Posted by Shawn Kelly on
URL: https://www.shado-forum.com/No-wonder-it-costs-so-much-to-remove-space-junk-tp1495553p1495555.html

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: