U.S.-Russian Satellite Collision Sends Debris Flying | Hacker News Reader

U.S.-Russian Satellite Collision Sends Debris Flying

nytimes.com

27 pointssanj13 comments

I wonder how fast the debris will be pulled downward and if it will damage other satellites, which will damage even more satellites.

Yeah, a chain reaction up there is a significant threat.

There's been a few posts in the last few days about business models. If someone can develop a way to clear debris from orbit, you have a business.

Clearing debris from orbit has less of a market than removing CO₂ from the atmosphere. If there was a space-debris equivalent to the Kyoto Accord, maybe they would be comparable.

I disagree. At least if you consider spent satellites to be "junk".

There's a lot of junk floating around, that is tracked, that precludes the use of certain orbits. Some of those orbits are valuable and clearing them would provide an ideal location for new satellites.

In particular, there are a limited number of geosynchronous slots -- especially those that are located over large (wealthy) landmasses. These slots are incredibly valuable.

I believe that the "good behaviour" requires satellites which inhabit these slots to retain enough fuel towards the end of their lives to move out of the slot so it can be used for a successor. However, only about a third of them do so:

http://www.space.com/spacenews/archive03/cnesarch_120103.htm...

Removing the other 60-70% of them would open up valuable slots.

Isn't this one of those "tragedy of the commons" problems, if you go up and clean it and the US gov't pays you for it, what happens when any one of the Russians, the EU, or the Chinese put a satellite in that orbit without helping pay for it?

I think that you'd time the launch of the "cleaner" to be just before the insertion of your satellite.

In particular, there are a limited number of geosynchronous slots

Really? That's a circle of about 43,000 km radius, so more than 170,000 km long. Even if you want certain points, it's not like it's packed over there. You can separate a satellite some km from the next and still have plenty of space for hundreds. If a satellite is at the same distance from Earth as others, they won't be moving relative to them.

Really! The orbit of a satellite is not perfectly stable because of the effects of the solar wind, the gravitational lumpiness of the earth, etc. IIRC the slot for a satellite is about 300 mi. wide. There are preferred slots such as over Europe or the east coast of the US with lots of countries contending for them, and slots allocated to countries that don't yet have satellites.

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

The major junk problem is in LEO. Basically everything in geo is equatorial, so you don't have orbits intersecting at large angles, so you don't have the problem where a stray paint chip in an oblique orbit craters your sensor. Also, getting stuff to geo is way expensive, so there's less up there.

I wonder if you could ionize the debris somehow... the magnetic drag the charged debris would have might be enough to bring it into the atmosphere.

The lawyers and insurance companies would stop you.

This isn't a new idea, and the early satellites used a lot of gold in them. However, all those satellites have an owner, and those owners are not willing to let you take the satellites away for "recycling" without getting a profit-eliminating payment.

Before satellite removal could become a viable business, one would have to change the Outer Space Treaties in order to make it work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty

Someone should extend the salvage law (as currently applied to boats) to also apply to failed satellites and space junk.

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