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.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mis... before complaining that I'm unfairly singling out China.
"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"
That single incident is responsible for something like 10% of all debris in orbit that is large enough to be tracked by NASA.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.