I think few people understand what the challenges of space flight are so asking for opinions is not a good idea. The problem with catching them and de-orbiting them is it requires the de-orbit vehicle to match the exact speed and orbit of the debris. This costs a lot of fuel, and means it is not as simple as going to space and then collecting "floating" pieces of junk like a garbage truck does. All the debris are in different orbits, so for every debris fuel is required to match that orbit. Laser brooms seem the most promising since then you do not need to match orbit of the debris. You can even target smaller debris that are not worth sending de-orbit satellites to. I am happy they are finally being talked about. But it's stupid that the weaponization potential is highlighted so much for those specifically.
I think we need something along the lines of Quark where we can scoop up the junk. Personally, instead of sending it back into the atmosphere, we should drop it off on the moon for when we colonize it and they can recycle the precious metals instead of spending even more money and polluting our atmosphere from the propellants, to send those precious metals back into space making them even more rare on Earth.
New satellites should have de-orbiting hardware, much cheaper compared with launching a de-orbiter to hunt space junk. However, making de-orbiting hardware mandatory requires global legislation and that takes years if it ever will happen. But in the end, lower orbits will clean itself, though it will probably decades so not centuries.
Furthermore burning up a bunch of metal and plastic in the upper atmosphere is not great for the atmospheric environment. This is why lifecycle extension and in space maintenance are the long term solution.
The problem isn't satellites, the problem is debris. You can't rig explosives to things, cause they don't really function in space, so the only way to de-orbit a satellite is to burn the remaining thrust in reverse. That works for satellites, but not for debris. Since orbitall interception is an extreme accuracy problem, ideally we'd want to look into how you could de-orbit debris at range. And there's really only two and a half ways I can think of you could even realistically try that without causing enormous problems that are cost effective. Either you deploy some kind of magnetic system into orbit, you try to apply reverse thrust with a laser, or you launch a satellite with a relative gravity high enough to seriously affect any nearby debris. None of those are *easy*
I saw an article on this 20 years ago where it stated that if there were no new high shedding spacecraft then the exponential increase of debris from the craft already in orbit would lead to LEO being unable to penetrate by 2025. whats the new date with all the new constellations?
This isn't a case of poor people dumping trash into rivers because their government has not provided anywhere else to dump it. We know where every piece of space debris came from and who is responsible for putting it there. Make them responsible for cleaning up their trash. Why is this even a question?? If they can't remove it themselves then they need to pay to have it removed.
@Jurgen Parkour This really could end very poorly for us. The view glossed over it at 3:55, but these collisions are basically chain reactions. If one satellite breaks up, it creates a high speed high energy cloud that can hit other satellites going other directions, creating more clouds. The pieces could be the sizes of paint chips and still blow holes in satellites and a single satellite can create huge clouds. Preventing the satellite from becoming clouds like the video showed at the end is easy, cleaning up the results from not doing this preventative action is incredibly difficult.
@@jurgenparkour9337 That's fair. If it spirals out of control it would be really difficult and detrimental to modern society but could potentially be solved by future technology that painstakingly removes millions of incredibly high speed paint chip sized particles from the space around earth. A decade might be a little low, though I could see it taking 2-3 assuming a relatively bad situation.
At 7:41 the video does not show a laser broom in action! It shows a telescope that does laser-range finding of satellites and laser communication with satellites. Laser brooms have never been used or build.
Probably best to retrofit a spacex starship with powerful magnet, collect trash and compact into cubes that are either pushed towards Earth's athmosphere or even transported back to earth for recycling
Magnets are really useless, you need to get to a very similar speed and very close anyway. And starship has such a huge volume that compacting the debris in space is an unnessary risk which requires a heavy machine inside starship. The rest of the idea rocks!
Im wondering if instead of sending expensive and energy exhaustive probes to hault them down, maybe something that creates a "dust bunny" of space junk. Quagulating them into one mass and yank it down from orbid in mass. Metal in hard vacuum welds togeather so maybe something we could use to an advantage.
Finally some talk about laser brooms! But the article titles are moving around nervously so we know we should be scared 7:51! ... Of course that laser is indeed being build with the goal to blind satellites so it's understandable. The technology to rendezvous, grab and deorbit satellites can also be weaponized, though it is much more expensive.
what about something like the ISS in space but its like a trash holder and we send mini drones with ionic thrusters and it sends it back to earth and slows it down to burn it in the atmosphere. And the trash holder has lasers to cut up the big pieces or something like that. What do you think?
@@elan-ln7ge If drones with ion thrusters are very small they cannot produce a lot of thrust, since they cannot generate a lot of electricity for their engine etc. So it will take a long time for those mini drones to change the orbit of debris. This means it's not easy to dispose the debris into the atmosphere with the mini drones without sacrificing the mini drone too. But still, you could use those drones to put the debris in much lower trajectory, speeding up their de-orbiting by years. It's a good idea but costs money. Lasers to cut up big pieces seems unnecessary and gives the risk of debris-creating-event in orbit. Why is the ISS-like trash holder necessary in your idea? Bringing the trash back to the trash holder probably takes much more fuel/time than deorbiting the trash. Your idea reminds me a lot of the VASIMIR orbital sweeper idea from ad astra (has an old video on youtube). In that idea the mothership made sense because that was the thing with the efficient engines, these engines are expensive, do not accelerate things quickly and require a lot of power. That's why they used those on the not-disposable mothership. Then you can bring cheaper drones with less-efficient- but higher-thrust engines to the trash.
@@kedrednael I feel like the space station could be useful in a few years time where the debris accumulates in larger amounts that it would be wasteful to send a few rockets every year just to clean it up. The space station could grind up the larger debris and then throw it to the atmosphere kind of like a slingshot. Also it would have already been de-orbittedd by the time it got caught and entered the station by a kind of capture device. What is your idea? Like if hypothetically there were a large number of debris that needed to be cleaned up. What would you do?
@@elan-ln7ge But you'd have to use rockets/drones/tugs to get the debris into the garbage collector. This costs fuel (probably much more than using the tugs to de-orbit the debris), so this means you need to launch more rockets. The slingshot idea is pretty cool. If something de-orbittedd it is no longer in space btw. To clean up space debris I think there are two possible solutions: 1. ion truster powered drones, which dispose the debris into orbits so low they decay in a couple months instead of years/decades/centuries. By not going all the way into the atmosphere you can have the drone increase its orbit again to go to the next debris. But this still requires quite a lot of drones. Docking to the debris is going to be difficult with just ion thrusters, because they accelerate the spacecraft so mindbogglingly slowly (but for a long time). 2. Probably the better idea is to place satellites in orbit with big solar panels to power lasers. The lasers ablate the target a little bit, that evaporated stuff is basically a thruster. So the advantage is you do not have to match orbit to the debris to move them. The satellite would give decelerating thrusts to many different debris, even debris that are so small they would not be worth catching with drones.
Why isn't anyone talking about how This space junk is mass from the Earth that we were putting outside into the atmosphere. Just like a cells mitosis. It reminds me of something I heard Terrance McKenna say crawling out of the ocean is going to look like a tiny step in our evolution compared to what's coming next.
Surely we could create a giant ship-like ‘skip’. Which is non penetrable with armour similar to the space station. This skip could collect trash, compact it down with a crusher and then dock it into a transporter ship back to earth for recycling. Yes, it’s very Star Wars like, but it’s thinkable so therefore it’s doable
So, like a starship to collect trash, except without the amour, since that part is impossible for anything bigger than a few millimeters (they are more than 4x as fast as bullets), the only way to remove a piece of space debris is to match their speed and collect them.
There is no such thing as 'non-penetrable" at orbital speeds. A small piece of debris hits like a hand grenade. You hit something slightly bigger and your armour is just obliterated - and we don't have the resources to have enough ablative layers for the amount of debris that's already up there, let alone predicted for the future
Some of the old satellites are very outdate, useless and probably decommissioned but still floating around. If anyone of them is still moveable, they could be used to crash the floating junks back towards Earth.
This is not how it works. And that's actually the reason space debris are a problem. Things are not 'floating' in space. There's still gravity, and the reason the satellites do not fall back onto earth after a couple of seconds is because they are moving so fast they go around the earth. To stay in space the satellites are moving at 8 km/s near earth (20x speed of a bullet). If you were to collide two things without exactly matching their orbits (which costs a lot of fuel probably, much more than old satellites have), then it collides faster than a bullet. The two colliding things explode and shatter into many more pieces, which are still generally moving in the same direction. You just turned one cannonball into a gigantic shotgun blast.
Laser brooms would be exceptionally suited for those I believe. Since the debris are lower mass. And the small debris are probably just pieces of things, so there's an even smaller explosive hazard. Not as if you are firing on half empty batteries or still pressurized fuel tanks.
maybe instead of laser on ground, laser satelites, regulated in size and output capability. Batteries that are filled by solar. Longterm but steadyly? When batteries have become better or we would at some point have fusion energy pocket reactors ... .
Hyperthetical thinking: What if the idea of creating a Junk ball that like a gell junk ball that absorbs sunlight and radiation like food and in turn grows in both size and Diametre, its set on a spiraling Orbit from high Orbit as it orbit spirals back towards earth on a trajectory orbit on its Orbits it collects impacts and absorbs space junk, in orbit. Once a certain size its size drags back into Earth's orbit and burns up over large areas water. Just like the crazy idea from Futerama junk ball heading towards earth.
If satellites were just put in a geostationary orbit, they could be made more efficient, much larger and we would need much less of them. sure the maintenance cost would be big but they could be made to last.
And if we need to deorbit, a disassembler could be made which would bring it into the graveyard orbit and disassemble it piece by piece sending all the pieces into the atmosphere to burn up.
What makes satellites in GEO "more efficient"? 1 GEO can replace several LEOs, but GEO satellite are also significantly more expensive to manufacture and launch. Atmospheric drag is a lot more effective in LEO than in GEO. Anything in LEO will deorbit much faster than anything in GEO and cascading collisions can be sustained a lot longer in GEO
Low earth orbit is about 99-1200miles away. I wonder if we had a super long cable with a pilotable magnet at the end to catch the more dangerous pieces and reel them back to earth. Kind of like magnet fishing but in space. It sounds crazy because its so far away but some people were considering building an actual elevator to space once so having a super long cable is probably possible.
The problem is everything is moving very quickly to circle the earth, otherwise it falls back to earth in minutes. Because at 400km high gravity is still 90% as strong as on earths' surface. So if you somehow have a static magnet connected to earth surface, you won't gently attract and catch debris. They will either wizz by or collide at 8km/s. 15x faster than a bullet. To keep space elevators in space the end has a counterweight that needs to be so high it goes beyond geostationary orbit, that's higher than 40,000km. At geostationary orbit you have a circular orbit if you go so fast that you go around the earth in one day. If you are lower gravity is stronger so you have to go quicker. If you are higher gravity is less strong so you have to go slower to go in a circle; Like the moon which takes a month to orbit the earth. If you try to go around the earth in one day above geostationary orbit you are going too fast, gravity is not strong enough to keep you close to earth, and you would fly away from earth. This 'centrifugal force' is what pulls the entire space elevator up. So having a space elevator just to low earth orbit is not possible, it will just fall down. You need the insane length to keep it up, but this means you also need a stronger material than we can produce, which is why space elevators are science fiction.
@@gothboschincarnate3931 You can't 'pull a platform on a wire' in space. It's not like dragging a net to catch plastic out of the ocean or off the road to clear a path. Everything is orbiting at 9 km/s in low earth orbit (15 times faster than bullet). The space junk problem mainly exists in low earth orbit. To put a mile wide asteroid in space requires insanely powerful rockets. Even the largest rockets we've build today would barely change the orbit of such an asteroid. After a while the asteroid orbit would decay and it would cause widespread devestation on earth. The ballistic gell doesn't change anything. If you hit ballistic gel with stuff at orbital velocity it will explode and many pieces will keep orbiting the earth. You just put more space debris in orbit.
The problem is everything is moving very quickly to circle the earth, otherwise it falls back to earth in minutes. Because at 400km high gravity is still 90% as strong as on earths' surface. Things are not gently floating in weightlessness like on an ocean. With a magnet you won't gently attract and catch debris. They will either wizz by or collide at 8km/s. 15x faster than a bullet.
Since space has a lot of space, as suggested by you, more or newer satellites should be parked further away from LEO. But there would be a lot of hues and cry over their finances, right!
Most satellites are launched to do something/ benefit something on earth. If you put them further away than LEO their entire function might be made impossible. And LEO has the advantage that there is still some air drag, so debris deorbit. If we put all the satellites in higher orbits and kessler syndrome really hits we could have a bigger problem. Perhaps we should incentivize better engines on satellites, so the low ones can stay in lower orbits, so if something goes wrong with them they really deorbit fast.
@@kedrednael Point well taken.. and I think it will be so, once it’s dire need arises..but until it’s happening, let’s suggest some weird idea’s.. because who knows what human ingenuity could lead upto! ✌🏻
#Cost of #space #junk is becoming a big #risk. The regulated private sector, motivated by #profits, will innovate to solve these problems, if government space agencies allow it.
Why do we need to capture? As long as we slow down whatever it is, it will de-orbit on it’s own. Isn’t most of what’s up there at least partially metallic? Who is working on solving this with magnetic fields?
They're not that magnetic, and they're moving much to fast to be affected by a magnet if it just passes by. It's moving 20x faster than sound! If you magically use magnets strong enough to adjust their speed in a couple milliseconds while passing by, you'd explode the satellite, ripping out the magnetic pieces. I think if we have technology to somehow stop satellites using magnetism we'd easily also have magnetic shields against bullets. One way to use magnetic fields is having a long conducting wire attached to a satellite. The satellites moves through earth magnetic field, so using such a conducting wire you can convert some of the kinetic energy to electricity, slowing the satellite down. But you'd need to get this conducting wire attached to the satellite somehow. So it's comparable to carrying/ connecting it to a drag-sail.
@@kedrednael If we speed up a space craft carrying a magnet, wouldn't the debris be slower in comparison? Like two vehicles moving at the same speed look like they aren't moving at all.
@@WanderTheNomad Exactly, but this still requires the space craft and debris to be nearby and nearly matched in speed. So it's not really different than harpooning it. Accelerating those last 30km/h of the 28,800km/h is not really the problem.
@@kedrednael it’s relative velocity that matters once the device gets going it won’t matter as much. And you don’t even need to match that speed. The devices can stay in geostationary orbit and work like a pulsing drag that subtly pulls and pushes on whatever it is as that thing flies by at 20x speed of sound. Over 1000 orbits, or however many, the object slows down enough to let gravity and atmosphere do their thing
@@Rkcuddles It is indeed the relative velocity that matters. If you have a geostationary thing with a wire to low earth orbit, so, you make a space elevator? The wire will only be going to go around 0.3 km/s in low earth orbit. Basically standstill. So this still suffers from the problem I outlined in my first comment. Getting thousands of close flyby's to debris is going to be a bit hard, especially because how are you going to precisely position the thousands of kilometer long wire that exerted a force on object sometimes? It is going to swing wildly. Even if it is a space elevator. The force you use to slow down the debris, will accelerate the wire.
A coupe hundred thousand low-cost smart robots flying around in space seems like one solution. They seek out and attach to space junk and take it into the atmosphere to burn up. But someone would have to design such a robot.
An old satellite isn't really space junk: people are worried about it's potential for space junk. Satellites go in all directions around earth at incredibly high speeds. If one satellite breaks into pieces, those pieces form a cloud of high speed high energy projectiles. This cloud can then hit other satellites, meaning satellites have to avoid it. If they don't, it creates more clouds and the problem increases in a chain reaction. The chances of a satellite hitting another satellite are super low, the problem is really small pieces hitting inactive satellites creating more small pieces. If a satellite has the ability to avoid space junk and de-orbit itself, there is very little problem with it.
I want to see a video when they explain long term responsibility and sustainability for egoistic CEOs like Elon Musk, who doesn't give a s#!t about this...
Hey there. You could be interested in this - previously we made a video on climate reparations; who should be paying back who. Please check it out here 👉 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-KGOvRn5_QRg.html and let us know your thoughts in the comments. 🌱
Not an expert, but a de-orbiter should be reusable. 3D printing is everywhere; why not use it for this use case? Laser-Sinter a small rocket engine made from powder you bring from earth (much smaller then those made by Relativity Space), put it on a larger piece, collect smaller fragments with a net as described in the video, fabricate a structure where you put the rocket on, and connect the net. Fuel the rocket and slow the thing down.
I know how we can deal with that, we will allow thousands more LEO satellites , even though we don't need them, but there is money to be made! Soon, where there is a launch, they will have to okay it with SpaceX because SpaceX has so many satellites that it controls launches!
The idea is starlink satellites are low enough (580 km high) they still experience some air drag. If they become uncontrollable they would slow down, thus get lower, get more air drag, slow down more, get lower and burn up in earth's atmosphere.
The problem isn't with Elon Musk's satellites, its with irresponsible satellites. (Starlink had to do a lot of stuff to get approval for so many satellites, so the Starlink satellites are actually pretty good about this.) Starlink satellites can avoid collisions and deorbit themselves when they're finished.
First, one must understand, if they don't already know it, those that are making the profits from this are NOT going to have to pay for the cleanup, that will be on the governments, tax payers, while those that are responsible keep their profits! Meanwhile, the wealthy investors will be blessed with more tax cuts!!
First !! --> we should save our own environments we live in here ON earth. You know I can live without my smartphone or other satellite based treats but without a home or food it gets hard. So forget about space for now!
GPS and weather prediction save trillions of dollars each year. Just imagine how much more pollution there will be if our transportation system cannot use GPS anymore. Food production is a huge polluter, but it benefits insane amounts from weather prediction via satellites, and even infrared measurements of the ground using satellites. There would be more damage from storms if we cannot predict them as well anymore. And many of those satellites circle the entire earth, or are so high they see half of the entire earth, so also countries and continents that did not launch them are benefiting from them. The Ocean cleanup, which cleans plastic from the ocean also uses a lot of satellite data! And remember satellites were the first things to be solar powered, since you can't keep pouring gasoline in them up in space to power them. They were the main reason for innovation in solar energy in the past, and we wouldn't be at the efficiency level we are at now without that. Same for digital cameras and insolation materials. Using satellite data we can also map who is polluting the environment. Nowadays CO2 emissions is reported by each respective country on a basically voluntary basis... They have a lot of insentive to lie. We'll map it with satellites and there'll be no more doubt. We are also tracking methane leaks using satellites, this information is being used to stop many massive leaks. So those are some reasons why space travel is extremely important for our environments ON earth.
"Forgetting about space" doesn't mean ignoring problems. Climate change is a huge problem, but it doesn't mean other problems should be completely ignored. Space debris could potentially set off a large scale chain reaction making it almost impossible to get anything into space, and all it really needs to better regulation and resources very comparable to the amount space generates in the first place.
They did mention that satellites are required to monitor essential environmental aspects - such as ozone layer, Arctic ice, ocean warming. We really need to keep an eye on these things, and it's best done from space. However, we don't need companies like Spacex sending up as many stupid satellites as they do. The night sky is quite ruined now with these things constantly tracking across the sky, distracting the eye from events like meteor showers and lunar eclipses. I am quite sure that between Musk, other commercial ventures, and aggressively paranoid governments, they are going to make the night sky as scruffy as a litter-strewn beach and totally inaccessible for future launches of a much more important nature, such as space telescopes like James Webb.
we could set up a scrap yard up in space this will save money bringing it back , then we coul recycle it to do space stations or somthing else with the metal that is up there.
Nahh were fcked already reagrding this and almost everything else enviroment related disasters lol, but its okay to everyone if greedy people make profit like that right?
You say it as if undeveloped countries would otherwise pay for it. Like with plastic and e-waste etc. But in this case that is utterly impossible. To clean the debris requires a highly efficient and large space infrastructure. This is something undeveloped countries obviously do not have, at most they put up a couple of satellites.
I am relatively sure where ever you reside, your country is utilizing the satellite data from western countries for weather, agriculture, navigation, communication, entertainment (internet) and security. So why should your country be free of the space junk tax?
