No wonder it costs so much to remove space junk

There's a story out today about a satellite that is coming back to
Earth, possibly on Sunday. Here's an interesting piece of the story:

---
Some estimates on the amount of loose space junk -- debris from space
and satellite operations -- exceed 100,000 pieces near Earth or
orbiting the planet.

---

Now we know why Henderson was so worried about the budget. That's a
LOT of things to go after one piece at a time.

On a serious note, can you imagine how complex it is to plot an orbit
so you don't hit one of these things at a zillion miles an hour???

Bill

"bill_cotter" wrote:

>
> Now we know why Henderson was so worried about the budget. That's a
> LOT of things to go after one piece at a time.
>


Can you imagine how smug he would have been if an incoming UFO
had crashed into a bit of space debris? :)

It's a shame they turned Henderson into such a turd though. That one lost
vehicle probably cost as much as the clean-up program Straker wanted, (even
if it was only indirectly destroyed using the junk). Even a tight-wad,
bean counting politico (like Henderson became) should've see that before
the loss.

I think it would have been more fun to have written Henderson to be more
like 'Q' in the bond films. Always showing up with more cool hardware the
research groups of SHADO built, we could have had a blast with that, and it
would'a kept the model makers real busy too. (...as well as the added
"Moychandoyzing" opportunities and don't forget Angelo re-collecting them
all now!)

{{They had the right idea, space junk is an increasingly real problem but
they definitely had the wrong solution. You know what you would get if you
blew a piece of space junk to bits.... 200-million bits of space junk all
traveling at orbital velocities (10,000+ miles/hr). Yikes!!! Something
the size of a marble could seriously damage or even destroy the ISS at
those energies, right now. A tiny flake of paint hit the US space shuttle
in the windscreen and left a 1 inch crater in it. They almost lost the
vehicle to a flake of paint off some old booster! --That's another reason
that ol' Ronald Reagan's Extra-Stupid "Star Wars" space missile defense
thingy was dumped. If it had worked and was used, it would have
contaminated earth orbit with so much debris that we wouldn't be able to go
back into space for 100 years (really) until the bits' orbits decayed and
enough reentered for it to be safe.}}

It would have been far better to attach a limpet booster rather than a
limpet mine to the space junk then launch it out towards the incoming UFOs,
let it get out quite away, *then* blow it up. Something more like the
device the aliens used but with a bomb like ours maybe.

See how well the green dudes can duck&weave at Sol 8! Alien freestyle
slalom. <G> Moonbase can keep score.

S.K.

--- In SHADO@y..., James Gibbon <james.gibbon@v...> wrote:

>You know what you would get if you blew a piece of space junk to bits....200
>million bits of space junk all traveling at orbital
velocities(10,000+miles/hr).

Yes, exactly. That why I always get amused at these movies that have some
giant metor heading for Earth and they want to blow it up. Just make things
worse, with a lot of smaller but still deadly metors coming down. Anyone
ever think of just attaching a rocket to it and firing it just enough to
change it course.

James K.


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

[hidden email] wrote:

> Yes, exactly. That why I always get amused at these movies that have some
> giant metor heading for Earth and they want to blow it up. Just make things
> worse, with a lot of smaller but still deadly metors coming down.

But hopefully if small enough, most might burn up in the atmos.
Otherwise, still less dramatic than a huge meteor smacking into the
side of the Earth I reckon.

> Anyone ever think of just attaching a rocket to it and firing it
> just enough to change it course.

Sounds tricky!

James