Am I the only one who thinks this is good news? Not awesome, not even great, but good for development of space technologies.
It's literally another space race if it's true, and we know how the last one turned out.
As they seek to destroy stuff in space (from Earth and from space), they'll want to do it as cheap and fast as possible, and that will be picked up by civilian space companies and enthusiasts in no time.
I highly doubt it will cause any big wars - but if it does, we damn well deserve it.
It was unintentional (and I dislike abuse of the word), but if "we" is a simple majority of the world's population, I suspect "we" would prefer to keep space war mongers away from responsibility.
A space race to Mars is a fun, if monstrously wasteful economically, way for the nations to one-up each other.
A space race to build weapons to destroy each other's satellites is not fun, and not good news. I don't see the higher probability of armed conflict with Russia or China as a good trade-off for development of space technologies. And going to war because "we damn well deserve it" is a terrible reason.
Maybe, but you'd need to make sure when it gets hit by a flake of paint at a relative velocity of 8-10 km/s that it doesn't make any new fragments. Space debris is fast.
And space is very, very big. Similar problems to cleaning up the ocean. Even if someone comes up with an effective solution, now you need to launch a million of them to get the job done.
Maybe small space debris could be cleaned up by vaporizing it or pushing it around with lasers?
Those are good points.
A followup thought I had is that it (the Garbage Collector) doesn't have to clean everything up in predetermined constant time once it's been deployed.
Performance would be sufficient, if, for a given interval of time, it would knock down at least as many pieces of junk, as there were collisions and new launches for the same period, plus some "margin"/"premium" to keep the counter going down.
I always envisioned a sort of huge, sticky balloon. You launch it, and it inflates into a large sphere, covered with balloonlets that each support a pad of debris capture material. It would look like a huge raspberry.
When enough of the balloonlets are destroyed by collisions, you de-orbit the thing.
Obviously, a lot depends on the as-yet-unknown debris capture material. It would have to be very elastic, sticky, and UV-resistant.
If the capture material is sort of a slimy foam that can expand greatly in volume without losing cohesiveness, the inflatable support structure might not even be necessary. You launch the mother slime, then add the foaming agent in orbit. Anything that hits it either sticks to it or slows down while passing through, without generating additional debris.
Or, better yet, actually recycle that junk to build spacecraft and such. One of the biggest expenses of maintaining any sort of orbital infrastructure in the short term is the cost of sending raw material to space, but with all the raw material already floating around in space doing nothing but being a hazard to spacecraft, that could be readily solved.
There are a couple things to consider though - one, it's not just raw material floating around, it's actual debris: a screw, a paint chip, maybe a panel for some sort of satellite, and for awhile there was even a glove[0] floating around in orbit. Even if it were feasible to use some of the debris floating up there, retrieving it would be akin to building a car by walking a few thousand miles from your starting point and then trying to catch bullets that have been fired from a gun.
Any metallic or plastic bits can likely be melted down and turned into new parts. And even totally-unusable stuff - like perhaps that glove - can always be ground up and used as propellant in some sort of crude thruster (perhaps by ionizing the resulting bits of junk and pumping it out an ion engine, or perhaps by vaporizing it into various pressurized gases).
And there are plenty of abandoned satellites up there, too. If a satellite breaks down (often because of the sheer quantity of space junk pelting it every waking moment, by the way), it's not really feasible to go and repair it, so the usual approach is to wait for its orbit to eventually decay (which isn't entirely feasible in higher orbits) while possibly launching a replacement. There are likely whole satellites or significant fragments thereof ready for repurposing.
This isn't to mention the presence of things like launch stages sitting in orbit (at least one Saturn V launch stage, for example, is in a near-Earth heliocentric orbit and is tracked as if it were a near-Earth asteroid; Apollo 10's lunar ascent module is also - as far as we know - intact and in a heliocentric orbit, though its location has been unknown since 1969). That's a lot of stuff that's probably recyclable.
> it would be akin to building a car by walking a few thousand miles from your starting point and then trying to catch bullets that have been fired from a gun
IIRC, thousands (I forget the exact figure, and I'm too lazy to look it up at the moment) of grapefruit-sized-or-larger chunks of space junk are actively tracked on radar by the likes of NASA and USAF (or maybe NORAD; I forgot exactly who manages the data) in order to be able to warn the ISS and satellite operators of possible collisions. The ISS also gets pelted by golf-ball-sized-or-smaller bits of debris regularly enough that all the modules are built with whipple armor designed to withstand such constant pelting.
It's really closer to walking a few thousand miles in a world where all the air molecules are replaced by bullets. The tiny bits can likely be caught pretty easily by setting out a large, flat ablative shield to catch them with. The bigger bits are tracked on radar and can therefore be sought after specifically by a recovery craft.
That's interesting, and I wasn't aware of most of that, aside from the debris tracking by NASA / USAF. I guess I was just hung up on the cost / benefit ratio of trying to catch a small piece of debris, for reasons other than making our orbits safer for future spacecraft.
I honestly think a space race to Mars is a huge waste of time and effort. Literally the only reason to establish a colony on Mars right now is research, and that can be performed cheaper by robots.
I think the Moon would be a much better prospect. Lunar regolith can be refined into silicon, oxygen, iron, alumnium, and other metals. With hydrogen and a few other key metals imported from Earth, the Moon could become the center of space manufacturing for satellites, spacecraft, and other products that require an ultra-clean environment during manufacturing.
If a space war means putting mass into LEO/GEO is much more expensive because of armoring, mining the moon for resources becomes that much more appealing - especially considering it costs 1/20th the fuel to put an object in LEO from the Moon than from the Earth.
Because if they have a Mars facility that can't easily be nuked, they can threaten to nuke everyone on Earth using their terrestrial stockpiles, and you can't threaten them back. MAD breaks down into madness.
Sure, investment in tech yes, but I would be very concerned about the massive increase in "space debris" in our lower orbits if things are getting blown apart. Enough war in space and we will need a clean-up method before people go back.
I couldn't disagree more. There are many parts in the world where people still have to deal with landmines that were laid in conflicts which ended long ago(i.e. decades). It's especially problematic because many of these fields aren't mapped or marked by any means, and kill people who unknowingly wander into them. War in space could mean filling Earth's low orbit with debris that travel in excess of thousands of kilometers per hour.
Going back to the landmine analogy, imagine being unable to get to your local supermarket because two warring nations planted landmines at every possible exit outside of your neighborhood. A war in space would be much worse.
Why use the landmine analogy when you can use the Space Race analogy? We ended up with GPS, high resolution cameras on satellites, the Hubble, and of course, intercontinental ballistic missiles, which have yet to kill anyone, thankfully...
But I agree about the debris - then again, maybe they'll invent something to clear all that crap...
> Why use the landmine analogy when you can use the Space Race analogy?
I was focusing specifically on the "war" part which, to me in part, means targeting enemy assets in space, e.g. artificial satellites for communications and other purposes. If it were a race between nations to accomplish a specific goal, then by all means, let the games begin.
I think the author meant "closer than ever" in terms of the probability of the event of space war. As in, the probability is closer to 1 than it has ever been.
Usually when someone uses the phrase 'closer than ever', they are implying that an uncertain outcome is more likely to occur than it has been in the past, not that a possible future event is temporally closer (which, as you suggest, would be a trivial statement).
We are not 'closer than ever' to nuclear war, for example.
Nuclear for space can go spectacularly well (innovative propulsion, electricity and heat generation) or horrendously bad. Propulsion is the most promising, though, for Moon and hopefully Mars colonies. More Elon Musk need to go mainstream.
A war in space would be utterly disastrous for human civilization - the resulting cascade of orbital debris would confine us to Earth for a long time, not to mention destroying or disabling the satellites on which so much of our infrastructure depends.
I have been involved in a number of informal discussions on this topic, things like the Kessler effect effectively denying access to space is a possibility even without malicious action (all you need is an asteroid to fly close enough to bat some of the geosyncronous satellites into a crossing orbit with the rest of the LEO stuff.
A number of scenarios start with just that, something happens and suddenly the space around the earth is so full of junk flying every which way that a new sort of "debris" belt prevents launching new Geo satellites or even people into orbit.
At which point the country that can build a space "tank" a hardened satellite which is designed to deflect damage from collisions wins.
Alternatively the ways in which things can be de-orbited can be increased. The laser idea has some good press going for it, I am partial to conductive tether tugs, but it is probably not going to be people up there taking out the trash.
And of course if someone does this deliberately how much of the US' military inventory is suddenly worthless? Predator drones, cruise missiles, gps guided bombs, auto-pilot features, iridium sat phones, gps laser designators, lots and lots of stuff. Not the kind of change that leads to extended space use.
I've thought about this a lot after reading some material about satellites and thinking about the consequences.
What do you think would be the best strategy for defending the current fleet? It seems like 3 "tanks" in highly elliptical orbits could provide some defense against space based attacks, but not really against ground-based lasers.
Within the orbital mechanics you can really only put two defenders on station with the satellite (one ahead and one behind in the orbit). Fortunately most of the stuff is in an equatorial orbit rather than a polar orbit so that is probably good enough for most things. One wonders if you could create "chunks" of expanded foam and push it ahead and behind. You want to add enough delta-v to move what ever is threatening you into a lower orbit (assuming from a lower orbit it will de-orbit faster).
Tether tugs basically have a glob of adhesive that works in space on one end, spool out a long conductor and then energize it with a small solar panel, it provides a constant back emf against the earths magnetic field. That slows you down, you orbit lower, and then the atmosphere takes over. Of course vacuum adhesives are quite a challenge.
It boggles my mind that there are so many things we've put in to space that there is a danger of them colliding in to one another on a plane that is larger than the entire earth.
it's not so much that there's a lot of stuff up there, but it's moving around at absolutely incredible velocities, so the territory an individual fragment can cover is continent sized.
I imagine your tanks as a little speck in the center of a 100 meter foam doughnut. but i guess it really depends on what the debris is like. I'd guess most would be with a few hundred m/s, faster would rise and slower would fall, right? Not sure how much kinetic energy could be converted to breaking chemical bonds.
The problem is with debris on different orbits than yours. If you're on an equatorial and there's a debris on an elliptical polar one and you happen to meet near its periapsis, that could easily amount to 10km/s of speed difference. And don't get me started on retrograde orbits.
the faster the object, the more energy it has. How about collecting that energy? Your delta-V is my joules so to speak. The space junk is (and probably will be) mostly metal, and there probably some ways to collect the energy, like magnetic traps, etc... (the idea inspired by my Prius brake regeneration :)
Interesting idea. However, I doubt it can work, because for it to work, you have to be close to the debris. (You're probably facing some kind of inverse-square-law here.) But you don't want to get very close to space debris that can close on you at those kinds of speeds (I believe the GP from me meant 10K km/sec, rather than 10 km/sec.) It's going to be really hard to guarantee a miss and still get close enough to collect energy...
> I believe the GP from me meant 10K km/sec, rather than 10 km/sec.
I meant 10 km/s; LEO orbital velocity is around 7 km/s and in the example I took into account that you can go faster at those altitudes if your orbit is elliptical. Double the velocity if one of the object is orbiting retrograde instead of polar. Adjust accordingly for other relative inclinations. Is there any reason I should be off by 3 orders of magnitude?
Like 'AnimalMuppet explains, the tricky part is to get close and not get hit, given that you have to maintain the speed difference to extract the energy. Also, I don't think the process will be energetically-viable; you still need to get close to orbital velocity yourself to be able to catch the stuff even if you didn't intend for the garbage can to stay in orbit, and if you do want it in orbit, navigating it around will most likely burn orders of magnitude more energy that you'll be able to retrieve.
I agree its an interesting idea, but there are few ways to convert high kinetic energy into something usable. On suggestion was a jello like, self healing sphere of ballistic gel or something, that would convert kinetic energy into heat, and then radiate the heat as a form of thrust. We're talking very inefficient though.
I wonder how the current push towards cubesats and nanosats changes the equation. People seem to seriously think that launching hundreds of satellites in one go, half of which will turn straight from payload to debris, is a good idea.
Another thought - maybe the future is not in satellites, but in aircrafts, like Project Loon's balloons and solar-powered high-altitude drones. Both will be much cheaper to make and launch, could easily take over most of the Earth-related responsibilities of satellites (meteo, agriculture, communications, spying) and offer much more flexibility (you can't exactly tell the satellite to hover or circle over a location for a while, and then circle over another one).
Seems very much like MAD. I would bet there's a 30% chance that the big players have already picked off some of each other's spy satellites, but they're secret, can't admit to their existence, much less their method of demise. ASAT missiles are 30 years old now. Surely there are other systems, ground based lasers or something.
But the big visible satellites? disabling gps, glonass or any of the communication satellites? That's a real bad idea. Messing with those looks a whole lot like starting world war 3.
Presumably, a modern conventional world war scale war would start with cutting the fiber optic cables, and disabling the communication satellites. Step 2, eliminate all of the gps type stuff. Maybe you'd pick off the spy satellites first. Stopping communications and navigation would disrupt economies a whole lot more than tipping your hand about troop locations.
It takes significantly lower levels of tech to destroy satellites than it does to design and launch them.
The big asymmetry lies in the dependency that the US has on both civilian and military satellites. The existing satellite infrastructure will not be retrofitted with armor or other defenses, so the cost of protection is in the trillions of dollars.
Within 10 years all satellites will be armored and look nothing like current-day satellites... or perhaps smaller, more disposable sats will become the norm (like those launched by Planet labs).
Ground-based lasers are capable of emitting pulses of energy sufficient to damage or disable many satellites.
> “We are in the process of messing up space, and most people don’t realize it because we can’t see it the way we can see fish kills, algal blooms, or acid rain,” he says.
Well, if this is what he's comparing space debris to, then we're so screwed. We can't make most people notice or care about fish, acid rain, deforestation, etc. because the consequences are already too abstract - and space trash? That's gonna be an order of magnitude harder.
I wish there was a good way to make people care about things that are actually important; as things are now, the general population pays attention in inverse relation to issue's actual importance.
What makes me the most upset is that these are not governments that are building anti-satellite weapons. These are scientists and engineers. People that know better and yet are building these weapons anyways, handing them to warmongers, all in exchange for some money. Each technologist has a choice whether or not to work on these systems. The answer should always be NO.
> Each technologist has a choice whether or not to work on these systems. The answer should always be NO.
While I agree that in theory this is true I don't think in practice this is always the case. It speaks to a larger morality issue coupled with economic/personal conditions of the professional involved. For example is it moral to develop space weapons if you are sure your enemy is/may be doing the same (see: military industrial complex)? Or what if the professional in question is threatened with career ruin if they don't comply or even have their loved ones threatened?
I'm just trying to say this isn't the black and white issue some people want to make it out to be.
>Each technologist has a choice whether or not to work on these systems. The answer should always be NO.
The answer NO makes sense only when ALL technologists do it. Prisoner dilemma.
Anyway, our technological civilization started when apes learned to use stone and stick as weapons. So, no surprise that most of the technological development is driven by weapons development. After all, Cro-Magnon had bow, and Neanderthal was physically stronger and had more peaceful spirit as result ...
> Each technologist has a choice whether or not to work on these systems. The answer should always be NO.
Technologists is not a politically or economically homogenous group. You can find engineers who would like to work on anti-satellite weapons for all kinds of reasons: economic, political, patriotic, religious, economic or simply for its cool factor. Also, technologists are not universally pacifists or proponents of space exploration or progress in general (even though majority of them may be).
74 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadIt's literally another space race if it's true, and we know how the last one turned out.
As they seek to destroy stuff in space (from Earth and from space), they'll want to do it as cheap and fast as possible, and that will be picked up by civilian space companies and enthusiasts in no time.
I highly doubt it will cause any big wars - but if it does, we damn well deserve it.
A space race to build weapons to destroy each other's satellites is not fun, and not good news. I don't see the higher probability of armed conflict with Russia or China as a good trade-off for development of space technologies. And going to war because "we damn well deserve it" is a terrible reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
And space is very, very big. Similar problems to cleaning up the ocean. Even if someone comes up with an effective solution, now you need to launch a million of them to get the job done.
Maybe small space debris could be cleaned up by vaporizing it or pushing it around with lasers?
Performance would be sufficient, if, for a given interval of time, it would knock down at least as many pieces of junk, as there were collisions and new launches for the same period, plus some "margin"/"premium" to keep the counter going down.
When enough of the balloonlets are destroyed by collisions, you de-orbit the thing.
Obviously, a lot depends on the as-yet-unknown debris capture material. It would have to be very elastic, sticky, and UV-resistant.
If the capture material is sort of a slimy foam that can expand greatly in volume without losing cohesiveness, the inflatable support structure might not even be necessary. You launch the mother slime, then add the foaming agent in orbit. Anything that hits it either sticks to it or slows down while passing through, without generating additional debris.
[0] http://www.wired.com/2009/02/spacestuff/
Not with that attitude it ain't. :)
Any metallic or plastic bits can likely be melted down and turned into new parts. And even totally-unusable stuff - like perhaps that glove - can always be ground up and used as propellant in some sort of crude thruster (perhaps by ionizing the resulting bits of junk and pumping it out an ion engine, or perhaps by vaporizing it into various pressurized gases).
And there are plenty of abandoned satellites up there, too. If a satellite breaks down (often because of the sheer quantity of space junk pelting it every waking moment, by the way), it's not really feasible to go and repair it, so the usual approach is to wait for its orbit to eventually decay (which isn't entirely feasible in higher orbits) while possibly launching a replacement. There are likely whole satellites or significant fragments thereof ready for repurposing.
This isn't to mention the presence of things like launch stages sitting in orbit (at least one Saturn V launch stage, for example, is in a near-Earth heliocentric orbit and is tracked as if it were a near-Earth asteroid; Apollo 10's lunar ascent module is also - as far as we know - intact and in a heliocentric orbit, though its location has been unknown since 1969). That's a lot of stuff that's probably recyclable.
> it would be akin to building a car by walking a few thousand miles from your starting point and then trying to catch bullets that have been fired from a gun
IIRC, thousands (I forget the exact figure, and I'm too lazy to look it up at the moment) of grapefruit-sized-or-larger chunks of space junk are actively tracked on radar by the likes of NASA and USAF (or maybe NORAD; I forgot exactly who manages the data) in order to be able to warn the ISS and satellite operators of possible collisions. The ISS also gets pelted by golf-ball-sized-or-smaller bits of debris regularly enough that all the modules are built with whipple armor designed to withstand such constant pelting.
It's really closer to walking a few thousand miles in a world where all the air molecules are replaced by bullets. The tiny bits can likely be caught pretty easily by setting out a large, flat ablative shield to catch them with. The bigger bits are tracked on radar and can therefore be sought after specifically by a recovery craft.
I think the Moon would be a much better prospect. Lunar regolith can be refined into silicon, oxygen, iron, alumnium, and other metals. With hydrogen and a few other key metals imported from Earth, the Moon could become the center of space manufacturing for satellites, spacecraft, and other products that require an ultra-clean environment during manufacturing.
If a space war means putting mass into LEO/GEO is much more expensive because of armoring, mining the moon for resources becomes that much more appealing - especially considering it costs 1/20th the fuel to put an object in LEO from the Moon than from the Earth.
And I meant if some dumbasses start a war over some spy satellites, there's little hope for the civilization that's been built so far...
Going back to the landmine analogy, imagine being unable to get to your local supermarket because two warring nations planted landmines at every possible exit outside of your neighborhood. A war in space would be much worse.
But I agree about the debris - then again, maybe they'll invent something to clear all that crap...
I was focusing specifically on the "war" part which, to me in part, means targeting enemy assets in space, e.g. artificial satellites for communications and other purposes. If it were a race between nations to accomplish a specific goal, then by all means, let the games begin.
We won't be going to space to get to the local supermarket, so I am genuinely unsure how your analogy makes any sense.
Someone has stolen "genderless no form factor options" from the populous, and are using them against us all...
There isn't much anyone can do.
:-(
1) http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-15-171554-1
We are not 'closer than ever' to nuclear war, for example.
A recent edition of BBC Horizon highlighted the problems of space junk: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0656dbj
A number of scenarios start with just that, something happens and suddenly the space around the earth is so full of junk flying every which way that a new sort of "debris" belt prevents launching new Geo satellites or even people into orbit.
At which point the country that can build a space "tank" a hardened satellite which is designed to deflect damage from collisions wins.
Alternatively the ways in which things can be de-orbited can be increased. The laser idea has some good press going for it, I am partial to conductive tether tugs, but it is probably not going to be people up there taking out the trash.
And of course if someone does this deliberately how much of the US' military inventory is suddenly worthless? Predator drones, cruise missiles, gps guided bombs, auto-pilot features, iridium sat phones, gps laser designators, lots and lots of stuff. Not the kind of change that leads to extended space use.
What do you think would be the best strategy for defending the current fleet? It seems like 3 "tanks" in highly elliptical orbits could provide some defense against space based attacks, but not really against ground-based lasers.
Tether tugs basically have a glob of adhesive that works in space on one end, spool out a long conductor and then energize it with a small solar panel, it provides a constant back emf against the earths magnetic field. That slows you down, you orbit lower, and then the atmosphere takes over. Of course vacuum adhesives are quite a challenge.
I meant 10 km/s; LEO orbital velocity is around 7 km/s and in the example I took into account that you can go faster at those altitudes if your orbit is elliptical. Double the velocity if one of the object is orbiting retrograde instead of polar. Adjust accordingly for other relative inclinations. Is there any reason I should be off by 3 orders of magnitude?
No. I was - I was thinking km/hr rather than km/sec, and 10 km/hr was clearly far too low. My error.
10K km/sec is 0.03c. It's not a velocity that will remain in earth orbit.
3.336×10^-5
1000km/s is enough to escape the galaxy (in fact, about 2 times more than needed. it's ridiculously fast.) 0.03c is 8990 km/s.
Another thought - maybe the future is not in satellites, but in aircrafts, like Project Loon's balloons and solar-powered high-altitude drones. Both will be much cheaper to make and launch, could easily take over most of the Earth-related responsibilities of satellites (meteo, agriculture, communications, spying) and offer much more flexibility (you can't exactly tell the satellite to hover or circle over a location for a while, and then circle over another one).
But the big visible satellites? disabling gps, glonass or any of the communication satellites? That's a real bad idea. Messing with those looks a whole lot like starting world war 3.
Presumably, a modern conventional world war scale war would start with cutting the fiber optic cables, and disabling the communication satellites. Step 2, eliminate all of the gps type stuff. Maybe you'd pick off the spy satellites first. Stopping communications and navigation would disrupt economies a whole lot more than tipping your hand about troop locations.
The big asymmetry lies in the dependency that the US has on both civilian and military satellites. The existing satellite infrastructure will not be retrofitted with armor or other defenses, so the cost of protection is in the trillions of dollars.
Within 10 years all satellites will be armored and look nothing like current-day satellites... or perhaps smaller, more disposable sats will become the norm (like those launched by Planet labs).
Ground-based lasers are capable of emitting pulses of energy sufficient to damage or disable many satellites.
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1649.html
Fiction becomes reality.
Well, if this is what he's comparing space debris to, then we're so screwed. We can't make most people notice or care about fish, acid rain, deforestation, etc. because the consequences are already too abstract - and space trash? That's gonna be an order of magnitude harder.
I wish there was a good way to make people care about things that are actually important; as things are now, the general population pays attention in inverse relation to issue's actual importance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Babylon
While I agree that in theory this is true I don't think in practice this is always the case. It speaks to a larger morality issue coupled with economic/personal conditions of the professional involved. For example is it moral to develop space weapons if you are sure your enemy is/may be doing the same (see: military industrial complex)? Or what if the professional in question is threatened with career ruin if they don't comply or even have their loved ones threatened?
I'm just trying to say this isn't the black and white issue some people want to make it out to be.
The answer NO makes sense only when ALL technologists do it. Prisoner dilemma.
Anyway, our technological civilization started when apes learned to use stone and stick as weapons. So, no surprise that most of the technological development is driven by weapons development. After all, Cro-Magnon had bow, and Neanderthal was physically stronger and had more peaceful spirit as result ...
Technologists is not a politically or economically homogenous group. You can find engineers who would like to work on anti-satellite weapons for all kinds of reasons: economic, political, patriotic, religious, economic or simply for its cool factor. Also, technologists are not universally pacifists or proponents of space exploration or progress in general (even though majority of them may be).
Thank you for putting it this way. People come up with all kinds of rationalizations to work on such things in exchange for a little more money.
They need to be shamed.