to pay it _to_ ? I'm pretty sure that any arm of the US government, or US parastatal body, would not be acceptable. It's an international governance problem.

1) https://www.space.com/3415-china-anti-satellite-test-worriso...

What is really hard is making it cheap, light and versatile thing.

You bond for the average cost and then use liability for edge cases. We don’t require every consumer product to be bonded for the edge case that it’s cancerous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

""" The Kessler syndrome (also called the Kessler effect,[1][2] collisional cascading, or ablation cascade), proposed by NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler in 1978, is a scenario in which the density of objects in low Earth orbit (LEO) due to space pollution is high enough that collisions between objects could cause a cascade in which each collision generates space debris that increases the likelihood of further collisions.[3] In 2009 Kessler wrote that modeling results had concluded that the debris environment was already unstable, "such that any attempt to achieve a growth-free small debris environment by eliminating sources of past debris will likely fail because fragments from future collisions will be generated faster than atmospheric drag will remove them".[4] One implication is that the distribution of debris in orbit could render space activities and the use of satellites in specific orbital ranges difficult for many generations.[3] """ -- Summary from Wikipedia's article.

Also from that article "One technology proposed to help deal with fragments from 1 to 10 cm (1⁄2 to 4 in) in size is the laser broom, a proposed multimegawatt land-based laser that could deorbit debris: the side of the debris hit by the laser would ablate and create a thrust that would change the eccentricity of the remains of the fragment until it would re-enter and be destroyed harmlessly.[32]"

A thought likely independently re-invented by anyone (myself included) who's seen science fiction where solar sail mirrors are used as parabolic solar reflectors often used by super villains.

That's called Kessler Syndrome, but it's not as bad as you portray. It doesn't mean we'll never be able to launch anything any more; it just means we won't be able to launch anything for a few centuries or so. All orbital debris will eventually fall into the atmosphere and burn up, so we just have to wait.

On the contrary, this seems reasonable. It (correctly) identifies that deorbiting intact satellites before they fragment is overwhelmingly the cost-optimal strategy.

In the long-run, it's really total mass in a given orbit that's the dominant variable which separates runaway Kessler syndrome from stability. Therefore, a per-kilogram "bounty" (with a sliding scale depending on orbit) wouldn't be a bad incentive model.

Don't pick winners, let the market decide™.

I'm not sure that's entirely true. Having a collector satellite match orbit with the debris and grab is one way to get rid of it, but I suspect in most cases it's good enough to just position a satellite with, say, a big steel plate in a path that intersects the debris' path and deflect it at the right angle so it returns to Earth. (If you're really clever you might use the impacts to deflect the interceptor satellite into roughly the right orbit to intercept the next piece of debris.)

There might also be ways to "catch" debris with moderately high relative velocity with the collector satellite. I imagine there's limits to the size of thing you can capture that way and the maximum relative velocity if you want to be pretty sure you can catch it without creating more debris.

Maybe the least sophisticated way to deorbit debris would be to just have an object with relatively low mass but very high surface area (e.g. an artificial "asteroid" made of aerogel) in an orbit that gives it the greatest probability of hitting any average piece of space junk, and then you wait for things to hit it by chance. The things that hit it lose momentum and hopefully fall back to Earth.

I think the point is that it was always a concern. It's never not been a problem to leave your trash for someone else to clean up. A person standing in a pristine forest is still wrong to throw their trash on the ground and walk away even though it doesn't immediately turn the forest into a toxic cleanup site, and it would be hard for the litterbug to guess at the costs of paying someone to go into the forest to clean up that mess in the future.

It was never acceptable for companies to throw their junk into orbit without having a plan in place to remove it, they just did it anyway because no one was willing to force them to be responsible.

Now we've reached a point where it's time to start forcing people to be responsible for their trash, but that doesn't mean the people who have been littering and brought us to this point were not wrong to do it or that it wasn't wrong for our world's governments to allow it to happen. It was wrong. We knew better, people have been warning us about the possible dangers since at least the 80s and NORAD has been keeping track of space junk since the 1950s!

I think it's perfectly reasonable to point out that, once again, we failed to hold governments and corporations accountable for trashing the environment and now it's predictably come back to bite us collectively in the ass, yet there's not been much talk about making those directly responsible for the mess pay for what they've done and companies today are continuing to act as they always have done.

I'm just saying. Sure, current launches are not responsible, but pay to play, man. And I don't mean make launching unprofitable, but play your part.

Commercialize the clean up. I don't know, NASA drafts a contract that soace players bid for, funded by launches. I dont know, but just do it.

So, we can verifiably determine whether the money has done its job or not.

Or shall we do nothing?

If it were sufficiently dense to fish, it'd be worth more to collect and keep it in orbit — that junk has a lot of high-grade materials and a lot of already-imparted momentum. Just[] move it all into a few large objects that can be managed as large craft, and the debris problem is solved, and there's a mineable resource already in orbit.

[] "Just" is doing some escape-velocity-class lifting there — all that junk is in such massively different orbital planes and altitudes that silly amounts of ΔV are needed to fetch each one and then to pull it back to dock with the new orbital junkheap.

Say China decides to flood a particular orbit path that a US company was planning on using and went through all the approvals for.

Is the China stuff now "dangerous debris"?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_decay

Government problem-solving rule #1: Any 5-year-old can recite "my government will solve..." slogans. Actually doing stuff requires that you actually control the government.