KrK
Heavy Artillery For The Little Guy
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| reply to Nightfall
Re: Interesting...but do we have the space?
Over time, most space junk will de-orbit and burn up, but unfortunatly much of it is in orbits that will take hundreds or even thousands of years to decay on their own... Most "space junk" will never pose a hazard to people on the ground, but it certainly is posing a danger to people and equipment in orbit.
Nasa has this image of the damage that a "fleck of paint" made when it impacted. It looks like what you might expect a .30 calibre bullet to do when it hits 2" steel plate.... and it was only a spec of paint... |
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Eatmeingreek
Gentard
join:2001-06-29
San Francisco, CA
| reply to rchandra
There are only two zones in Earth orbit where space junk is a concern. LEO (Low Earth Orbit) which is at about 100 miles up, and Geosynchronous
orbit.
Lingus is right in that there is a whole lot of room up there, even in Earth orbit. Also, the vast majority of space junk would burn up in the atmosphere if it were ever to re-enter, so it doesn't really pose a hazard (there are exceptions) to humans on the ground.
The problem is that LEO and Geosynchronous are getting kind crowded after 50-odd years of space launches. A collision in Geosynchronous means an expensive satellite bites the dust. A collision in LEO can mean dead astronauts.
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rchandra
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| reply to KrK
one little note I'd like to add to this discussion: space may be expansive, but there are practical limits too. Signal strength varies inversely with the square of distance, if I recall my physics correctly. Sure, you can orbit a satellite at a distance greater than the moon, but what kind of power are you going to need to reach it? And what kind of power will be needed to get back, which will affect the size/bulk of this satellite? And what kind of RTT delays are you willing to tolerate?
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KrK
Heavy Artillery For The Little Guy
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| reply to Lingus
The problem is simple. We've got all kinds of junk in earth orbit... much of it unintentional and too small to be tracked. It's really been a miracle at this point that nobody has been killed by space debris collision. Satellites have died from it. The problem is simple physics... you have a small object, which has very little mass, let's say it's a screw the size of one of the screws which holds PC slot covers on.... Now, it's in Earth orbit, so it's circling the earth at thousands of miles per hour.... and it's too small to track.
So, along comes XYZ company, and they launch their new multi-billion dollar communication satellite into earth orbit... unfortunately that orbit has a intersection with the aforementioned screw. When that screw hits it, well, for comparison, imagine what would happen to your car if it was hit by a tank shell. You get the idea.... and the collision itself would release numerous MORE debris.
SPACE itself may be massive..... But the space around the Earth isn't, and that's where 99.9% of the junk goes. |
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Eatmeingreek
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| reply to clecssuck
said by clecssuck:
What goes up must come down
Yeah, but most will burn up on reentry. Only really big things survive re-entry without shielding. And considering how expensive launch costs are, we don't have to worry about the public at large launching really big stuff. (Like say, a Datsun, for example.)
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Lingus
U.S. Navy AE3
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| reply to Karl Bode
I understand they must track it, but hey when your crazy enough to go into space well thats the chance you take. Another thing if a piece of space junk lands on me, please please, make sure you have my body stuffed and mounted on a wall in the smithsonian with a sign that says "This A**hole got hit by a piece of space junk isn't he lucky!" Make sure you put a big smile on my face too like I just won the lottery if possible. 
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Karl Bode
News Guy
join:2000-03-02 | reply to Lingus
At 28,000 kilometres per hour, a single particle of dust has enough power to shatter the hull.
I'm sure engineers appreciate your suggestion of relaxing, but to avoid DEATH, they have to track every bit... |
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Lingus
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| reply to Karl Bode
What is Junk to you?
To me this whole planet, the moon, the sun, the comets, the asteroids, and even the astronauts own urine is all the same as space junk. Just because there is a couple of nuts in bolts in SPACE seems like no harm to me. Nah, to me I would be more worried about the sun's radiation first. Second the effects of a vacuum. See I don't share any negative feelings towards any human created "JUNK" that we put into SPACE. If you think about it, that metal in that bolt has always existed in SPACE it just was in another form in the core of the earth. So I say relax. Another big bang will eventually come along in blast us all into some other form of matter and the cycle will continue.
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clecssuck
join:2002-01-23
Birmingham, AL | reply to Nightfall
I was amazed when I read this until I thought about the space issue as well...we don't need a junk yard floating above us. What goes up must come down
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Karl Bode
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| reply to Lingus
It's not other satellites they worry about hitting, like everything we humans touch, the immediate space around the earth is pretty cluttered with junk, metal, bits, bolts, and nuggets:
»www.theatlantic.com/issues/98jul/junk.htm
»www.space.com/spacewatch/space_junk.html
»octopus.gma.org/surfing/satellit···unk.html |
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Lingus
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| reply to richb01803
Dangers of Collision?
Don't be silly. They are in SPACE for crying out loud! Do you know how much SPACE there is in SPACE! The possibility of a satellite colliding with another satellite is practically zero. Think about this, in order to get two satellites to actually collide with one another you would probably have to do some serious planning and calculations first.
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richb01803
Rich
join:2001-02-14
02100 | reply to Nightfall
I think there are something like 100,000 pieces of space junk and/or operational satellites tracked in one of the NASA databases.
Adding a few hundred more amateur satellites might add to the dangers of collision, but not by much. |
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Nightfall
My Goal Is To Deny Yours
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|  I really think this is a neat story. This is like October Sky in the present.
However, I really don't see people launching their own satellites into orbit for internet access. It is too expensive, especially for mechanical support and upkeep in space. There is also a finite amount of space in orbit. Right now, we have many satellites just drifting in orbit. I really can see a lot of collisions as we launch more satellites.
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