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Comment by Veedrac | Hacker News Reader

Debris removal is less an R&D problem than a market problem. The highest impact thing a government can do is put a price on debris removal, and then guarantee that price for existing debris for an extended period of time.

Flight volume is an easily solved problem with the near future market, and that cost is the main reason junk isn't deorbited already.

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> The highest impact thing a government can do is put a price on debris removal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_origina...

Objects in space are merticuously tracked. It would be very hard to get away with something like that, and none of the relevant fliers would dare bet their business on trying.

I meant it bit of a tongue-in-cheek way, but for the sake of argument it wouldn't be hard for a clean up mission to have an "accident" and actually generate more debris for later missions to clean up. And it might not even be malicious, just side effect of more pressure to launch something to do the clean ups.

To be clear, I'm not saying OP is wrong, it would probably work out fine. But this seems like a fun angle to consider.

I can't find xboneslife's comment to reply to, so replying here

> You can just put the same price on debris addition.

Indeed. A small tax that matches the cost of debris capture payment + minor administrative overhead would encourage the outcome that junk isn't thrown into unrecoverable orbit.

The tax wouldn't be small. I do agree, though, the only real answer is to charge for putting things in orbit and refund it to whoever deorbits the thing.

A fee per kilogram placed in orbit, refundable if the entire mass is deorbited as a single object, seems like a reasonable starting point.

If that fee is the entire estimated near-term cost to recover the object, it would also create incentives for entities putting large amounts of mass in orbit to focus on improved strategies for removal: if removal becomes lower cost than the fee, it's worth paying someone to recover your debris if a satellite fails in order to recover the fee.

This would have to work across borders or else you'd create a downward force on the space industry in your nation. If the US had a tax to launch stuff, then suddenly Russia has a competitive advantage.

> I can't find xboneslife's comment to reply to

I can't even find their account https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=xboneslife

Wonder what happened...

Even weirder, this discussion is Google's only relevant hit for "xboneslife."

Surreal.

I went to reply to the user, then got a "comment deleted" error. First time I've seen that on HN.

weird . I hope the deletion thing doesn't become a trend here.

I can't find out what the cost to govt is in order to launch something into space, but you do need govt permission to launch since all space objects must belong to a specific country.

The govt can include the cleanup cost as part of the launch licensing cost.

Mike Judge also thought it was fun to run a Simpsons episode featuring Donald Trump getting elected to the presidency. So… definitely worth thinking through.

You could always slip China a fiver to get them to blow up another satellite or five.

Pretty sure China would prefer to make rockets that don't explode at all. But if you insist, my friend Sergey knows a guy that might have an overstock of aging launchers...

The incident in question is generally believed to have been a weapons test. They deliberately hit a satellite with a rocket to see that they could.

It also created an insane amount of junk in a high orbit that won't deorbit any time soon.

I feel like the perverse incentive here (if we can call it that) might be more along the lines of all companies becoming more careless w.r.t. the creation of space debris (because it'll be cleaned up by "someone" eventually, kind of like how it's common to consume plastic with the thought that it'll get recycled), rather than any particular entity doing this with a profit motive.

You can pair that with hefty fines. The US is in a good position to place them on international players too.

Want to work with USA companies? Great, pay your fines and you can.

You could potentially avoid this by paying more for older junk.

Love this reference

Or combine it with a fine for creating debris?

I think it is past time to make launchers publish their plan for lifecycle management, and perhaps post bonds against them, in case they go bankrupt.

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

US, through the FCC of all things, requires licensing applications (before launch) to address satellite lifetimes.

How are you going to get e.g. the Chinese Government to pay? (1)

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...

> How are you going to get e.g. the Chinese Government to pay?

Seize assets of nation-state entities (or entities controlled by the Chinese state) like airplanes and ships or bank funds, release them after payment.

But are there any serious, adult, workable proposals?

Yes of course. We did that over a decade ago in Germany - a construction company was owed 30 million euros from the government of Thailand, so our police seized the airplane of the king at the Munich airport, and in 2005 we did the same for a collection of debt against Lebanon [1].

[1] https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article13485097/Boeing-von-Th...

So to be clear, you would say that China's standing and general compliance to perceived hostile action against it is the same as Lebanon or Thailand? IMHO, that is very naïve.

China's "standing" is being a fucking bully that doesn't care about any rules.

That opinion is consistent with the link that I posted - smashing a satellite into debris for kicks. But it does seem to be inconsistent with taking your above "seize assets" suggestions seriously.

All well and good, until someone decides to lob a missile at a satellite and make a little Kessler syndrome, or launch missions with no reentry plans from a nation that hasn't signed your treaty.

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

Throwaway LLC creates the debris and goes bankrupt from fines, main company does the cleanup.

The problem is partially legal. Many of these objects have complex ownership. The US government should have some hesitation about simply starting putting a price on the destruction of things that might be owned by particular companies or countries.

I think what the government should do is invest in better tracking primarily. Then make a stronger law requiring sat makers to have a plan to remove debris also on failure.

Then they can clean up their own old junk and put a price on that.

> Debris removal is less an R&D problem than a market problem.

How did you come to this conclusion? Not that I know much about it, but I'm skeptical we can actually do orbital debris removal at a scale that meets the scale of the problem. AFAIK proof od concept demonstrations so far have been rather feeble. Seems hard.

The engineering challenges are hard, probably not impossible. There is already serious research in to this by Astroscale and others. What is impossible though, is to launch a constellation of things to deorbit other things without a ton of money. Someone has to be willing to provide that money.

If you want to remove a small piece of debris and you can build a fairly large sat specifically for that piece of debris, its not difficult but not crazy hard. Most of the required hardware is available.

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

Yeah of course, de-orbiting or grave yarding a single piece of debris is doable for a few million dollars right now, but we are talking about a large fraction of 900K+ pieces. That's the really hard part.

Much like surface trash cleanup, the perfect is the enemy of the good. The goal is "less junk on the streets", not necessarily "absolutely squeaky-clean streets". First get rid of that rusty fridge that someone dumped in the woods before we deal with all the cigarette butts.

Let's focus on the more problematic, larger objects first, that are at risk of creating much more debris if hit.

What's the minimum size at which debris is dangerous?

Since everything is moving at orbital speeds, and generally at an angle to each other, i understood even small fragments move at a few km/sec relative to what they hit, so don't need to be particularly large.

True, but I imagine that, the smaller the object, the smaller the chance that it will be hit/it will hit something, and a smaller amount of fragments that the hit can generate.

If you ask the person who put the satellite up to pay, you have a problem that that company might be bankrupt/gone in 50 years when their satellite becomes junk.

If you make them put up insurance or a bond, it's a massive cash cost to have a $1B bond for 50 years...

And you would be needing $1B or more, because the worse case is a satellite gets smashed into 100,000 pieces, and you're going to need a lot of debris collection missions to get rid of them all...

> you would be needing $1B or more, because the worse case is a satellite gets smashed into 100,000 pieces

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.

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