We’ve Already Passed the Tipping Point for Orbital Debris | Hacker News Reader

We’ve Already Passed the Tipping Point for Orbital Debris

spectrum.ieee.org

80 pointsvectorbunny80 comments

Identify the externalities that aren't being paid and make them get paid. And if this means that we all end up paying more for services we use today that create space debris, then fine.

The next generation is being fleeced by those with the means of production. They extract as much profit as they can and ignore the damage left in their wake. Added to that they fight tooth and nail at any government policy that tries to make them pay for externalities they should rightfully assume.

Of course, the traditional capitalist model says suck what you can today and then expect the spillover to get paid by the taxpayer tomorrow.

What a world we have left for all of humankind's children merely for the benefit of the contemporary capitalist and consumer.

OK, who will make China pay a fee for junk they deliberately created in space for military purposes?

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mis... before complaining that I'm unfairly singling out China.

http://blogs.nature.com/news/files/debris.JPG

This graph seems to indicate that the Chinese anti-satellite test moved the number of objects from ~10700 to ~13900, or about 3200 objects released. Now that we are at about 16000 objects, 3200 is closer to 20% (in fact is is exactly 20%) than 10% of all objects.

Different sources will quote different numbers of objects.

The reason is that there were millions of debris particles. So you find counts of different sizes.

I got 10% by comparing the number in the Wikipedia article over a certain size with the number of objects that NASA is actively tracking. If NASA is actively tracking at a different size threshold, that would explain the discrepancy.

Regardless of the exact numbers, this Chinese test is clearly a significant part of the problem by itself. And the altitude chosen means that it will continue to be a problem for a very, very long time.

Anyone who trades with them?

To make an honest attempt at addressing the problem, you'd need an international treaty. And -- not unlike Kyoto -- unless it included penalties up to and including automatic tariffs to collect those penalties, it would be pointless.

Still, you are unfairly singling out China. From the article you linked:

"It was the first known successful satellite intercept test since 1985, when the United States conducted a similar anti-satellite missile test"

"In February 2008 the US launched its own strike to destroy a malfunctioning US satellite, which demonstrated to the world that it also had the capability to strike in space"

China's test created far more debris than any previous incident, including the US incident you point to. Furthermore China created that debris in a much higher orbit so it will take much longer for it to naturally fall out of orbit.

That single incident is responsible for something like 10% of all debris in orbit that is large enough to be tracked by NASA.

It was not my intention to defend China. But what's with the other 90% of debris? 40% USA, 40% Russia, 10% other is not far from the truth, I guess.

It's closer to 20% due to China's ASAT test and 80% due to the collective spaceflight activities of the entire world over the last half century. You know, vs. one single event.

If China dumped as much garbage into the ocean in one event equal to 20% of the entire world's ocean dumped garbage since 1957 you can be damned sure they'd catch some flak for that.

I don't know why people in US automatically think they have the right to do anything they want, yet when somebody else does the same they find every reason to brand them evil conveniently neglecting everything they did.

There is no point in trying to act innocent, space or other wise US has been screwing earth since decades now. Wars, weapons and emissions all in the name of development. Yet now when some other countries do the exactly all that for similar reasons, they become bad?

Did you even read the comment? One Chinese demonstration created 10% of all objects we can track. The US demonstration was held in a much lower orbit and most of the fragments it created have probably burned in the atmosphere by now.

The events are not comparable. The Chinese test represented wanton disregard for orbital debris, to an extreme degree. The US anti-satellite tests (in 1985 and 2008) were on low-altitude satellites using sub-orbital weapons. This led to much smaller debris plumes that reentered the atmosphere in a short period of time (weeks or months).

Look at the graph I posted earlier: http://blogs.nature.com/news/files/debris.JPG

Can you see the impact of the debris created by the 1985 ASAT test? No? Can you see the little bump that starts in early 2008 and goes away by 2009 that represents the debris generated by the 2008 US ASAT test? Now look at the impact of the Chinese test, it's night and day. And that's due to the altitude of the event (865 km, well above the outer fringes of the atmosphere, where orbital decay is very, very slow) and the nature of the impact from a counter-orbiting kinetic-kill vehicle, which dumped at least 4 times as much kinetic energy into the impact at the very least.

While launch vehicle and satellite makers have been trying to make their launches cleaner and leave less debris in orbit here comes China to dump in one go the same amount of debris that it takes the ENTIRE WORLD two full decades to generate. In fact, they produced about twice as much debris as the worst case natural space disaster imaginable, two satellites hitting one another (the Iridium 33 / Kosmos 2251 collision).

We and Russia and the UK and France and Japan and Israel and South Korea, and on and on. We ALL left junk in space.

So I guess we ALL pay? And pay who? A space=based clean up crew? I doubt we even have the technology to clean it up. Right now.

It's interesting that you think that this is an issue of capitalism, when it has nothing to do with capitalism at all. The vast majority of space junk is the result of governmental programs like NASA and its peers [1].

[1]http://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ast...

In fairness, I don't imagine private space companies would be careful about their debris unless someone else made them.

You are right, but I'm not going to let the facts get in the way of a perfectly good rant!

I'm not sure what word I should have used, but my fundamental point was that as long as decision-makers, be they corporations, individuals, or government entities, are allowed to make decisions without considering the cost of the mess they make (because they don't have to pay for it), then we are burdening those who will have to clean up the mess and don't even have a voice in our Democratic process.

You're correct. Its the absence of a system of property rights that caused this problem. Its the opposite of capitalism, as is the case with many things that get polluted.

Space is an example of the tragedy of the commons. No one owns space so the incentive is to exploit it now without regard to what happens in the long run.

I think property rights are the answer, but until they are applied to something new, it is non-obvious how to go about it. I have a few, not fully baked thoughts.

What if someone owned the satellite real estate in a particular region of space? They would have an interest in keeping it orderly to maximize revenue.

The owner could charge rent to anyone wanting to put up a satellite in that space. That party would also have to provide a way to remove it and would be charged for accidents that spread debris.

The owners of different regions would compete against each other so we could keep prices reasonable. And other uses of space, such as passage through those regions could be left out of the arrangement.

And if debris from one region impacts another, they owners could sue each other.

> What if someone owned the satellite real estate in a particular region of space? They would have an interest in keeping it orderly to maximize revenue.

In my mind this would only apply to geostationary orbit. Doing anything else would require incredibly complex coordination of "regions" of space, considering orbits are constantly moving with relation to each other and to the Earth.

well, satellites can be geostationary. Not all are. Some travel through a layer of space. You could do this for layers and cover both.

actually, an entire layer would mean all satellites at a specific distance would be renting from the same owner.

I guess that layer would sell for more initially and still compete with other layers that aren't ideal. Or we could have separate scheme for geostationary satellites.

Should we contact the Illuminati and make sure the "One World Government" charges a fee?

How would you force China, India and Russia and other pseudo capitalist countries to pay, let alone the United States, Europe etc?

If the UN enforced a fee of some sort, why wouldn't we just offshore space launches to a country that ignores the UN.

Of course, you are right. You can't force anyone to do anything.

And yet, remarkably, international cooperation on many issues still exists. Practicality come down to being diplomatic and being compromising.

You are right - it is difficult many groups of people (e.g. Dominionist Christians that think the rapture will happen in their lifetime) to even understand the need for policies of long-term sustainability.

It could potentially be a major business model to clean this junk up too. Satellite insurers will eventually asess the risk high enough that it will be profitable to pay someone to take care of it. Onward oppression of the working class!

I think you're right to criticise capitalism's approach to so called externalities. It's a convenience to not treat limited resources as depreciating assets, for the purposes of competitive advantage. And near space is a limited resource. As are oceans and accessible space and atmosphere and so on.

The normal solution is a market based allowance cap, An example from another resource area are carbon taxes that give pricing to carbon.

Pointing out that accounting rules don't correctly price scarcity is not really a criticism of capitalism per se.

There is a decent discussion that could be had regarding how capitalism should deal with negative externalities. However your equating of 'Traditional Capitalism' with 20th century American Capitalism mars everything you said.

My uncle was at NASA (from very close to the beginning). One of his long term projects was dealing with orbital debris. History of Orbital Debris 1961 to 1998 http://ston.jsc.nasa.gov/collections/TRS/_techrep/TP-1999-20...

There was a manga that specifically involves astronauts collecting space junks and that manga is Planetes.

I think I heard about that. I think it's interesting to note that, in much of science fiction, the home planets of space-faring species are always terribly littered due to the bootstrapping process of reaching the stars, whereas the orbital debris of colony planets tends to be non-existent.

It's very well done, too. Great character development and a gripping story arc. From my layperson's perspective, the science of orbital debris collection is taken very seriously.

The opening sequence in the first episode powerfully illustrates the speed and devastation caused by the intersection of the orbits of a simple bolt and a passenger liner.

Two live-action TV series from the 1970s about space garbage: "Salvage 1" (with Andy Griffith no less) and "Quark."

Here's NASA's webpage for orbital debris.

(http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/)

It's fascinating. It has better graphics than the linked article. (The linked article does have a link to this site, but not the front page and it's buried down the article.)

Awesomest link from that refereence: http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/newsletter/pdfs/ODQNv16i1....

The current newsletter on debris. Excellent data in there.

My science teacher back in 1996 told the class about the immense amount of garbage piling around orbit and told us that when we were older it would become a serious problem and that whoever figured out how to be "space garbagemen/women" would be very rich.

The class kinda laughed, space is so vast and who wants to be known as garbage men?

Should have gotten my degree as a Space Debris Collector.

DARPA is currently working on this now.

http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/TTO/Programs/Phoenix.aspx

Specifically, they are looking into ways to remotely salvage parts from existing satellite and presumably remove the satellites from orbit.

I always thought this was the strongest technical argument against Star Wars back in the 80s - all you have to do to defeat a sattelite-based system of any kind is launch a load of gravel into orbit and wait a few days.

I remember hearing about the growing orbital debris problem awhile back and thinking, Well, we've covered the surface area of the earth with a whole ton of stuff, but when you fly in an airplane and look out, most of the surface still looks almost completely untouched. Now the "surface area" of the orbit is way bigger than the earth's surface area, and we don't have nearly as much stuff up there yet, either. So shouldn't it be a long time before we start having problems like this?

I suppose the big issue is that most of that stuff is moving. If everything on the surface of the earth was constantly trying to circumscribe it, we'd have a lot more stuff colliding than we already do...

Don't look at the surface, look at the sky. You hardly ever see another airplane except occasionally when near an airport.

And yet, mid-air collisions do happen, despite the systems in place to prevent them.

The fact that all of this stuff is moving makes it a completely different proposition. The fact that a collision just makes more junk to go out and collide with other stuff results in a potentially disastrous feedback loop.

Also, very few things up there are made to be durable in the face of collisions. That adds weight for, until recently, no apparent value. So even small pieces of debris are very dangerous to useful equipment.

> mid-air collisions do happen,

Airplanes are not evenly distributed. They follow well defined routes and flight levels.

Same goes for satellites.

Not always. When they fly own their own they still collide sometimes.

Between this and the great pacific garbage patch, I think the human legacy is going to be litter.

Ever see the film Wall-E? Cause that's where we are headed.

I've heard the analogy that capitalism is just a clever method of converting the natural world in to garbage.

I wouldn't go that far, nor is capitalism alone responsible. I think a great deal of blame lies in the methods we've developed to keep the garbage out of site. Our manufacturing pollution is outsourced to the other side of the globe, we put our trash in black bags and have someone else bury it far away from where we live.

In space you can't hide. And that makes the problem, and the consequences, very evident.

The great pacific garbage patch is rather overhyped. From what you hear and the way some people describe it you'd think it would be like a sargasso sea of garbage, but it's actually just an increased concentration of small bits of plastic just under the surface of the ocean. If you were looking right at the water in the densest part of the garbage patch you probably wouldn't even be able to tell that the water was unusual.

For example, here's a typical picture illustrating the garbage patch: http://myecoaction.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/great-paci... However, it's a fraud, it's actually a picture from Manila harbor. The fact that this isn't the deep ocean should be blatantly obvious by the fact that there is a person in a canoe in it, and canoes are not well known trans-pacific transportation vessels.

I'm not saying that the various oceanic gyre garbage patches aren't a problem, but they certainly will not form a legacy for humanity, as they are pretty much invisible.

The plastic NEVER goes away and is always increasing, not decreasing

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/science/10patch.html

I've been reading about space junk for a while, if we are in fact 'past the tipping point' (as opposed to journalistic hyperbole) then you should be planning how your App will work in a post-GPS world. Seriously. While certain bands of orbit are currently more crowded than others, as the Chinese satellite attack [1] demonstrated, the debris from collisions will be wide and multiband. Further once it reaches that point the density is predicted to prevent additional satellites from reaching useful orbit trying to get through it (so more replacement Geo-sync satellites). Perhaps it will be the 21st century's equivalent of land mines in terms of resource denial to unintended victims.

Would make a great conference topic too, given SpaceX has a launch vehicle that can get your idea to pretty much all of the orbital bands for $150M, what might you do with a couple of tons of payload which would mitigate this problem, and how can we compensate it? What if the US/China/USSRS/EU funded a 'bounty' that for every ton of junk de-orbited the person who de-orbited it would get $1M.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mis...

The Kessler effect is supposed to take decades to make near Earth orbit unusable.

If your app survives that long, changing operating systems is a more pressing problem than the immanent destruction of GPS.

At a NASA talk on space debris (part of the Space Technology Grand Challenge program at NASA [1]) the presenter mentioned that so called 'structured orbit' systems (like Iridium and GPS) were particularly vulnerable because their service depended on where they were in orbit and they had finite maneuvering capability. So GPS destruction is a combination of satellites which run out of gas swerving and jinking to avoid junk, and losing individual satellites due to forced (de-orbit) or worse actual destruction.

It was by that reasoning that this presenter was describing the space junk disaster as a sort of slow motion thing but the first indicator that you and I would notice would be that GPS service goes away. Its also exponential in that actual collisions threaten on 1 or 2 additional satellites but dozens in orbits above and below.

Then he finished with current NASA timelines (about 25 years before a system might be tested) and funding (0).

Granted he may have just been trying to rustle up funding for his pet project but I found his reasoning pretty compelling.

[1] http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/503466main_space_tech_grand_challeng...

Aren't GPS satellites geostationary? And aren't geostationary orbits like 100 times further out than LEO?

No, more like 16,500 (about 10x LEO if you consider leo to be 100 - 200 per NASA's definition). View of debris from GEO which also includes the GPS orbits : http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/photogallery/beehives/GEO1...

[1] Fun GIF http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ConstellationGPS.gif

Is this something that can be solved from the ground (high powered lasers)? Or would we need mechanisms in space and up close to handle this kind of debris?

There is the idea of a laser broom [1], a ground-based system for pushing debris into more elliptical orbits that bring them closer to Earth at perigee.

It might not be feasible for political reasons; I imagine most designs would also be excellent tools for disabling satellites, thus could start a space arms race. (Both China and the US have blown up satellites, but both were done with anti-satellite missiles; lasers might be more useful for starting a disastrous space war.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_broom

The URSS has already blinded (temporarily) US satellites with lasers.

However, to permanently disable them, it seems that more power is required, compared to adding velocity to small orbital debris.

The article specifically mentions material ablation (vaporizing part of the debris) rather than light pressure as the source of impulse.

If it could vaporize debris that came off of satellites or boosters or what have you, it could vaporize parts of satellites. Possibly at the rate of the metaphorical little bird that sharpens its beak on a mountain. :)

There's some research on that (lasers), according to wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_broom

Any way to develop a business model off this problem? Orbital garbage collectors. They would have to be traveling in the roughly the same orbit to collect a single piece of trash; surely a head on collision with a small piece of debris traveling at a relative speed of 10mi/sec would be devastating.

I don't think there would be any hope of actually collecting the bits piece by piece, the amount of fuel required to match trajectories alone makes it infeasible. The best 'solution' would be to change the trajectory of the garbage either away from the atmosphere, or into the atmosphere. Unfortunately a lot of it won't completely burn up before it hits the ground, creating a few more problems then just some broken satellites.

I wonder if it would be practical to mitigate ground strikes by steering objects into collisions. I guess if you got the math right you could do the collisions at low orbits and avoid making things worse.

Good point.. maybe there are "rings", or orbits with a high concentration of junk that justify the fuel?

The real problem is the junk is travelling at high speeds, in many different directions. So the only 'safe' way to collect it is to match the speed and direction of each piece of junk, one at a time.

Google something like: laser remove orbital debris

I don't know how old this idea is, but I think I saw some discussion on sci.space.tech a long while ago. (Yes, my hair is getting gray.)

Edit: After reading a bit myself (http://spie.org/x84761.xml), the lasers are Earth based these days (IIRC, the laser was in a high orbit in sci.space.tech) because adaptive optics is "easy" now. It should be less risk of frying satellites with Earth viewing optics if the laser is in orbit, but that should just be a software problem.

Don't the LEO objects have a natural loss rate (I.E., so many objects will soon be vaporized as they fall back into the atmosphere)? Those objects are designed to have a shorter lifespan (typically, ignoring the ISS). As for the GEO objects, given their fixed station over earth, I imagine there is less path-crossing, which would reduce the probability of an impact.

Assuming the LEO objects are a major danger to something critical like the ISS, what would be the added cost of shielding? How much impact should the material be able to absorb, and what would that weigh? As for the economics of satellites, shielding seems like the next-best option to expensive tracking and safe decommissioning of all objects, provided the shielding material isn't too heavy as to be cost-prohibitive.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/img/09WOrbitalDebrisf1-134867493242...

This is a completely accurate and to scale representation of Earth orbit.

The sheer sight of that simulated model makes me wonder if you're being sarcastic, but the story doesn't say whether it's a simulation or just made up.

He's joking. We don't have satellites the size of entire cities. If this were to scale, it would look exactly like the pictures of earth we are used to seeing with nothing but black surrounding it.

There's a lot of space debris, but there's a whole heck of a lot more "space."

http://www.esa.int/esaMI/ESOC/SEMN2VM5NDF_mg_3_s.html

The debris field shown in the image is an artist's impression based on actual data. However the image does not show debris items in their actual size or density. Note: The debris objects shown in the images are an artist's impression based on actual density data. However, the debris objects are shown at an eggagerated size to make them visible at the scale shown.

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

If shown to scale even the biggest satellite wouldn't take up a pixel.

Well technically it's 'infinitely' big. Most people's brains breakdown when you start trying to tell them about the idea of a 4th dimension that holds the universe.

I think this is why humanity defaults to religion as explanation for the unknown; the God factor is easier to process, and there's a reward at the end for a life of good deeds.

>Most people's brains breakdown when you start trying to tell them about the idea of a 4th dimension that holds the universe.

Sorry I could not understand a single word.

Can you explain this a little bit more?

Here's a video that really helped me grasp the higher-order dimensions:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqeqW3g8N2Q

Thus continues the reddit-ization of this website. A shame. At least cite the man; "inside jokes" of this sort are tired.

So are ad-hominem attacks.

The first line is a quote from Douglas Adams. Well known to anyone who has tried to run a conjunction analysis and had to set the range to 50 km to get something to show up.

Yes, it's quite plain that it is not the commenter's own voice. It is also a short step from self-gratifying quote continuation threads.

> Thus continues the reddit-ization of this website.

You know what was even worse on reddit than the memes and inside jokes? The posts whining about how much better the site was before X happened.

This is the internet, no one will listen to whining. If you want to preserve the nature of HN, find something constructive to do. If a comment is so devoid of content that you cannot constructively turn it into a useful conversation, downvote it and spend your time building a conversation somewhere else. Complaining is easy, but it just adds to the noise that you're so concerned about.

I imagine the average distance between these satellites is well over 100 km.

Tractor beam? If someone could come up with one of those, that would work. No huge energy loss due to traveling into the atmosphere. No worries about refueling in orbit or potential collisions loss of life. Seems to me like that could be a thing.

Or how about a small propulsion system with a tether that can be carried to LEO with a weather balloon and then propelled further if needed. You'd just need like a 100 mile long wire cable to use with it. I'm sure that's doable, right? :)

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