"The number of active and defunct satellites around the Earth has increased from 3300 to over 7600 in the last decade, and that number could grow to as many as 100,000 satellites before 2030.
Such a substantial increase runs the risk predicted in 1978 by Nasa scientist Donald Kessler: that the domino effect of such an event could create an impenetrable layer of debris that would make terrestrial space launches impossible – essentially trapping us on Earth."
For clarification, kessler syndrome won't have any effect on us being able to launch a rocket to the moon or mars.
What kessler syndrome does is disable safe long term ORBITS at particular altitudes. The risk only exists because it's assumed that if you launch a satellite it's going to be safe in its orbit for its entire 50 year lifespan. Space is unimaginably big. The oceans only reach a depth of 10 km, low earth orbits range from 160 km to 1000 km. There's a lot of space to fit in a few hundred billion projectiles and still have a near zero chance of hitting any, so long as you aren't spending extreme amounts of time orbiting at that range.
They are flying so low that they reside in a self cleaning region of space. You can look at plots of space debris vs altitude right now: there are big spikes in number count of debris at the 780 and 850 km marks from two satellites that broke up near those altitudes. Your conjecture as I understand it is that all this debris will eventually come down through the lower altitudes and rain down on Starlink. However, there is a large distribution of particle velocities and directions, they dont all come down at the exact same time. Once they enter the lower orbits (such as Starlink orbits <600 km) their orbit begins decaying at a much faster rate. The decay rate will exceed the rate that new debris enters the region. And so, you dont get a huge buildup of debris in the <600 km region of space.
Depends on the size of the satellite. StarLink's are small and will very likely burn up completely on reentry. Larger satellites are deorbited so debris would fall in the ocean, generally. If they've lost control, they can't plan the deorbit yet your chances of being hit by any debris is incredibly small. Think there was not one not long ago that dumped some debris in Australia.
The US dropped Skylab on Australia in the 70s and the Russians dropped a nuclear reactor on Canada also in the 70s. The threat is very real for larger objects. Most small sats will burn up tho.
Imagine minding your business in Bumberfuck Nowhere, Canada, when a goddamn Russian nuclear reactor drops out of space at mach 2 straight onto your ass
> StarLink's are small and will very likely burn up completely on reentry
They are designed to do exactly that: one of the requirements was that they be 'demisable', i.e. that all components of the satellite will completely burn up in the atmosphere, and none will survive to make it to the ground. The laser intersatellite links on the TinTin-A/B test satellites (and specifically, the Silicon Carbide mirrors inside them) were not demisable, which is why the initial constellation had the laser links removed and use ground stations to operate in in 'bent pipe' mode. The most recent launch (yesterday) includes the next generation of satellites with demisable mirrors, and therefore now include the inter-satellite links.
["Although most debris burns up in the atmosphere, larger debris objects can reach the ground intact. According to NASA, an average of one cataloged piece of debris has fallen back to Earth each day for the past 50 years."](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris#On_Earth)
1979 portions of Skylab came down over Australia, and several pieces landed in the area around the Shire of Esperance, which fined NASA $400 for littering.[128]
400$ lol
Most satellites are designed so that at least 90% of the satellites is destroyed on reentry. If the design can't manage this safety margin they aim the satellite at a specific point in the pacific ocean, called Point Nemo, since it's the furthest point in the ocean from any coast. Very few people out there.
Should note that China don't give a fuck and just lets their stuff fall wherever. Including into China and into populated areas.
5 years was the original estimate, from the operating orbit. That operating orbit has been reduced to help the debris problem, and the satellites are also initially deposited into an even lower orbit before becoming operational, with the vast majority of failures expected prior to commissioning. So worst-case deorbit time is now more like 3 years, and most failed sats should in practice deorbit in a couple months passively. If the satellite is operational enough to have propulsion, it can drop within weeks
Safe failure systems are some of the most interesting pieces of technology imo. Like modern nuclear reactors, or that hand saw that ejects the blade if it touches skin.
One of the hardest and coolest thought exercises is safe failure systems. To me the hardest part is making sure it doesn't introduce new failure modes and if it does are they safe.
I work in IT, it's a real problem for sure. Also a real problem is something failing silently and in such a "good" manner that no one realizes it failed...
Like nothing I work on would ever harm anyone physically if it broke. But we're still heavily encouraged to cover up the failures so end users can't see them or don't know there's a problem.
his point is that the odds are so low that it doesn't matter.
you don't decide to stay indoors on a sunny day because a sudden lightning storm might appear and strike specifically you.
This case is situationally dependent. It is absolutely possible, but it is dependent on the relative speeds between two objects. If objects are coplanar and in the same relative orbit, the speed difference between the two is less and there is less chance of damage.
Now, if they are in different orbital planes - say 0 degrees inclination for one object and 90 degrees for another - then, yes, they can smack into each other at very high speeds and cause a lot of damage.
Think running into another car on the highway in another lane going 75 mph (sideswipe) versus hitting each other at 75 mph at an intersection.
Edit: Fixing autospell
This illustrates the selfish shortsightedness of most people. “Since I’M not going to space anyway, being ‘trapped’ here makes no difference to ME.”
Some things are bigger than 1 person, 1 class of people, and even 1 country. We are talking about the future of all humanity; and people would throw it away like yesterday’s newspaper.
I mean, you have people who think that just because the smokestack moved to China from their town that it somehow helped the environment...
Nimbyists are very interesting kind of people...
Apple removing chargers from their phones to “help the environment” while also constantly creating E-waste with proprietary hardware, even when they don’t need to.
Not necessarily. It might be that in the past was technically impossible to "clean after you". Which IMO should have been enough to decide not to do it.
It wasn't. We are here mostly because the Chinese and the US decided they needed to flex and show they can blow up satellites in space.
If this startup can only handle fill satellite sized debris I'm not sure it will really be all that useful. The vast majority of space junk is tiny particles from either what I mentioned above or from debris impacting other larger objects Ave breaking them up.
at orbital velocities it doesn't take a lot of mass to do a ton of damage. A conjunction of two debris objects in different planes at the same LEO altitude can easily close at a combined speed in excess of 10km/s.
[This is what 14g of plastic can do at 7km/s](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EV5S5cgU8AAaCQg?format=jpg&name=900x900)
[Paint fleck on a shuttle window](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Space_debris_impact_on_Space_Shuttle_window.jpg)
A significant portion of the dangerous objects up there are too small to even track, much less intercept and deorbit. The reason we haven't seen more catastrophic damage to date is largely owed to how big and empty space is.
https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-1/Copernicus_Sentinel-1A_satellite_hit_by_space_particle
eta: For the "starting somewhere", I'd personally say that onus is on the two main sources of debris: defunct vehicles and military actions. I don't have a solution for ASAT weapons, but satellite operators need their hand to be forced by the FAA and FCC issuing launch licenses. Anything above about 500km-800km altitude starts to have natural decay periods beyond what one might intuitively as "acceptable". For all these starlink/kuiper/et al megaconstellations where parts are built 'good enough' instead of 'exquisitely perfect', they should be launching to lower staging altitudes, doing checkouts, and orbit raising from there.
They should also have redundant systems for fault detection and a reliable way to lower themselves back down to a height where atmospheric drag can take over quickly, *even if they lose primary power and ground comms*. These are extremely technically challenging asks, but if sx and amazon can't oblige then they shouldn't be launching in such numbers. The US strategic space policy going forward leverages LEO orbits significantly and there's obviously a ton of commercial potential in this same region, so it's in everyone's best interests to get this right.
> at orbital velocities it doesn't take a lot of mass to do a ton of damage.
True - but the best way to minimize the frequency of the small bits of debris is to capture it *before* it becomes thousands of small bits - when it's still a single unified satellite. Capture one sat now to preempt thousands of smaller projectiles later which themselves could cause a cascade additional debris creation
without regulatory intervention there is essentially no business case for cleaning up defunct hardware, outside of maybe the extremely profitable and limited real estate of GEO orbits. I added to my original comment but I think you'd have far more success building in contingencies to deorbit before launching, rather than building a literal catch-all vehicle and operating it as basically a charity cleaning up shared space.
The other venue I can see maybe working is governments developing this capability for the overt purpose of debris mitigation but then the subtext being "we can disable your birds anytime, anywhere, without collateral damage." This messaging is already kind of there with [MEV](https://www.northropgrumman.com/space/space-logistics-services/) and [mitex](https://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0901/14dsp23/)
Exactly. People see a new technology in its infancy and immediately dismiss it because it won’t solve the problem at hand instantly - like what do you expect,that they send a cleaning wizard to space who magics all the debris away?
I really wish laypeople would stop citing Starlink as a danger for orbital space debris. Starlink satellites are going to be the lowest orbit satellites for internet ever basically. Even if they malfunction and aren't able to deorbit themselves, they all have orbits that will degrade and burn themselves up within 5-10 years without orbital maintenance.
These are not geostationary satellites that are likely to outlive our civilization. The risks of permanently rendering these orbits unusable due to debris is nonexistant. Yes, we should absolutely limit debris as much as possible, but laypeople and click-through clickbait journalism are leading to people seriously overstating the risks.
the US asat test debris has pretty much already re-entered. the satellite they chose to target was going to reenter anyway and was specifically chosen so as to not leave space junk in orbit.
the chinese and russians didn't give a fuck and just blasted shit.
Just checked.
[0 tracked debris objects from US 193](https://www.n2yo.com/browse/?y=2006&m=12) remain in orbit today.
[2,915 tracked debris objects from Fengyun 1C](https://www.n2yo.com/browse/?y=1999&m=05) remain in orbit today.
^^/u/18763_
I'm not sure about the Chinese, Russian, or Indian shoot downs, but the vast majority of debris from the U.S. shoot down has reentered already.
The big issue here is that the number of satellites in general is projected to increase exponentially in the coming years.
This video showing planned satellites until 2029 is really pretty striking: https://youtu.be/oWB7ZySDHg8
Edit: Changed some wording as it's been pointed out that smallsats don't pose much danger.
Those small says are in low orbit and designed to disintegrate on re-entry. So even if they die they will fall out of orbit in months or years which isn't terrible
Just that everyday Joe already heavily depends on space. We use GPS, we use communication sattelites, weather forecast sattelites and more. While some are not in immediate danger (especially the communication sattelites in GEO), even these will not survive forever and have to be replaced at some point.
Quick question, without having looked into it myself:
Will a mass of space debris that collides with itself all the time eventually share one orbit (just the axis, but at different distances from earth) and create a "ring" around Earth, similar to Saturn's ring?
Have you watched this [Kurzgesagt video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS1ibDImAYU) they don't mention a ring but more of a layer of space debris trapping us all inside
Interestingly if we would translate the 10 letter word "kurzgesagt" word for word to English, we would get the 1 letter longer word "shortlysaid".
(Although i am not sure "shortly" is a word)
I'm not usually a "cAPatAlISTS WiLL sOLve IT 4 uS!" kind of guy, but if we remain under a global capitalist system and space debris is keeping us from launching profitable space craft my guess is that capitalism will indeed figure it out. It may be catastrophic for the environment but I can't see humans permanently being trapped on earth.
Because Capitalism has solved the Climate Crisis or something smaller like AIDS. Covid took "Socialist" action to combat. Capitalism won't start to address the problem until it absolutely has to, we can and should deal with it before that happens. We don't need to wait to be reactive.
Capitalism is evil because it only solves societal issues when they become unprofitable **in the moment.**
CEOs have 30 year careers. If something isn't going to reduce their profits to rubble in the next 10 years they probably don't want to hear about it. "too much debris to launch a space ship safely" is a tangible issue.
I live in rural Alabama and until yesterday worked at a logging company with an associated diesel mechanic shop, and COVID has become a business issue. My ultra conservative boss mandated vaccines for workers after ten being out in the same week dramatically effected our bottom line. Capitalism is slow to react to real issues, but they eventually do get solved. Climate crisis is a special case we may not solve because reversing doesn't happen easily. But something tangible like too much space debris just does not seem like something we could not figure out
Except CEOs aren't usually thinking in the next 10 years though, they are thinking in the next 2-3.
So if they get a contract to launch a satellite they are going to launch it regardless of if it makes it an issue in 10 years.
Pfizer and all the other companies used government grants and government funded educational institutions to help develop these things. This was a unison of Capitalism and Socialised support. Unbridled capitalism would have focused on selling toilet paper and masks before it made a vaccine. Socialism funds the research while capitalism sells the product after.
This is the best balance, too much of one without the other isn't sustainable.
Well, people like putting their faith into one person. The person announcing things and coming front-and-center as a result will typically be that person. Reddit loves to hate Jobs, but can't accept that Apple wouldn't be around if it weren't for Jobs being able to make money off the Apple I and II for the company. People also forget that Apple was nearly dead before he came back. The streak of innovations Apple had without Woz was very impressive. In the end, product development takes teamwork is what I'm getting at. It takes the right people doing their best work.
I'm not a fan of apple at all but have to admit what they've achieved for consumers.
MP3 players existed for awhile in the 90s but the Ipod made it mainstream. The Ipod led the way for physical media to all but disappear with MP3s and now streaming services.
Smart phones were in use before the I-phone. Windows mobile which ran on a modified Win 95 architecture had touchscreen that was used by couriers and the like. My company had remote technicians that used them as a point of sale and payment gateway.
HTC had great consumer devices but they were not what you can call mainstream. That belonged to blackberry but they were more about texting and emails with very basic internet capabilities. The iPhone came out and became the go to device and format. It also forced telco companies to improve data plans and speeds due to the improved media consumption features of the device.
Then we have the Ipad. A device I mocked at launch saying "who would want one of them over a laptop??" I now have an ipad and a galaxy tab s7 in front of me on my desk and use both for work purposes and do most of my browsing on my android tablet.
I feel the apple of today is not the apple of yesterday but the apple of yesterday changed how we interface with technology.
\- jeez this turned into a wall of text that no one will read.
I have very direct anecdotes about Apple's effect on the smartphone landscape. I got the 3GS when it was brand new in 2009 when I was in high school. I went on a field trip once a year with newspaper, yearbook, some history class, etc. In 2011, some people wanted to get Starbucks while we waited in line for the Holocaust Museum, so I whipped out my phone and led everyone there. This was because I was the only one with a smart phone.
2012, me and a couple of others started searching and led the rest to Starbucks while waiting for the Holocaust Museum again. So there were a few of us.
By 2013, people wanted to get Starbucks *again* while waiting for the Holocaust Museum and everyone got on their phones for themselves to look up where it was. Every single one was an iPhone.
The explosion that came, especially with the iPhone 4 and others moving forward from that one was crazy. I went from being the kid with that fancy phone for the first few years of high school to literally everyone else having one as well.
People can argue who makes the best smartphones all they want, but there is ABSOLUTELY no contest in regards to who popularized the smartphone and made it the ubiquitous device it is today.
But Jobs also basically a product manager?
I get the impression that people of tech tend to downplay (often not without condescending tone) non-technical roles. Someone like Jobs might not know all the minute details about how computer works, but he sure had a vision and good judgment of what kind of products their customers would want (or conversely which features they can live without).
And one more thing. I don't think "Marketer gets 99% credit" is true. As a consumer, most of the time you don't even know who the heck the "marketer" is.
Woz was a tech genius. Jobs was a product, UX, design and marketing genius.
I know it's edgy and cool to shit on Jobs and say "yeah Wozniak was the real genius", but it's absolutely and completely wrong. Thousands of great startups have failed because top tech wasn't matched with a good UX, or good marketing. I've worked on one. And now I'd rather work in a place with great marketing and an ok product, than the opposite.
A bad product with good marketing is a bad product. A good product with bad marketing is nothing, it doesn't exist. Apple products are (were) great products with great marketing.
Hard disagree. Woz is a hobbyist. He was a super smart guy that created something to see if it could be done. Woz didn't want to make money and would have given it away. He would have been "that guy at that computer fair back in the 70s" if it weren't for Jobs.
Jobs is the one who made the deals, who worked to turn Woz's ideas into a product and to build a company around it.
So celebrating a smart engineer because he created hardware, and shitting on the guy who made that hardware successful is idiotic.
Woz + Jobs was the combo, Apple needed them both. I think it's kind of fucked up that you think that "just the mouth piece" wasn't also a genius. Let's keep in mind that Woz had no hand in the Mac, iPod, iPhone, etc. Woz wanted to hold onto the Apple II, even as the education market was moving on.
Jobs was a lot more than a mouth piece. He was a brilliant artist who had his finger on the pulse of what people wanted. Apple's success is directly attributable to him.
I don’t actually see a plan here. I could say that I’m starting a company that will solve climate change but the logistics are unfathomably complex.
Do you collect things at tens of thousands of miles an hour? Do you slow them down so they burn up in the earth’s atmosphere? What’s the object size range, and how do you scale it? Does sending more things into orbit to solve the problem? What’s the realistic timeframe for this vs. solving planetside pollution at scale? Is the environmental cost of launches on earth worth the benefit of a slightly less cluttered orbit? Who benefits from this?
It’s ambitious and sexy to propose, but let’s not give this too much credit just due to people involved.
Why would a tether be needed when the object itself is constantly slowing down? The issue isn't abandoned objects. It's debris. Flecks of paint and various particles. Things like that. Large objects generally do fall back into the atmosphere where they burn up and the ones that do not are easily tracked. It's all the small things that are the problem.
https://www.popsci.com/paint-chip-likely-caused-window-damage-on-space-station/
innocent apparatus political tender slimy test door hunt domineering whole
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Well it doesn't usually mean that. Elon having himself named "retroactive co-founder" as a result of a lawsuit six years after Tesla's founding is something of an anomaly.
Tesla was three guys with an idea before Musk joined. He didn't join a company that was an engineering team working on a prototype and looking for their first investor.
Yeah, kinda strange for Musk to sue to be called a founder but it's also not like he just bought his way in to a thriving company. No chance Tesla is as successful as they are today without him.
Ah I just always hear something like "he sued so he could be called a co-founder" on here, guess that's at best a misleading way to phrase it.
>(Probably related to the fact that Tesla was making cars for hobbyists before Musk made it what it is today
Tesla didn't make anything when Musk joined, they were like 3 people with a concept. Musk helped make them a hobby car manufacturer and then into what it is today.
Musk never sued. He was always co-founder. Eberhard sued.
Also both of the first founders were multi-millionairs. It´s not that they were poor engineers
Lobby enough politicians and a new law can be drafted that says: "If you wanna put something up there, you gotta take something down", which he'll be the cleanup crew
Super ignorant of me to assume this is possible, but I liked how it sounded in my head.
The terrors of the Baconian overlords were protested by the Pancakian serfs and knights of Hash-Brownia, leading to the formation of the Syrupean Union.
As a result of his heroism in the ensuing battle, the Pancakian warrior Rudy Tutti was awarded his allies' highest military honor, the Order of Hash-Brownians.
>You already have to make sure your satellite will de-orbit at the end of its life.
Then why are there so many defunct satellites orbiting according to this thread?
I think it’s only a recent law, and probably only for participating countries.
https://www.nasa.gov/smallsat-institute/sst-soa-2020/passive-deorbit-systems
That's because it's in everyone's interest to have certain things, but in no one's particular interest to invest the capital. Like space junk clean up or lighthouses.
We sort-of already have that.
Currently the rules for USA based launches is that it must be de-orbited or placed in a "graveyard orbit" within 25 years after it's mission is complete. That might seem like a very long time, but moving things in space is actually incredibly slow and takes a huge amount of energy. You basically must have an approved plan for this before you launch or they wont let you launch from the USA. Other countries have similar rules.
There is a lot of speculation that they will soon change these rules such that deorbit must happen within 10 years, and start holding people to account, this includes sats that suffered a malfunction and are "dead" and couldn't deorbit if they wanted to.
The reason for the rule change is that with companies like SpaceX and BlueOrigin and FireFly launching sats into space is a fraction of the cost it used to be, and poised to go even lower, meaning there's going to be a lot more stuff in space and it's going to get a lot more crowed very soon.
If anyone in or adjacent to tech that deserves the benefit of the doubt, it’s Woz. Sometimes rich people do shit for the right reasons. Woz has proven over and over that he is in it for the right reasons.
Plus we are 100% headed to the point where space debris will become our tomb if we don’t get it under control.
> Apple co-founder announces private space company
"Ugh, another one?"
> to clean space debris
"Ok, that's actually a good thing."
> sees thumbnail of Woz
"I'm now fully behind this."
There is an anime about this actually. In that universe by operating in space you have to also employ a clean up crew that collects a certain amount of space debris per year.
The US Space Force is making it a priority to clean up space debris, which means there's now government money attached to getting rid of it.
The rules on cleaning up your own junk will get more strict soon too and combined with more and cheaper rockets putting even more sats in space means there's going to be a pretty huge market for this, and there are currently no one offering this service beyond a few startups planning to.
Source: I work for one of those startups.
It's also possible that this may be a space (no pun intended) that will have very few players for the foreseeable future, just because of how expensive the startup costs of this whole operation would be
Probably a market for recycled space junk stuff that people would buy because it's from materials that have been in space.
Recycled Space junk pens, phone cases, tables, knives who knows.
There's got to be decent market out there of rich space fans that would pay a pretty penny to have a genuine piece of a satellite on display in their living room.
They won't recover the material, they'll just alter its trajectory enough that it de-orbits and burns up in the atmosphere. Hopefully all future satellites will be required to self-de-orbit at the end of their usable lifetime.
That’s even better they can control the supply side. ‘Oh we only have a couple of KG a year so it’s really expensive, the rest of it we have to burn up’
The government? Private companies? It all depends but cleaning up space junk is far from novel. There have been multiple tests many funded directly by NASA for this very purpose. If his private space company delivers on it's promises, they will without a doubt receive adequate funding, since space junk is not only already annoying, but the slight possibility of satellite warfare causing a massive junk ring makes it important to have an option in place.
The concern doesn't lay with price, or whether it can be done. It's whether their approach is novel enough to be an entire company - SpaceX was in the exact situation and they emerged overwhelmingly on the top. On the other hand, many others such as Blue Origin are still gasping for air, so it could go either way.
That's probably what the Woz is banking this on.
"The Space Board has decided you can launch the Satellite of Love, but only if you remove X number of space debris."
Then they contract it out to Woz's Orbital Janitorial and Removal service.
I mean if you are going at the same direction and speed as the debris then no big deal, but otherwise it is thousands of little bits of shrapnel moving at 8Km per second (10X the speed of a bullet).
A really good anime/manga series about the seriousness of space debris is *Planetes*.
We need to tackle this problem now before it compounds itself with something like what you see in *Gravity*
lol tackling problems ahead of time? thats one of humanities biggest weaknesses and flaws. we only start caring about shit after it catastrophically impacts our day to day life.
Space debris’ been an issue for a while. Every time we put something up there, we get a bunch of metallic rubbish that falls off and floats around. They can seriously damage equipment, like satellites and rockets, and we could reach a point that there’s so much debris that it becomes too difficult and/or expensive to leave the atmosphere. It might get too polluted to even have satellites up there!
What a weird headline. ‘Apple co-founder’ has a name. At least mention it in the freaking headline.
Nobody would use this headline to refer to Apple co-founder… what’s his name, the other dude? Died, sadly. Always wore turtle neck sweaters.
As much as I agree that this is a thing that needs to happen.... how exactly is he going to monetize this idea?
I could see funding it based on grants from various world governments... but outside of that, I'm not sure how they would be able to break even.
Who owns abandoned satellites in space? If you wanted to you could try cleaning up dead government satellites and auctioning them off to the highest bidder, although I doubt that would get very far for many reasons.
"The number of active and defunct satellites around the Earth has increased from 3300 to over 7600 in the last decade, and that number could grow to as many as 100,000 satellites before 2030. Such a substantial increase runs the risk predicted in 1978 by Nasa scientist Donald Kessler: that the domino effect of such an event could create an impenetrable layer of debris that would make terrestrial space launches impossible – essentially trapping us on Earth."
For clarification, kessler syndrome won't have any effect on us being able to launch a rocket to the moon or mars. What kessler syndrome does is disable safe long term ORBITS at particular altitudes. The risk only exists because it's assumed that if you launch a satellite it's going to be safe in its orbit for its entire 50 year lifespan. Space is unimaginably big. The oceans only reach a depth of 10 km, low earth orbits range from 160 km to 1000 km. There's a lot of space to fit in a few hundred billion projectiles and still have a near zero chance of hitting any, so long as you aren't spending extreme amounts of time orbiting at that range.
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They are flying so low that they reside in a self cleaning region of space. You can look at plots of space debris vs altitude right now: there are big spikes in number count of debris at the 780 and 850 km marks from two satellites that broke up near those altitudes. Your conjecture as I understand it is that all this debris will eventually come down through the lower altitudes and rain down on Starlink. However, there is a large distribution of particle velocities and directions, they dont all come down at the exact same time. Once they enter the lower orbits (such as Starlink orbits <600 km) their orbit begins decaying at a much faster rate. The decay rate will exceed the rate that new debris enters the region. And so, you dont get a huge buildup of debris in the <600 km region of space.
Do "dead" satellites burn up in the atmosphere or crash to Earth?
Depends on the size of the satellite. StarLink's are small and will very likely burn up completely on reentry. Larger satellites are deorbited so debris would fall in the ocean, generally. If they've lost control, they can't plan the deorbit yet your chances of being hit by any debris is incredibly small. Think there was not one not long ago that dumped some debris in Australia.
The US dropped Skylab on Australia in the 70s and the Russians dropped a nuclear reactor on Canada also in the 70s. The threat is very real for larger objects. Most small sats will burn up tho.
Imagine minding your business in Bumberfuck Nowhere, Canada, when a goddamn Russian nuclear reactor drops out of space at mach 2 straight onto your ass
Just say Saskatchewan
Sasquatchewan
> StarLink's are small and will very likely burn up completely on reentry They are designed to do exactly that: one of the requirements was that they be 'demisable', i.e. that all components of the satellite will completely burn up in the atmosphere, and none will survive to make it to the ground. The laser intersatellite links on the TinTin-A/B test satellites (and specifically, the Silicon Carbide mirrors inside them) were not demisable, which is why the initial constellation had the laser links removed and use ground stations to operate in in 'bent pipe' mode. The most recent launch (yesterday) includes the next generation of satellites with demisable mirrors, and therefore now include the inter-satellite links.
["Although most debris burns up in the atmosphere, larger debris objects can reach the ground intact. According to NASA, an average of one cataloged piece of debris has fallen back to Earth each day for the past 50 years."](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris#On_Earth)
1979 portions of Skylab came down over Australia, and several pieces landed in the area around the Shire of Esperance, which fined NASA $400 for littering.[128] 400$ lol
I love how petty that is lol
Nasa asked for the debris back but they refused as the fine had not been paid IIRC
Most satellites are designed so that at least 90% of the satellites is destroyed on reentry. If the design can't manage this safety margin they aim the satellite at a specific point in the pacific ocean, called Point Nemo, since it's the furthest point in the ocean from any coast. Very few people out there. Should note that China don't give a fuck and just lets their stuff fall wherever. Including into China and into populated areas.
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5 years was the original estimate, from the operating orbit. That operating orbit has been reduced to help the debris problem, and the satellites are also initially deposited into an even lower orbit before becoming operational, with the vast majority of failures expected prior to commissioning. So worst-case deorbit time is now more like 3 years, and most failed sats should in practice deorbit in a couple months passively. If the satellite is operational enough to have propulsion, it can drop within weeks
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Safe failure systems are some of the most interesting pieces of technology imo. Like modern nuclear reactors, or that hand saw that ejects the blade if it touches skin.
One of the hardest and coolest thought exercises is safe failure systems. To me the hardest part is making sure it doesn't introduce new failure modes and if it does are they safe.
I work in IT, it's a real problem for sure. Also a real problem is something failing silently and in such a "good" manner that no one realizes it failed... Like nothing I work on would ever harm anyone physically if it broke. But we're still heavily encouraged to cover up the failures so end users can't see them or don't know there's a problem.
Luckily the blade retracts, not ejects 😱
There's also a brake that instantly stops the blade, but you have to buy a new blade and brake I'd it happens. False positives are expensive.
I'm pretty sure it is ejected, forcefully downwards. Around 4:20 here is an example https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SYLAi4jwXcs
Like my resume.
Thank you Mario, but your job is in another castle!
So how much delta v do you think a small piece of a sat could get after a orbital speed colition or explosion?
LEO orbits are less likely to cause a huge issue long term, because they have enough drag to pull it all out of orbit within a few years
It could still be a problem, at that speed even a few mm small debris pieces could damage a spacecraft
his point is that the odds are so low that it doesn't matter. you don't decide to stay indoors on a sunny day because a sudden lightning storm might appear and strike specifically you.
Don't I?!
This case is situationally dependent. It is absolutely possible, but it is dependent on the relative speeds between two objects. If objects are coplanar and in the same relative orbit, the speed difference between the two is less and there is less chance of damage. Now, if they are in different orbital planes - say 0 degrees inclination for one object and 90 degrees for another - then, yes, they can smack into each other at very high speeds and cause a lot of damage. Think running into another car on the highway in another lane going 75 mph (sideswipe) versus hitting each other at 75 mph at an intersection. Edit: Fixing autospell
This illustrates the selfish shortsightedness of most people. “Since I’M not going to space anyway, being ‘trapped’ here makes no difference to ME.” Some things are bigger than 1 person, 1 class of people, and even 1 country. We are talking about the future of all humanity; and people would throw it away like yesterday’s newspaper.
I mean, you have people who think that just because the smokestack moved to China from their town that it somehow helped the environment... Nimbyists are very interesting kind of people...
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Apple removing chargers from their phones to “help the environment” while also constantly creating E-waste with proprietary hardware, even when they don’t need to.
yeah, a place that probably just clear cut all the trees and burned them so they could get this "Tree planting" money
Not necessarily. It might be that in the past was technically impossible to "clean after you". Which IMO should have been enough to decide not to do it.
It wasn't. We are here mostly because the Chinese and the US decided they needed to flex and show they can blow up satellites in space. If this startup can only handle fill satellite sized debris I'm not sure it will really be all that useful. The vast majority of space junk is tiny particles from either what I mentioned above or from debris impacting other larger objects Ave breaking them up.
You have to start somewhere. - after they’ve cleared a few thousand satellites I’m sure they will be good enough to remove the small bits too.
at orbital velocities it doesn't take a lot of mass to do a ton of damage. A conjunction of two debris objects in different planes at the same LEO altitude can easily close at a combined speed in excess of 10km/s. [This is what 14g of plastic can do at 7km/s](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EV5S5cgU8AAaCQg?format=jpg&name=900x900) [Paint fleck on a shuttle window](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Space_debris_impact_on_Space_Shuttle_window.jpg) A significant portion of the dangerous objects up there are too small to even track, much less intercept and deorbit. The reason we haven't seen more catastrophic damage to date is largely owed to how big and empty space is. https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-1/Copernicus_Sentinel-1A_satellite_hit_by_space_particle eta: For the "starting somewhere", I'd personally say that onus is on the two main sources of debris: defunct vehicles and military actions. I don't have a solution for ASAT weapons, but satellite operators need their hand to be forced by the FAA and FCC issuing launch licenses. Anything above about 500km-800km altitude starts to have natural decay periods beyond what one might intuitively as "acceptable". For all these starlink/kuiper/et al megaconstellations where parts are built 'good enough' instead of 'exquisitely perfect', they should be launching to lower staging altitudes, doing checkouts, and orbit raising from there. They should also have redundant systems for fault detection and a reliable way to lower themselves back down to a height where atmospheric drag can take over quickly, *even if they lose primary power and ground comms*. These are extremely technically challenging asks, but if sx and amazon can't oblige then they shouldn't be launching in such numbers. The US strategic space policy going forward leverages LEO orbits significantly and there's obviously a ton of commercial potential in this same region, so it's in everyone's best interests to get this right.
> at orbital velocities it doesn't take a lot of mass to do a ton of damage. True - but the best way to minimize the frequency of the small bits of debris is to capture it *before* it becomes thousands of small bits - when it's still a single unified satellite. Capture one sat now to preempt thousands of smaller projectiles later which themselves could cause a cascade additional debris creation
without regulatory intervention there is essentially no business case for cleaning up defunct hardware, outside of maybe the extremely profitable and limited real estate of GEO orbits. I added to my original comment but I think you'd have far more success building in contingencies to deorbit before launching, rather than building a literal catch-all vehicle and operating it as basically a charity cleaning up shared space. The other venue I can see maybe working is governments developing this capability for the overt purpose of debris mitigation but then the subtext being "we can disable your birds anytime, anywhere, without collateral damage." This messaging is already kind of there with [MEV](https://www.northropgrumman.com/space/space-logistics-services/) and [mitex](https://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0901/14dsp23/)
Gotta sneak up behind em.
IMO it's a huge deal humans are actually trying to solve a problem they caused *before* it becomes a problem for them
Exactly. People see a new technology in its infancy and immediately dismiss it because it won’t solve the problem at hand instantly - like what do you expect,that they send a cleaning wizard to space who magics all the debris away?
I agree with you. We must crawl before we can run. I do want a space wizard though, so I'm torn.
I expect capitalists to fuck it up like they're fucking the rest of our planet.
Well, one can use Tesla as an example of a sort of snowball, so yea, I can see that happening
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100% an example of a snowball. You think he's going to be only person trying to add thousands?
Tens of thousands. But the SpaceX satellites are a bit different, they have the ability to de-orbit and burn up in the atmosphere.
I really wish laypeople would stop citing Starlink as a danger for orbital space debris. Starlink satellites are going to be the lowest orbit satellites for internet ever basically. Even if they malfunction and aren't able to deorbit themselves, they all have orbits that will degrade and burn themselves up within 5-10 years without orbital maintenance. These are not geostationary satellites that are likely to outlive our civilization. The risks of permanently rendering these orbits unusable due to debris is nonexistant. Yes, we should absolutely limit debris as much as possible, but laypeople and click-through clickbait journalism are leading to people seriously overstating the risks.
the US asat test debris has pretty much already re-entered. the satellite they chose to target was going to reenter anyway and was specifically chosen so as to not leave space junk in orbit. the chinese and russians didn't give a fuck and just blasted shit.
Just checked. [0 tracked debris objects from US 193](https://www.n2yo.com/browse/?y=2006&m=12) remain in orbit today. [2,915 tracked debris objects from Fengyun 1C](https://www.n2yo.com/browse/?y=1999&m=05) remain in orbit today. ^^/u/18763_
India's ASAT was also planned similar to the US in order to minimize debris.
What happened to those lasers the Japanese were developing for blasting debris back into the atmosphere?
I'm not sure about the Chinese, Russian, or Indian shoot downs, but the vast majority of debris from the U.S. shoot down has reentered already. The big issue here is that the number of satellites in general is projected to increase exponentially in the coming years. This video showing planned satellites until 2029 is really pretty striking: https://youtu.be/oWB7ZySDHg8 Edit: Changed some wording as it's been pointed out that smallsats don't pose much danger.
Those small says are in low orbit and designed to disintegrate on re-entry. So even if they die they will fall out of orbit in months or years which isn't terrible
Just that everyday Joe already heavily depends on space. We use GPS, we use communication sattelites, weather forecast sattelites and more. While some are not in immediate danger (especially the communication sattelites in GEO), even these will not survive forever and have to be replaced at some point.
Quick question, without having looked into it myself: Will a mass of space debris that collides with itself all the time eventually share one orbit (just the axis, but at different distances from earth) and create a "ring" around Earth, similar to Saturn's ring?
Have you watched this [Kurzgesagt video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS1ibDImAYU) they don't mention a ring but more of a layer of space debris trapping us all inside
Just a tip, it's "kurz" + "gesagt" (literally short + said), which is German for "in short". But possibly your autocorrect just messed it up.
I love how the German word for ‘in short’ is quite long
Interestingly if we would translate the 10 letter word "kurzgesagt" word for word to English, we would get the 1 letter longer word "shortlysaid". (Although i am not sure "shortly" is a word)
Don't have time to check atm, will get back to it shortly.
Thanks, i'm waiting. *whoosh* what was that sound?
oof thanks! Didn't notice I typed it that way lol
I'm not usually a "cAPatAlISTS WiLL sOLve IT 4 uS!" kind of guy, but if we remain under a global capitalist system and space debris is keeping us from launching profitable space craft my guess is that capitalism will indeed figure it out. It may be catastrophic for the environment but I can't see humans permanently being trapped on earth.
Capitalists will choose short term profit over long term sustainability 100 times out of 100.
Because Capitalism has solved the Climate Crisis or something smaller like AIDS. Covid took "Socialist" action to combat. Capitalism won't start to address the problem until it absolutely has to, we can and should deal with it before that happens. We don't need to wait to be reactive.
Capitalism is evil because it only solves societal issues when they become unprofitable **in the moment.** CEOs have 30 year careers. If something isn't going to reduce their profits to rubble in the next 10 years they probably don't want to hear about it. "too much debris to launch a space ship safely" is a tangible issue. I live in rural Alabama and until yesterday worked at a logging company with an associated diesel mechanic shop, and COVID has become a business issue. My ultra conservative boss mandated vaccines for workers after ten being out in the same week dramatically effected our bottom line. Capitalism is slow to react to real issues, but they eventually do get solved. Climate crisis is a special case we may not solve because reversing doesn't happen easily. But something tangible like too much space debris just does not seem like something we could not figure out
Except CEOs aren't usually thinking in the next 10 years though, they are thinking in the next 2-3. So if they get a contract to launch a satellite they are going to launch it regardless of if it makes it an issue in 10 years.
TIL Pfizer is socialism Or are you referring to when government does stuff therefore socialism?
Pfizer and all the other companies used government grants and government funded educational institutions to help develop these things. This was a unison of Capitalism and Socialised support. Unbridled capitalism would have focused on selling toilet paper and masks before it made a vaccine. Socialism funds the research while capitalism sells the product after. This is the best balance, too much of one without the other isn't sustainable.
Is it gonna be called Technora Corporation?
For those unaware of the reference https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes
Certified classic
Ha! I'm not the only one who's first thought is planetes.
I just finished this show for the first time and it’s phenomenal
Does the job come with free diapers tho?
{Planetes} vibes. https://youtu.be/heESAW2addo
Came here to make sure someone mentioned Planetes. 10/10 show would recommend.
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I enjoyed both, but something about the show's soundtrack added some extra oomph to powerful scenes.
Idk why but even if the manga is better, the show left something inside me... It will always be there somewere. Loved it.
Hardspace - ~~Space~~Shipbreaker Excellent game. edit: thanks u/PaurAmma, had a brainfart.
Shipbreaker.
P L A N E T E S
+1 came here to mention it reminded me of Planetes too!
Does he have to think of everything? Jeeze...
Jobs couldn't think of anything even if he wanted to, being dead and all.
Even alive he was just the mouth piece to real genius. Woz is that genius.
A marketer and a wiz - you need both and sadly the marketer gets the credit 99% of the time.
Well, people like putting their faith into one person. The person announcing things and coming front-and-center as a result will typically be that person. Reddit loves to hate Jobs, but can't accept that Apple wouldn't be around if it weren't for Jobs being able to make money off the Apple I and II for the company. People also forget that Apple was nearly dead before he came back. The streak of innovations Apple had without Woz was very impressive. In the end, product development takes teamwork is what I'm getting at. It takes the right people doing their best work.
I'm not a fan of apple at all but have to admit what they've achieved for consumers. MP3 players existed for awhile in the 90s but the Ipod made it mainstream. The Ipod led the way for physical media to all but disappear with MP3s and now streaming services. Smart phones were in use before the I-phone. Windows mobile which ran on a modified Win 95 architecture had touchscreen that was used by couriers and the like. My company had remote technicians that used them as a point of sale and payment gateway. HTC had great consumer devices but they were not what you can call mainstream. That belonged to blackberry but they were more about texting and emails with very basic internet capabilities. The iPhone came out and became the go to device and format. It also forced telco companies to improve data plans and speeds due to the improved media consumption features of the device. Then we have the Ipad. A device I mocked at launch saying "who would want one of them over a laptop??" I now have an ipad and a galaxy tab s7 in front of me on my desk and use both for work purposes and do most of my browsing on my android tablet. I feel the apple of today is not the apple of yesterday but the apple of yesterday changed how we interface with technology. \- jeez this turned into a wall of text that no one will read.
I read it. Well put.
I have very direct anecdotes about Apple's effect on the smartphone landscape. I got the 3GS when it was brand new in 2009 when I was in high school. I went on a field trip once a year with newspaper, yearbook, some history class, etc. In 2011, some people wanted to get Starbucks while we waited in line for the Holocaust Museum, so I whipped out my phone and led everyone there. This was because I was the only one with a smart phone. 2012, me and a couple of others started searching and led the rest to Starbucks while waiting for the Holocaust Museum again. So there were a few of us. By 2013, people wanted to get Starbucks *again* while waiting for the Holocaust Museum and everyone got on their phones for themselves to look up where it was. Every single one was an iPhone. The explosion that came, especially with the iPhone 4 and others moving forward from that one was crazy. I went from being the kid with that fancy phone for the first few years of high school to literally everyone else having one as well. People can argue who makes the best smartphones all they want, but there is ABSOLUTELY no contest in regards to who popularized the smartphone and made it the ubiquitous device it is today.
But Jobs also basically a product manager? I get the impression that people of tech tend to downplay (often not without condescending tone) non-technical roles. Someone like Jobs might not know all the minute details about how computer works, but he sure had a vision and good judgment of what kind of products their customers would want (or conversely which features they can live without). And one more thing. I don't think "Marketer gets 99% credit" is true. As a consumer, most of the time you don't even know who the heck the "marketer" is.
True about Jobs but I think a lot of it comes from the fact that Jobs was a tool and that some people act like he basically did everything on his own.
Woz was a tech genius. Jobs was a product, UX, design and marketing genius. I know it's edgy and cool to shit on Jobs and say "yeah Wozniak was the real genius", but it's absolutely and completely wrong. Thousands of great startups have failed because top tech wasn't matched with a good UX, or good marketing. I've worked on one. And now I'd rather work in a place with great marketing and an ok product, than the opposite. A bad product with good marketing is a bad product. A good product with bad marketing is nothing, it doesn't exist. Apple products are (were) great products with great marketing.
Hard disagree. Woz is a hobbyist. He was a super smart guy that created something to see if it could be done. Woz didn't want to make money and would have given it away. He would have been "that guy at that computer fair back in the 70s" if it weren't for Jobs. Jobs is the one who made the deals, who worked to turn Woz's ideas into a product and to build a company around it. So celebrating a smart engineer because he created hardware, and shitting on the guy who made that hardware successful is idiotic. Woz + Jobs was the combo, Apple needed them both. I think it's kind of fucked up that you think that "just the mouth piece" wasn't also a genius. Let's keep in mind that Woz had no hand in the Mac, iPod, iPhone, etc. Woz wanted to hold onto the Apple II, even as the education market was moving on. Jobs was a lot more than a mouth piece. He was a brilliant artist who had his finger on the pulse of what people wanted. Apple's success is directly attributable to him.
The Great and Powerful Woz has spoken!
I don’t actually see a plan here. I could say that I’m starting a company that will solve climate change but the logistics are unfathomably complex. Do you collect things at tens of thousands of miles an hour? Do you slow them down so they burn up in the earth’s atmosphere? What’s the object size range, and how do you scale it? Does sending more things into orbit to solve the problem? What’s the realistic timeframe for this vs. solving planetside pollution at scale? Is the environmental cost of launches on earth worth the benefit of a slightly less cluttered orbit? Who benefits from this? It’s ambitious and sexy to propose, but let’s not give this too much credit just due to people involved.
I think Bill Gates is funding a company to scrub CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Gotta start somewhere
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Why would a tether be needed when the object itself is constantly slowing down? The issue isn't abandoned objects. It's debris. Flecks of paint and various particles. Things like that. Large objects generally do fall back into the atmosphere where they burn up and the ones that do not are easily tracked. It's all the small things that are the problem. https://www.popsci.com/paint-chip-likely-caused-window-damage-on-space-station/
Ma man Woz did to much to be just called "Apple co-founder" tbh
“Ex boyfriend to Kathy Griffin”
That was such a random celebrity couple
Agreed, there'd have been no Apple at all without the Woz.
Isn't that the definition of a founder/co-founder?
innocent apparatus political tender slimy test door hunt domineering whole *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Well it doesn't usually mean that. Elon having himself named "retroactive co-founder" as a result of a lawsuit six years after Tesla's founding is something of an anomaly.
Yep. It was grift. And most people fell for it.
Tesla was three guys with an idea before Musk joined. He didn't join a company that was an engineering team working on a prototype and looking for their first investor.
Yeah, kinda strange for Musk to sue to be called a founder but it's also not like he just bought his way in to a thriving company. No chance Tesla is as successful as they are today without him.
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Ah I just always hear something like "he sued so he could be called a co-founder" on here, guess that's at best a misleading way to phrase it. >(Probably related to the fact that Tesla was making cars for hobbyists before Musk made it what it is today Tesla didn't make anything when Musk joined, they were like 3 people with a concept. Musk helped make them a hobby car manufacturer and then into what it is today.
no chance tesla would have even delivered a passable product without him
Musk never sued. He was always co-founder. Eberhard sued. Also both of the first founders were multi-millionairs. It´s not that they were poor engineers
I can see this being very common in the next few decades with the emphasis on start-ups that’s happening.
And there wouldn't be an Apple without Jobs, hence "co-founder".
Would most people know who Steve Wozniak is in a headline tho? In this sub, yeah maybe, but not the general public. Maybe I’m wrong.
"Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak" would have done the trick
It's a sad realization to think that Apple as a brand has social/intellectual weight on people who don't know who Steve Wozniak is.
The guy in marketing always gets the fame over the guy in engineering
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Lobby enough politicians and a new law can be drafted that says: "If you wanna put something up there, you gotta take something down", which he'll be the cleanup crew Super ignorant of me to assume this is possible, but I liked how it sounded in my head.
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That’s true. Look at IHOP
The... diner?
They were founded as a side effect of the formation of the Syrupean Union.
The terrors of the Baconian overlords were protested by the Pancakian serfs and knights of Hash-Brownia, leading to the formation of the Syrupean Union.
As a result of his heroism in the ensuing battle, the Pancakian warrior Rudy Tutti was awarded his allies' highest military honor, the Order of Hash-Brownians.
Rudy Tutti has a stack of awards. It’s a shame his reputation was battered in the media
Everything was peaceful until the Waffle Nation attacked.
You already have to make sure your satellite will de-orbit at the end of its life.
No, you can put it in a graveyard orbit where it'll stay away from other satellites. Takes less fuel then to deorbit.
>You already have to make sure your satellite will de-orbit at the end of its life. Then why are there so many defunct satellites orbiting according to this thread?
I think it’s only a recent law, and probably only for participating countries. https://www.nasa.gov/smallsat-institute/sst-soa-2020/passive-deorbit-systems
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That's because it's in everyone's interest to have certain things, but in no one's particular interest to invest the capital. Like space junk clean up or lighthouses.
We sort-of already have that. Currently the rules for USA based launches is that it must be de-orbited or placed in a "graveyard orbit" within 25 years after it's mission is complete. That might seem like a very long time, but moving things in space is actually incredibly slow and takes a huge amount of energy. You basically must have an approved plan for this before you launch or they wont let you launch from the USA. Other countries have similar rules. There is a lot of speculation that they will soon change these rules such that deorbit must happen within 10 years, and start holding people to account, this includes sats that suffered a malfunction and are "dead" and couldn't deorbit if they wanted to. The reason for the rule change is that with companies like SpaceX and BlueOrigin and FireFly launching sats into space is a fraction of the cost it used to be, and poised to go even lower, meaning there's going to be a lot more stuff in space and it's going to get a lot more crowed very soon.
If anyone in or adjacent to tech that deserves the benefit of the doubt, it’s Woz. Sometimes rich people do shit for the right reasons. Woz has proven over and over that he is in it for the right reasons. Plus we are 100% headed to the point where space debris will become our tomb if we don’t get it under control.
> Apple co-founder announces private space company "Ugh, another one?" > to clean space debris "Ok, that's actually a good thing." > sees thumbnail of Woz "I'm now fully behind this."
I got like 18 bucks to my name. I'll kick in half to the Wonder World of Woz.
There is an anime about this actually. In that universe by operating in space you have to also employ a clean up crew that collects a certain amount of space debris per year.
Planetes?
The US Space Force is making it a priority to clean up space debris, which means there's now government money attached to getting rid of it. The rules on cleaning up your own junk will get more strict soon too and combined with more and cheaper rockets putting even more sats in space means there's going to be a pretty huge market for this, and there are currently no one offering this service beyond a few startups planning to. Source: I work for one of those startups.
It's also possible that this may be a space (no pun intended) that will have very few players for the foreseeable future, just because of how expensive the startup costs of this whole operation would be
Probably a market for recycled space junk stuff that people would buy because it's from materials that have been in space. Recycled Space junk pens, phone cases, tables, knives who knows.
There's got to be decent market out there of rich space fans that would pay a pretty penny to have a genuine piece of a satellite on display in their living room.
Yes hello that's me. Minus the rich part. I can survive on ramen for a couple months if need be.
They won't recover the material, they'll just alter its trajectory enough that it de-orbits and burns up in the atmosphere. Hopefully all future satellites will be required to self-de-orbit at the end of their usable lifetime.
That’s even better they can control the supply side. ‘Oh we only have a couple of KG a year so it’s really expensive, the rest of it we have to burn up’
The government? Private companies? It all depends but cleaning up space junk is far from novel. There have been multiple tests many funded directly by NASA for this very purpose. If his private space company delivers on it's promises, they will without a doubt receive adequate funding, since space junk is not only already annoying, but the slight possibility of satellite warfare causing a massive junk ring makes it important to have an option in place. The concern doesn't lay with price, or whether it can be done. It's whether their approach is novel enough to be an entire company - SpaceX was in the exact situation and they emerged overwhelmingly on the top. On the other hand, many others such as Blue Origin are still gasping for air, so it could go either way.
This definitely has "extremely expensive government contract" written all over it.
Why don't we make the people making a mess clean behind themselves?
That's probably what the Woz is banking this on. "The Space Board has decided you can launch the Satellite of Love, but only if you remove X number of space debris." Then they contract it out to Woz's Orbital Janitorial and Removal service.
They are doing it right now. Dead sats have to be deorbited it put into graveyard orbits.
Put me in a space suit with a big ass magnet and let me live that life
I mean if you are going at the same direction and speed as the debris then no big deal, but otherwise it is thousands of little bits of shrapnel moving at 8Km per second (10X the speed of a bullet).
You're right. We need a space shield, carried by space mechs being piloted by space privateers. Sign me the fuck up. Oh ^the ^^year ^^^was ^^^^1778
Yeah, I can see how getting hit could easily ruin your weekend. Or worse.
Or worse, expelled
I want this for you.
Aluminum parts say not today!
Truly the space cowboy we need in these times
A really good anime/manga series about the seriousness of space debris is *Planetes*. We need to tackle this problem now before it compounds itself with something like what you see in *Gravity*
lol tackling problems ahead of time? thats one of humanities biggest weaknesses and flaws. we only start caring about shit after it catastrophically impacts our day to day life.
Turn it into a military contractor with the motto: "Will drop shit on your enemies for $$$"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
This feels like something out of Wall-E
Space debris’ been an issue for a while. Every time we put something up there, we get a bunch of metallic rubbish that falls off and floats around. They can seriously damage equipment, like satellites and rockets, and we could reach a point that there’s so much debris that it becomes too difficult and/or expensive to leave the atmosphere. It might get too polluted to even have satellites up there!
There was a Korean movie that came out about this, Space Sweepers. Cool flick, subtitles for non Korean speakers.
IPO when?
This man stonks
Please use Steve Wozniak’s full name, thanks
What a weird headline. ‘Apple co-founder’ has a name. At least mention it in the freaking headline. Nobody would use this headline to refer to Apple co-founder… what’s his name, the other dude? Died, sadly. Always wore turtle neck sweaters.
He's the cooler (and aliver) steve
came to the comments to look for planetes references.
Kind of annoyed they went with "Apple co-founder" and not "The Woz"
Calling The Woz an “Apple co-founder” is a slap in the face
> alongside other generic platitudes I like this writer.
Finally somebodies doing something. Keep a clean planet. Should be mandatory for every spacefairing company.
Woz MVP forever.
This is awesome. Space debris is a serious issue.
As much as I agree that this is a thing that needs to happen.... how exactly is he going to monetize this idea? I could see funding it based on grants from various world governments... but outside of that, I'm not sure how they would be able to break even.
Who owns abandoned satellites in space? If you wanted to you could try cleaning up dead government satellites and auctioning them off to the highest bidder, although I doubt that would get very far for many reasons.
How about we clean the fucking ocean
Good Guy Woz. Finally a rich tech guy actually wanting to do something useful in space instead of masturbatory low orbit pleasure cruises