Space Junk

Steve Pace

Steve Pace

Aviation History Writer
Joined
6 January 2013
Messages
2,266
Reaction score
212
This image from NASA shows the current amount of orbiting spacecraft and debris. I guess we need to build a garbage-hauling spacecraft to haul a great deal of this space junk to a dump. -SP
 

Attachments

  • space fence.jpg
    space fence.jpg
    793.4 KB · Views: 22
Nah, we just need to get all the janitors in the world to pay for that laser broom to sweep the heavens of humanity's garbage.
 
A radar reflector inside BIG blobs of aerogel in a net: SplatNiks !!

FWIW, a space station has ideal conditions for manufacturing such: Free heat, free cold, high vacuum...

Plus, they'd make fair 'bumpers' for the ISS as the hazard count rises...
 
And someone just championed all previous performances. Shame on them (this kind of prehistoric launch profile should not be tolerated from a state run agency):
spacenews.com

Huge rocket looks set for uncontrolled reentry following Chinese space station launch

The Long March 5B rocket which launched China’s first space station module Thursday is likely to undergo an uncontrolled reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere in the coming says.
spacenews.com spacenews.com
 
I can for see a comedy, science-fiction series about a merry band of orbital space junk salvagers.
Perhaps they were stranded in orbit after earth-based launch facilities fail, quit, sabotaged ...
Hah!
Hah!
 
An uncontrolled reentry. Well, unless there's some international law against it, that describes the fate of boosters. And aside from attempts to reuse boosters, the technology hasn't changed much.
 
Let's suppose somebody invented a technology that could grab old satellites, put them in a heatshield and drop that on Earth for recycling the precious metals.
Who is proprietary of, say, an old Soviet military satellite dead since 1973 ? Russia ? Could they protest the recovery of such an old wreck ?

Imagine all the metals orbiting Earth...
 
Archibald said:
Who is proprietary of, say, an old Soviet military satellite dead since 1973 ? Russia ? Could they protest the recovery of such an old wreck ?
Click to expand...
Yes, they would. Derelict spacecraft still considered full property of the nation that launched it. The "Outer Space Treaty", "Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects" and "Convention on Registration of Objects Launched into Outer Space" firmly establish such position.

The supposed salvage company would thus need to negotiate the transfer of ownership rights - or hire itself into service of derelict-owner nation, as part of space-cleaning effort.
 
Dilandu said:
Archibald said:
Who is proprietary of, say, an old Soviet military satellite dead since 1973 ? Russia ? Could they protest the recovery of such an old wreck ?
Click to expand...
Yes, they would. Derelict spacecraft still considered full property of the nation that launched it. The "Outer Space Treaty", "Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects" and "Convention on Registration of Objects Launched into Outer Space" firmly establish such position.

The supposed salvage company would thus need to negotiate the transfer of ownership rights - or hire itself into service of derelict-owner nation, as part of space-cleaning effort.
Click to expand...

Ah, good to know. I find this rule a little silly - I mean, does present day Russia cares about Kosmos 666 or Kosmos 69 in any way ? But ok, they launched it, it belonged to them, and this applies to the dead hulk floating in space.

Well if it was an American company it could at least start cleaning up dead American satellites.
 
Archibald said:
I find this rule a little silly
Click to expand...

Not at all, if you consider that those rules were made during Cold War. When A - those dead satellites were brand-new and filled with state-of-art, secret technology, and B - both sides suspected that other would stole the secret satellite without much remorse, if figured out how to do it legal-ish. Even now, there are probably quite a lot of still secret tech in derelict military satellites, that would their owner would be VERY unhappy if fell into other hands.
 
Archibald said:
Well if it was an American company it could at least start cleaning up dead American satellites.
Click to expand...

Well, this is clearly legal. Of course, there might be hidden legal problems: for example, is derelict communication satellite still a property of company that owned it before? But they are simpler to overcame.
 
How many dead comsats are in the GEO graveyards ? some hundreds ?
 
We need regulations. Means we need an incentive to abandon ownership rights past a certain delay (= high taxes) or for recovering a launch sat by yourself or via a contractor (=low tax).

Also, ideally, it should be mandatory that all plans, hardware drawings and software usage should be made public* past a certain delay (decades?) to prevent potentially deadly accidents during recovery and harvesting processes and allow for direct re-use of sub-components.

At commercial level, 10 or 20 years is centuries in term of technological gap and depreciation in value.

*or at least available to registered recycling companies.
 
Last edited:
Nik said:
A radar reflector inside BIG blobs of aerogel in a net: SplatNiks !!

FWIW, a space station has ideal conditions for manufacturing such: Free heat, free cold, high vacuum...

Plus, they'd make fair 'bumpers' for the ISS as the hazard count rises...
Click to expand...

I have this weird idea of a modified rocket stage (think Transtage, Agena, Fregat, Briz-M or Block D : no LH2 ) refueling at a LEO station and then ascending to GEO empty; catching a derelict comsat in the graveyard orbit(s) there, and bringing it back down to the LEO station via aerobraking.

Once in LEO, start recycling.

Alternatively, bring it down to Earth via a Skylon or a Starship, and recycle it on Earth solid ground.

Rinse, repeat, until the GEO graveyard is empty.

Imagine all the components and precious metals in those old communication satellites... it's time for the "great space harvest" to start.

And it can only improve the space junk growing issue...

Briz upper stage

The history of the Briz upper stage by Anatoly Zak
www.russianspaceweb.com
 
TomcatViP said:
And someone just championed all previous performances. Shame on them (this kind of prehistoric launch profile should not be tolerated from a state run agency):
spacenews.com

Huge rocket looks set for uncontrolled reentry following Chinese space station launch

The Long March 5B rocket which launched China’s first space station module Thursday is likely to undergo an uncontrolled reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere in the coming says.
spacenews.com spacenews.com
Click to expand...
Here’s a report regarding where the last stage ended up.

Ivory Coast villagers in shock after they find a debris that fell from the sky
View: https://youtu.be/rStfHuSBQ7E
 
TomcatViP said:
We need regulations. Means we need an incentive to abandon ownership rights past a certain delay (= high taxes) or for recovering a launch sat by yourself or via a contractor (=low tax).
Click to expand...

The second is more likely, because, again, abandoning ownership rights means security problems.

TomcatViP said:
Also, ideally, it should be mandatory that all plans, hardware drawings and software usage should be made public* past a certain delay (decades?) to prevent potentially deadly accidents during recovery and harvesting processes and allow for direct re-use of sub-components.
Click to expand...

Erm, "for some reason" no one is very enthusiastic about, say, making public domain the blueprints for Mark-III atom bomb) Despite the fact, that they are more than 75 years old) Military security of different nations have their own protocols about releasing such materials.
 
I did some calculations using this excellent website.

Hughes: HS-303

Gunter's Space Page - Information on Launch vehicles, Satellites, Space Shuttle and Astronautics
space.skyrocket.de space.skyrocket.de

I got 118 Hughes "300-series" communication satellites with a total weight of 114 metric tons.

Of course some of them are military, others are foreigns (Palapa, Japan, Anik...) so take that with a pinch of salt.
 
… the burdens on spacecraft design that rocket launches impose, resulting in new and exciting possibilities in space.

If you design a satellite that was manufactured in orbit … we estimate that maybe 80% of the mass of a satellite being launched is there to support the launch loads, so that’s a significant component to how spacecraft are designed today… So if we can design satellites that are manufactured, assembled in orbit, can completely change the economics of those assets.
Click to expand...

earthsky.org

| EarthSky

Northrop Grumman said last week that its Mission Extension Vehicle 2 - a robot spacecraft designed to help prolong the life of satellites in space - successfully docked to a commercial communications satellite. "We are now the only provider of life extension services for satellites," a company...
earthsky.org earthsky.org
 
TomcatViP said:
… the burdens on spacecraft design that rocket launches impose, resulting in new and exciting possibilities in space.

If you design a satellite that was manufactured in orbit … we estimate that maybe 80% of the mass of a satellite being launched is there to support the launch loads, so that’s a significant component to how spacecraft are designed today… So if we can design satellites that are manufactured, assembled in orbit, can completely change the economics of those assets.
Click to expand...

earthsky.org

| EarthSky

Northrop Grumman said last week that its Mission Extension Vehicle 2 - a robot spacecraft designed to help prolong the life of satellites in space - successfully docked to a commercial communications satellite. "We are now the only provider of life extension services for satellites," a company...
earthsky.org earthsky.org
Click to expand...
Existing thread below. Though I think it’s probably in the wrong section.

 
I`ve heard that Space X is gonna make Starlink satellites will be able to lead themself in the atmosphere of Earth when their lifespan is over to burn down there and not to increase the number of space junk
 
There are 4 ways how we can handle with space junk 1)we can design & program sats such that they switch to a lower orbit when we replace a sat with a new one automatically and burn up in outer atmosphere 2)we can use high power lazer that could burn them up in the orbit. 3) we can send them toward sun where they would burn up. 4)or we can adopt a technique that require less sats. I guess the easiest way to cope with space junk is to make them burn down in the atmosphere. However, it depends on the size of some space debris. It can be so large that it won't just burn down in the atmosphere
 
I have already mentioned in another thread about one space mission that is about to happen in 2025. On the website of
space news 2021 I found another ``cleaning`` space mission which is called ‘The Claw’. So it`s another space debris cleaning mission which is gonna be launched soon
 
Sending them to the Sun will require a lot of energy that might prove too expensive to sustain. But the idea might make sense if dead sats are first collected (empty starship?), eventually processed to retrieve materials and electronics and then de-orbited in bulk for the sun to burn.
 
bearnard97 said:
I`ve heard that Space X is gonna make Starlink satellites will be able to lead themself in the atmosphere of Earth when their lifespan is over to burn down there and not to increase the number of space junk
Click to expand...

For low orbits, the operator has to make sure the satellite reenters the atmosphere no more than 25 years after decommissioning. That rule has been in place for several decades now. That can usually be achieved without action (you still get a little bit of atmospheric drag below 1000 km).

The big problems are:
1. satellites that were launched before those rules came into force.
2. satellites that malfunctioned, so they can't be controlled any more
3. intentional debris from ASAT weapons tests.

The Sun is a hard target, requiring thousands of m/s delta-v (i.e. a massive rocket) to reach. Decaying into the atmosphere requires on the order of 10 m/s delta-v instead, and is easy to achieve with the onboard thrusters.
 
How many satellites will be on orbit at any time in the next decades? Launch per year is now averaging the thousand, increasing. A conservative number for the next 25 years would be then 25000 sats parked in orbit. The vast majority of them on low earth orbit. Would that be sustainable? Shouldn't the maximum time on Station be regulated?
 
Last edited:

Similar threads

Please donate to support the forum.

Back
Top Bottom