ESA report shows unsustainable levels of orbital debris
payloadspace.com
payloadspace.com
The answer is exactly what governments and industry have been doing for at least two decades now. Tracking of in-orbit objects, coordinated conjunction response, and rules that require either manual or drag-induced reentry cleanup at the end of a mission. Active maneuverable satellites in orbit (like Starlink) aren't a fundamental problem. The number of objects has gone up significantly, but the big actors are coordinating and following good practices.
Well, it's not about debris, it's about the capability to sneak up to an enemy satellite and disrupt it without outright destroying it or making it look like a failure.
Shooting a satellite with a rocket ("ASAT") is easy enough - the US, China, Russia and India have proven that capability, and Israel likely has it as well. EMPs from nuclear blasts are another option. But either of that leaves undeniable traces (an EMP blast would likely fry a lot of stuff on the ground!) and the debris can endanger your own satellites as well, so you need something that acts in-space, preferably very difficult to observe from Earth. And something that can grab a dead satellite and drag it out of orbit can also just go and deposit a small explosive charge.
And at that point, 50 million euros are chump change to test that capability - if needed, replace the magnet/hook/whatever with a bomb and that's it.
The way a laser broom works is imparting an extremely miniscule bit of momentum every time the object is in line of sight of the laser. Over time you lower its orbit enough for atmospheric drag to take over. For small debris, like baseball sized chunks of insulation, it takes months to deorbit the objects. For something the size of a satellite it would take an order of magnitude longer than the life expectancy of the satellite, and that's assuming it does no station-keeping.
Laser brooms are great because they can deorbit a lot of debris in parallel, which is great if your goal is to slowly clean up an orbit. They are pretty much the worst option for deorbiting a specific object quickly which is a hard requirement for any anti-satellite weapon.
I don't see much of a limit to scale. Satellites can only dissipate so much heat so you don't even have to deorbit it to be successful, you just need impart enough energy to overheat the satellite or disable key parts.
You're not building a weapon system with surplus energy. Energy costs are actually pretty negligible - with 0.01% electric to kinetic efficiency it's only about 7 million dollars worth to bring down a 1000 kg satellite. The issue is the equipment. To deorbit that satellite in a year, you would need to on average be pumping 7.8 gigawatts of electricity into the system. If you put literally all of the US's electricity production into it, you could deorbit that single satellite in 2.4 days. And note that is if you could constantly keep the satellite in field of view, realistically only a small percentage of a satellite's orbit will be even under the best of circumstances, and many orbits won't be in view at all.
Yeah, there's nothing physically stopping someone from building such a system, but you're talking about putting basically all of a large nation state's GDP for decades into one weapon system that, in the best case scenario, is going to do an extremely minute amount of damage and realistically would be destroyed long before it could accomplish anything.
Disabling a satellite poses different technical challenges. For momentum transfer, so long as you're hitting the object you're good, to target critical systems would require far greater precision, and dumping heat faster than the satellite can dissipate it would require even higher instantaneous power. Remember the satellite is only very briefly in view. While this is almost certainly more feasible than a weapon that works by deorbiting, it is still very difficult. Laser weapons for disabling and destroying aircraft and airborne munitions, which is an inherently easier task, is an active field of research that many billions of dollars have been dumped into over the years, with no system yet being demonstrated as effective. Satellites are just faster moving, more distant targets for such systems.
ASAT missiles might be too mundane for the megalomaniac Bond villain, but they are an immensely more practical solution to the problem.
If it works, and if it gets cheaper as the technology matures, it might let use remove derelict satellites before they break up into smaller pieces.
It is usually easier to remove a few thousand big pieces of trash than to remove millions of small pieces of trash.
To a degree. It helps to not blow shit up, in weapons tests or otherwise. These tests arise due to the weaponization of orbit (specifically), so the goal is really to not weaponize orbit - which governments have been doing the exact opposite of. All nations are deciding to tear Solomon's baby to shreds, instead of having shared custody.
If people want to weaponize space then, sure, go right ahead.
Unless the status quo drastically changes, i.e. bickering old fools being voted out (or removed via other means where voting is not possible/fair) throughout the world, Kessler syndrome is inevitable. I'd wager it happens sooner than runaway global warming.
Starlink doesn't have a debris problem thanks to the low orbit. Any debris generated deorbit on time-frames of a few months to a free years. Starlink also has 0 reported Earth debris strikes that I can find.
Where do you get this misinformation from?
This is wrong because it's based on a flawed assumption.
That assumption being: Propellant is required to deorbit debris, and the rocket equation makes launching all that propellant prohibitively expensive.
And while we can't do anything about the rocket equation, we don't actually need to have propellant in space to deorbit things.
Ways to deorbit without propellant in space:
1. The ground based methods. Although these would likely be seen by superpowers as military escalation of the status-quo.
2. Propulsion-less drone satellites. All propulsion-less designs use some form of sail which can be used to change the drone's orbit to match the debris before latching on and towing it to a new orbit. Once the debris is now in a decaying or graveyard orbit, the drone can detach and go after it's next target. All that is needed is time, power (readily accessible via solar power this close to the sun), and reaction wheels (which now we know what caused previous designs to fail like in the Kepler mission, can be built to last).
The most common form of sails would be solar sails, but there's also EDTs and magnetic sails.
The dress would not survive unscathed, and neither would the solar sail.
Space debris impacting on a solar sail would all but certainly simply punch neat holes through it. Much as accumulating dust slowly degrades the light-gathering capability of a large reflector telescope, a modestly-perforated solar sail would lose a very small fraction of its effectiveness. But you could probably lose a heck of a lot of surface area before those effects became significant. Strength of the sail itself is probably a minimal concern, though a design with periodic reinforcing threads (themselves having a cost of increased mass) might be more than sufficient to address any strength compromise.
the larger the sail is, the more likely it is to be affected by space debris at any given moment.
debris passing through a taught mylar solar shield will tear holes in the mylar which are the shape of the debris passing through. any sharp corners in the debris will leave a sharp corner in the hole, and those corners are going to become tears the next time something passes through nearby. the tiny holes become large holes pretty quickly.
other materials will behave differently of course, but i don't know of any solar sails at all, never mind ones made out of not-mylar.
And more importantly, just having laws that require people to deorbit sats and force them to pay for deorbit if they fail to make something deorbit.
> 2. Propulsion-less drone satellites.
Nowhere near enough thrust for this.
The Jevons Paradox strikes again.
Even now, getting launch-capable countries on board with restrictions is a likely problem. The US, EU, and Japan perhaps not so much, but of Russia, China, India, Pakistan (potentially), and North Korea, rather more plausibly.
There was US company that tried to launch on an Indian vehicle not following all the regulation and they got fucked hard.
Of course countries like Russia are simply not gone follow these rules anyway.
One problem with the Kessler Syndrome is that it's a runaway phenomenon, though one that evolves more slowly than most people appreciate. A few bad actors could trigger events which slowly start to seriously degrade at least low-to-mid Earth orbital ranges.
Geosynchronous orbits are possibly less susceptible as the entire orbital ring is large, though geostationary orbital space, strictly along Earth's equator, is more constrained. The Starlink approach of putting comms satellites in very low Earth orbit, which clears fairly quickly, possibly mitigates this in two ways (it makes geosync less critically necessary, and de-orbits satellites quickly). But LEO is still where higher orbits eventually decay to, and might itself be affected with time as well.
The lax regulatory problem, which invokes another underappreciated economic principle, Gresham's Law, is one that's appeared elsewhere and has proved hard to counter. I'd suggest not underestimating its possible noxious effects.
> Nowhere near enough thrust for this.
Of course there is.
If solar sail probes can change their orbits over time (which they can), then they already have enough thrust. There's no static friction to overcome, so there isn't a minimum thrust that you need to reach.
As long as you can continue to apply thrust over time, then you have a solution. It doesn't matter if it takes 6 hours, 6 weeks or 6 months. Even a single probe moving the right piece of debris prevents tens of thousands of more pieces being generated. Imagine what three of them could do, or twenty...
You'd need to fuel a laser platform, but it could target debris over a huge region. The goal would be to both reduce size and to gently nudge smaller debris to lower (and atmosphere-intersecting) orbits.
(As mentioned in another comment, linking: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_broom>, here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41051533>.)
You build a ground based laser, and fire it at objects when they're approximately directly overhead. Pushing upwards on the object basically rotates it's orbit so one side of it will not be lower into the atmosphere.
Additionally, all the propellant-less solutions are low-thrust (or ground-based, which is another thing entirely). It's absolutely possible to orbit match, dock, and deorbit an object, but whatever low-thrust device you're using is going to deorbit as well. Maybe it's possible to launch a bunch of small devices like this to do cleanup, but it's not necessary or worthwhile.
This is a great example of a solution that sounds fun and interesting to a problem that's easy to understand at a surface-level. It gets attention and funding, but the real unsexy stuff (tracking, monitoring, collision avoidance) is where the money should go.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
We definitely do need a way to clean things up, it is a shared resource. Unfortunately that means it suffers from tragedy of the commons.
Maybe if starship achieves it's goals of rapid re-usability, then active debris removal could be affordable.
In the mean time it would make sense for some kind of international agreement that requires all launches plan for de-orbiting of their debris.
Debris in LEO will be slowed by the atmosphere and will fall to earth naturally, but it will be dozens of decades for the higher altitude stuff and many dozens of years for all but the lowest altitude stuff.
The only feasible way to clean this up that I’m aware of, really, is to stop making new debris and wait.
Not a suggestion we call a halt on sat launches for 50 years. I'm asking if the remediation of time would work.
Most of the debris is in LEO so it could take decades to centuries for the debris to clear out
Take command of the high space and make the low ground indefensible.
A rule they just violated on the return-to-flight of Ariane 6.
I also hate the cover photo. That's not the actual size of the debris.
So... Complaining about a caricature when the real solution isn't possible seems silly.
But grounding humanity is bad for everybody. GPS and weather satellites are nice.
I am guessing it is way more massive than anything we can put into orbit.
Still not viable I assume, but...
I guess the big problem is that it’d affect the intact satallites a lot more than the debris.
I don't understand how a lack of regulation would mean something isn't a big problem. It could for sure use much more regulation, as it is such a large problem.
Worry about the other satellites.