Space Debris: Is It a Crisis?
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esa.int
Nice!
In 200 years, we will have tamed the ability to generate energy efficiently and have relatively intelligent drones. These drones in swarms can track space debris, match their horizontal speed and push them out to outer space. Space debris will not be an issue. Maybe they can also take little bubbles of greenhouse gases and drop them out into space too.
On the site is a fun interactive object tracker.
If you are aware of the risk of collision a couple of days in advance, just changing your satellite orientation for a couple of orbit will retire the risk of collision.
You may want to perform in-orbit servicing, but that is more about increasing the longevity of your assets in orbit or increasing their capabilities via refueling/upgrading/repairing.
SpaceX’s Starship is being built based on the (business) principle that extremely low cost-to-orbit will be a good business, because it will unlock a huge market for launches. Some tiny fraction of these launches will probably go beyond Earth’s orbit. A much larger fraction (eg Starlink) will be aimed at low orbits where Kessler Syndrome can be avoided (unless there are major accidents.) But at least some of that new mass is going to wind up in higher orbits where Kessler syndrome is already a risk, and this new mass will obviously increase the risk of a disaster. And so far I’m only talking about Starship and SpaceX, not its competitors.
My question is: is there a world where Starship is a viable economic project — meaning its investment pays back at the rate SpaceX is betting on — but where it does not also dramatically increase the risk of disaster? And what exactly does the model of “successful Starship / no Kessler syndrome” look like in terms of future launches? Has anyone modeled this?
SpaceX stands to lose just as much as the rest of us if they fuck this up, possibly more.
No it will go bankrupt and be forgotten.
While we leave future generations with a problem that may not be economically or technically solvable and ruin space for ever.
And, in much of that gray zone, SpaceX could be the very profitable leader in a booming market for launching all the replacement satellites, heavier collision-"resistant" satellites, and debris-sweeping satellites.
The mechanism you describe, logically, should've prevented tetraethyl lead in gasoline.
I think the real motivation for Starlink is precisely this -- there is otherwise no near-term market for greatly increased launch capacity. Starlink actually doesn't make too much sense from a purely technical perspective: in wireless point-to-point communications, distance is your enemy squared, both in terms of signal power and density. And it only gets worse when you have to punch through a cloud layer. But it is also the only near-term application that could absorb the launch volume offered by the Starship, so the two kind of feed off each other. This is not unlike the past ISS - Space Shuttle relationship, but at least the public is not paying for it this time.
The first question is whether even more low-cost launch access will continue to create more new applications like this one. The second question is whether the business projections for Starship already assume that's the case.
Instead we have either the total idealisation, of a utopist - all will be good, all obstacles can be overcome, just more of the same approaches, disasters be damned. The education will fix it. 6 billion, in remedial school, forever.
The other is basically naturalism, snuggling to your emotions is the only thing left, fall back to natural behaviour, no matter how disastrous the consequences and disjunct the circumstances. Ignore all those societies who walked down that road into disaster.
There is almost nobody out in the open in the middle ground. Cataloguing the disabilities, the side-effects and what we still can and cant do, planning moderate dreams and longterm projects that are realistic, even with the roof of the planet coming down.
For most people, a better life is a life where their children are healthy, nourished, well-educated and living in peace (technology be damned). More importantly, for most people, a better life for themselves is one of extremely little, basic food, peace, community, movement.
All those children grow up to find what makes them happy is less, not more. We all know it. It's the intangibles, not the material. It's the people, our pets, the sun shining and a bird singing.
The end isn't worth the means, maybe instead of looking for some quant to see it all, we could just see ourselves and move forward slowly with what we know to be good and true, without falling on our face trying to punch a baby.
Which describes itself as "What's in Space is a realtime 3D map of objects in Earth orbit, visualized using WebGL"
I actually intended to share: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2025/04/Space_Debr...
which is the European Space Agency page link that wraps their 8 minute space debris documentary.
I didn't notice the URL is modified on click through to the generic ESA "space debris" catchall page :/
Youtube hosts the same content .. but lacks the gravitas of the ESA creator host page.
HN allows me to edit the submission title but not the submitted URL.
Here an article on that:
https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/are-starlinks-satellites-...
Quite a crazy example of how costs are externalized, while profits are accumulated at the top.
The largest satellite payloads are 20 tons in a launch.
(Al2O3 isn't even the highest-impact ozone depletor within the space industry; that's chlorine. Also from solid rocket fuel).
The fact that they re-enter by itself is not the problem. The problem is that they contain aluminium:
> When Starlink’s satellites reach the end of their lives, they burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere and leave behind small particles of aluminum oxide. These travel down into the ozone layer, which absorbs harmful ultraviolet radiation. Researchers from the University of Southern California found that these oxides have increased eightfold from 2016 to 2022.
DOGE about to cancel funding for USC
Especially when the problem he is solving i.e. global access to internet is already solved just not to the level we would want it.
So as a society we have to ask what is more important: watching Netflix on a yacht or having the ability to someday explore the universe.
There are startups and research programmes working on Active Debris Removal using everything from nets to lasers to destroy or divert debris (as well as larger tugs to remove whole satellites). It's just an expensive problem to solve, and if Kessler Syndrome were to occur, you wouldn't necessarily want to pause space launches to wait for orbits to be cleared, especially not if you'd just lost critical satellites...
https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2025/04/Space_Debr... ("Space Debris: Is it a Crisis?")
The page is borked in a way that makes it tricky to find its canonical link.
They've separately mirrored their documentary on YT, which is here,
If you're travelling between stars, you do actually need star trek sci-fi shields. The relative velocity turns interstellar dust into bullets that would obliterate an unshielded ship. Assuming those shields can operate in proximity to a planet, they could simply shove their way through the debris cloud.
Alternately, an interstellar ship probably has a lot of power to throw around and likely a lot of time they're willing to spend. It's not unreasonable to think that a starship would be equipped to deal with some amount of orbital debris. Probably point defense lasers or something. Maybe a tractor beam.