Debris removal is less an R&D problem than a market problem. The highest impact thing a government can do is put a price on debris removal, and then guarantee that price for existing debris for an extended period of time.
Flight volume is an easily solved problem with the near future market, and that cost is the main reason junk isn't deorbited already.
Objects in space are merticuously tracked. It would be very hard to get away with something like that, and none of the relevant fliers would dare bet their business on trying.
I meant it bit of a tongue-in-cheek way, but for the sake of argument it wouldn't be hard for a clean up mission to have an "accident" and actually generate more debris for later missions to clean up. And it might not even be malicious, just side effect of more pressure to launch something to do the clean ups.
To be clear, I'm not saying OP is wrong, it would probably work out fine. But this seems like a fun angle to consider.
I can't find xboneslife's comment to reply to, so replying here
> You can just put the same price on debris addition.
Indeed. A small tax that matches the cost of debris capture payment + minor administrative overhead would encourage the outcome that junk isn't thrown into unrecoverable orbit.
The tax wouldn't be small. I do agree, though, the only real answer is to charge for putting things in orbit and refund it to whoever deorbits the thing.
A fee per kilogram placed in orbit, refundable if the entire mass is deorbited as a single object, seems like a reasonable starting point.
If that fee is the entire estimated near-term cost to recover the object, it would also create incentives for entities putting large amounts of mass in orbit to focus on improved strategies for removal: if removal becomes lower cost than the fee, it's worth paying someone to recover your debris if a satellite fails in order to recover the fee.
This would have to work across borders or else you'd create a downward force on the space industry in your nation. If the US had a tax to launch stuff, then suddenly Russia has a competitive advantage.
I can't find out what the cost to govt is in order to launch something into space, but you do need govt permission to launch since all space objects must belong to a specific country.
The govt can include the cleanup cost as part of the launch licensing cost.
Mike Judge also thought it was fun to run a Simpsons episode featuring Donald Trump getting elected to the presidency. So… definitely worth thinking through.
Pretty sure China would prefer to make rockets that don't explode at all. But if you insist, my friend Sergey knows a guy that might have an overstock of aging launchers...
I feel like the perverse incentive here (if we can call it that) might be more along the lines of all companies becoming more careless w.r.t. the creation of space debris (because it'll be cleaned up by "someone" eventually, kind of like how it's common to consume plastic with the thought that it'll get recycled), rather than any particular entity doing this with a profit motive.
How are you going to get e.g. the Chinese Government to pay? (1)
And if you can get them to agree to pay, who is a suitable body that they can be convinced to pay it _to_ ? I'm pretty sure that any arm of the US government, or US parastatal body, would not be acceptable. It's an international governance problem.
> How are you going to get e.g. the Chinese Government to pay?
Seize assets of nation-state entities (or entities controlled by the Chinese state) like airplanes and ships or bank funds, release them after payment.
Yes of course. We did that over a decade ago in Germany - a construction company was owed 30 million euros from the government of Thailand, so our police seized the airplane of the king at the Munich airport, and in 2005 we did the same for a collection of debt against Lebanon [1].
So to be clear, you would say that China's standing and general compliance to perceived hostile action against it is the same as Lebanon or Thailand? IMHO, that is very naïve.
That opinion is consistent with the link that I posted - smashing a satellite into debris for kicks. But it does seem to be inconsistent with taking your above "seize assets" suggestions seriously.
All well and good, until someone decides to lob a missile at a satellite and make a little Kessler syndrome, or launch missions with no reentry plans from a nation that hasn't signed your treaty.
I don't think it's a bad idea to be proactive about space cleanup, rather than reactive.
The problem is partially legal. Many of these objects have complex ownership. The US government should have some hesitation about simply starting putting a price on the destruction of things that might be owned by particular companies or countries.
I think what the government should do is invest in better tracking primarily. Then make a stronger law requiring sat makers to have a plan to remove debris also on failure.
Then they can clean up their own old junk and put a price on that.
> Debris removal is less an R&D problem than a market problem.
How did you come to this conclusion? Not that I know much about it, but I'm skeptical we can actually do orbital debris removal at a scale that meets the scale of the problem. AFAIK proof od concept demonstrations so far have been rather feeble. Seems hard.
The engineering challenges are hard, probably not impossible. There is already serious research in to this by Astroscale and others. What is impossible though, is to launch a constellation of things to deorbit other things without a ton of money. Someone has to be willing to provide that money.
If you want to remove a small piece of debris and you can build a fairly large sat specifically for that piece of debris, its not difficult but not crazy hard. Most of the required hardware is available.
What is really hard is making it cheap, light and versatile thing.
Yeah of course, de-orbiting or grave yarding a single piece of debris is doable for a few million dollars right now, but we are talking about a large fraction of 900K+ pieces. That's the really hard part.
Much like surface trash cleanup, the perfect is the enemy of the good. The goal is "less junk on the streets", not necessarily "absolutely squeaky-clean streets". First get rid of that rusty fridge that someone dumped in the woods before we deal with all the cigarette butts.
Let's focus on the more problematic, larger objects first, that are at risk of creating much more debris if hit.
What's the minimum size at which debris is dangerous?
Since everything is moving at orbital speeds, and generally at an angle to each other, i understood even small fragments move at a few km/sec relative to what they hit, so don't need to be particularly large.
True, but I imagine that, the smaller the object, the smaller the chance that it will be hit/it will hit something, and a smaller amount of fragments that the hit can generate.
If you ask the person who put the satellite up to pay, you have a problem that that company might be bankrupt/gone in 50 years when their satellite becomes junk.
If you make them put up insurance or a bond, it's a massive cash cost to have a $1B bond for 50 years...
And you would be needing $1B or more, because the worse case is a satellite gets smashed into 100,000 pieces, and you're going to need a lot of debris collection missions to get rid of them all...
> you would be needing $1B or more, because the worse case is a satellite gets smashed into 100,000 pieces
You bond for the average cost and then use liability for edge cases. We don’t require every consumer product to be bonded for the edge case that it’s cancerous.
Thinking ahead, we’ve learned from projects like skyscrapers to engineer destructability into projects, and from abandoned infrastructure like windmills to require the builder to post bonds to pay for abatement and removal. Why aren’t we doing this in space?
We regulate the heck out of launches; why not require orbital devices to have a built in deorbit mechanism (or “move to a parking orbit mechanism” for non-LEO), and/or require posting a bond to pay for someone to go clean up your mess?
We do require sattalites to have an end of life plan, that either safely deorbits, or moves to a graveyard orbit. The Outer Space Treaty is a bit vague on this point, but in practice space fairing nations do require that their own launches gave an EOL plan.
Most space junk is not a full device, but debris from one, which is much harder to clean up and impossible to completely prevent.
This is also why there is an occasional international incident when a country decides to test out its ability to destroy sattalite.
The speeds involved make ever piece a bullet and it is impossible to fully plan for that contingency. The best option is to aim it to the atmosphere or a debris zone. Especially when something unexpected happens.
They already do most of this for US and space partners, but it also adds significantly to weight to do it for every single small piece and parts naturally fall off.
This seems like a good time to remind people that in 1961, the US through Project West Ford, launched billions of small copper wires into orbit in an effort to provide global radio communications [1].
I guess I'll take this time to shill for the mid-'00s TV show Planetes, which is basically about exactly this; cleaning up orbital debris in order to maintain safe space travel.
I've been meaning to watch Planetes, because Vinland Saga is honestly mind-blowing. One of the best storytelling in Anime of all time, second only to Cowboy Bebop of course.
The story is slightly different in the Planetes anime but reputedly good, I've only read the manga for that one. The manga collection for Planetes is relatively short, only a single large book versus the many volumes of Vinland Saga.
There’s also an interesting kurzgesagt video that says that if we reach some threshold we’ll never be able to launch anything in space anymore. Quite depressing :(
"""
The Kessler syndrome (also called the Kessler effect,[1][2] collisional cascading, or ablation cascade), proposed by NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler in 1978, is a scenario in which the density of objects in low Earth orbit (LEO) due to space pollution is high enough that collisions between objects could cause a cascade in which each collision generates space debris that increases the likelihood of further collisions.[3] In 2009 Kessler wrote that modeling results had concluded that the debris environment was already unstable, "such that any attempt to achieve a growth-free small debris environment by eliminating sources of past debris will likely fail because fragments from future collisions will be generated faster than atmospheric drag will remove them".[4] One implication is that the distribution of debris in orbit could render space activities and the use of satellites in specific orbital ranges difficult for many generations.[3]
""" -- Summary from Wikipedia's article.
Also from that article "One technology proposed to help deal with fragments from 1 to 10 cm (1⁄2 to 4 in) in size is the laser broom, a proposed multimegawatt land-based laser that could deorbit debris: the side of the debris hit by the laser would ablate and create a thrust that would change the eccentricity of the remains of the fragment until it would re-enter and be destroyed harmlessly.[32]"
A thought likely independently re-invented by anyone (myself included) who's seen science fiction where solar sail mirrors are used as parabolic solar reflectors often used by super villains.
>There’s also an interesting kurzgesagt video that says that if we reach some threshold we’ll never be able to launch anything in space anymore.
That's called Kessler Syndrome, but it's not as bad as you portray. It doesn't mean we'll never be able to launch anything any more; it just means we won't be able to launch anything for a few centuries or so. All orbital debris will eventually fall into the atmosphere and burn up, so we just have to wait.
Anyone remember the Hanna Barbera cartoon where Yogi and the gang are trying to find the "perfect place" free of pollution? They eventually end up in space, thinking this must be it, only to see it becoming more cluttered and full of junk. They finally decide to go back home and clean it up, because they won't find the perfect place, they have to make it.
Would anyone working in this space mind sharing their thoughts on the most promising methods for removing the small space debris? I work with radar and the debris problem is increasingly a large part of that work. I've heard various solutions suggested like physically impacting each piece, disintegrating them with lasers, creating pockets of atmosphere to slow them down, but nobody sounds convinced that any of these are good practical solutions.
You can't reasonably measure this by the kg. Pulling down a single 10000 kg satellite is fairly cheap; all you need to do is latch onto it and deorbit. This can be done with a single vehicle. Deorbiting 10k 1 kg fragments would be vastly more expensive. 1 million 10 gram fragments would be more expensive still.
There are techniques with which deorbiting 1 million 10 gram fragments might end up being quite cheap. E.g. the use of a single laser-equipped base that selectively hits the debris to cause localized evaporation and thrust, disrupting their trajectory.
If a tiny bit of undirected evaporation is enough to push the fragment to deorbit, it's already so low that it would have deorbited on its own very soon anyway.
In that case evaporating it completely would be a better option, as a gas it's harmless
>You can't reasonably measure this by the kg. Pulling down a single 10000 kg satellite is fairly cheap
On the contrary, this seems reasonable. It (correctly) identifies that deorbiting intact satellites before they fragment is overwhelmingly the cost-optimal strategy.
In the long-run, it's really total mass in a given orbit that's the dominant variable which separates runaway Kessler syndrome from stability. Therefore, a per-kilogram "bounty" (with a sliding scale depending on orbit) wouldn't be a bad incentive model.
I've heard about space drives which leverage a tether and an electrical wire which allows you to trade electricity for momentum by reacting against Earth's magnetic field. I wonder if a space tug could use this effect and maneuver indefinitely. Grab a dead satellite, spin up to speed using magneto drive, let go and simultaneously yeet the junk retrograde and boost its own orbit.
1) Debris is dangerous to orbiting objects. So the value of bringing it down is more valuable than the per kilogram value. It is highly dependent upon potential damage it can do. Space debris is already causing damage to satellites and the ISS. As we place more objects in space this danger increase super-linearly.
2) If you can decommission debris you can decommission satellites. This has obvious military applications. In fact to properly do this you actually have to get pretty close to other satellites without colliding. By solving the debris problem you're solving a lot of the same problems you need for these military applications.
So both incentives are valued far greater than the per-mass value of the trash.
> "If you can decommission debris you can decommission satellites. This has obvious military applications. In fact to properly do this you actually have to get pretty close to other satellites without colliding. By solving the debris problem you're solving a lot of the same problems you need for these military applications."
I'm not sure that's entirely true. Having a collector satellite match orbit with the debris and grab is one way to get rid of it, but I suspect in most cases it's good enough to just position a satellite with, say, a big steel plate in a path that intersects the debris' path and deflect it at the right angle so it returns to Earth. (If you're really clever you might use the impacts to deflect the interceptor satellite into roughly the right orbit to intercept the next piece of debris.)
There might also be ways to "catch" debris with moderately high relative velocity with the collector satellite. I imagine there's limits to the size of thing you can capture that way and the maximum relative velocity if you want to be pretty sure you can catch it without creating more debris.
Maybe the least sophisticated way to deorbit debris would be to just have an object with relatively low mass but very high surface area (e.g. an artificial "asteroid" made of aerogel) in an orbit that gives it the greatest probability of hitting any average piece of space junk, and then you wait for things to hit it by chance. The things that hit it lose momentum and hopefully fall back to Earth.
The value will be based on the value of the reduced risk of damage/loss from orbital debris and reduced cost from orbital adjustments to avoid debris (which uses fuel or mass which reduces the lifespan of the satellite). Once we end up with 100k or more LEO satellites it'll be very valuable to reduce the amount of debris at those altitudes.
Many countries can launch satellites - the debris could be from anyone. We should all clean it up together. The USA is the richest and can afford to do it, but it would be more appropriate for this type of thing to be a joint mission.
Debris can be caused by defunct companies that put sats up when this all wasn't a concern.
Also, deorbiting a sat at end of life is one thing, but deorbiting debris from an accidental collision (or an intentional one, just not intended by the sat's owner!) is a completely different thing. Companies do plan for end of life sat deorbiting, but it's hard to ask them to plan for unintentional collision debris deorbiting.
Paying for debris cleanup could be a thing that new sat deployment could be required to have covered, but without first knowing the cost of debris cleanup, it's hard to charge enough. Debris cleanup has never been done, so we don't know the cost of it! Also, if the government were the escrow agent, you know the money would just be spent, so the escrow would have to be a private entity.
Lastly, a lot of debris in orbit is due to anti-sat missile testing by nation states, so you're really asking them to clean up their debris.
> Debris can be caused by defunct companies that put sats up when this all wasn't a concern.
I think the point is that it was always a concern. It's never not been a problem to leave your trash for someone else to clean up. A person standing in a pristine forest is still wrong to throw their trash on the ground and walk away even though it doesn't immediately turn the forest into a toxic cleanup site, and it would be hard for the litterbug to guess at the costs of paying someone to go into the forest to clean up that mess in the future.
It was never acceptable for companies to throw their junk into orbit without having a plan in place to remove it, they just did it anyway because no one was willing to force them to be responsible.
Now we've reached a point where it's time to start forcing people to be responsible for their trash, but that doesn't mean the people who have been littering and brought us to this point were not wrong to do it or that it wasn't wrong for our world's governments to allow it to happen. It was wrong. We knew better, people have been warning us about the possible dangers since at least the 80s and NORAD has been keeping track of space junk since the 1950s!
I think it's perfectly reasonable to point out that, once again, we failed to hold governments and corporations accountable for trashing the environment and now it's predictably come back to bite us collectively in the ass, yet there's not been much talk about making those directly responsible for the mess pay for what they've done and companies today are continuing to act as they always have done.
While it was always a concern, it was not a practical concern.
It would not be reasonable to require an 1970s satellite launch to be able to clear out the debris if the satellite exploded after a collision, because that's something we aren't able to do even now, 50 years later (note that the proposal is for 'thinning out', not clearing it). So obviously it was acceptable for companies to throw their junk without having a plan in to place to remove the debris after an accident - they are required to have a plan to deorbit after a normal operation, since that is actually a reasonably practical requirement.
Stating that this is unacceptable would mean that essentially no satellite launches would happen, and so the society chose to explicitly accept launches without a responsibility for clearing out the debris.
For the most part they already do what you suggest.
Companies are required to have plans for save disposal. The problem is currently if you have a total failure, you are not required to pay for removal. This could be added as a law and then it would just be part of the insurance package.
Also, most actual space junk in LEO are government sats or parts of rockets that launched government sats.
Commercial stuff is mostly in GEO and there you also have a disposal problem but its quite a different problem then LEO.
> Space companies pay a fee per launch. Amount gets pooled.
This seems to be a very bad approach. Amount of launch does not have much to do with how much debris exists.
Rather than debris removal there needs to be focus on just not producing more. Put limits on how long a satellite can be in orbit after end of life. The market will figure itself out after that happens.
This is already done, although without significant penalties (and maybe impossible to add them as there is no global government to enforce them). Nonetheless basically all satellites plan to be in a low temporary orbit in the first place, or have plans/margins to either move into a higher parking orbit or deorbit. But things can fail, preventing these actions.
Why don't they introduce a bill to stop deficit spending during inflation and make private companies bear the costs associated with space commercialization?
If it were sufficiently dense to fish, it'd be worth more to collect and keep it in orbit — that junk has a lot of high-grade materials and a lot of already-imparted momentum. Just[] move it all into a few large objects that can be managed as large craft, and the debris problem is solved, and there's a mineable resource already in orbit.
[] "Just" is doing some escape-velocity-class lifting there — all that junk is in such massively different orbital planes and altitudes that silly amounts of ΔV are needed to fetch each one and then to pull it back to dock with the new orbital junkheap.
I suppose the real comparison is [cost of refining material in orbit] - [cost of collecting on orbit (which must be done anyway)] vs [cost of refining it on the surface + launching it into orbit].
It's establishing (assuming it gets passed and signed) the work for a demonstration program on active debris removal from orbit. It's not imposing the US government's will on anyone else.
You could literally say this about anything the government does. If 100% citizen agreement was required for everything, government would do nothing. This is why we’re a republic - you elect your leaders that you best trust to make society-level decisions.
We empowered federal government in Constitution to do a limited list of things, with everything else explicitly reserved to the States and the people. Space Janitor can be put in Constitution via an amendment.
The federal government can do what it likes with the legislative process, as long as it’s not unconstitutional. As this isn’t unconstitutional and is voted in by both houses, it then becomes law.
It seems to me you have some major misunderstandings about how the government works, and misattributing things left and right. The government funds all kinds of things none of which are written in the constitution. That’s the entire point of congress and taxes. None of this has anything to do with abortions and body scanners.
Also, there are no “abortion shops,” and that kind of rhetoric is inflammatory and has no place here on HN.
Unless a lot of people have serious religious objections to janitoring, there's nothing to stop it.
Even if you had standing, what would you sue for? The government is spending its own money on the program. If it didn't spend that money, it would just sit around in the treasury. Not go through some kind of reverse tax process.
> Can federal government force me
Government spending doesn't mandate that you or anyone else has to do anything.
It happens. Sue the government and stop it on Constitutional grounds. Vote in November and maybe change things. Run if you're sufficiently motivated. You also have the option of leaving the country and renouncing your citizenship. Or do like a guy I knew and don't pay taxes, though what happens after that may not be to your liking either (he didn't).
I don't even know what this is supposed to mean. Are you some kind of sovereign citizen? If you don't pay taxes then the USA government isn't spending your tax dollars like you said they were in your first post, is it?
I am not trying to attack the grandparent poster or anything, I seriously think that's what they intended to say. They are basically saying "I only have to pay income tax if I work, and the government cannot force me to work so they can extract tax money from me.".
On an off-hand chance that they indeed just earn money under the table and do not report the income, it was probably not the sharpest idea to admit it on a large-visibility public form.
It works the same way in space as it does in the ocean. You can mess with other people's stuff under the pretext of doing something legitimate, and you might get away with it or you might provoke a conflict.
It depends on who you are, who you're messing with, who your friends and their friends are, whether they stand to lose face or can pretend they didn't notice it, etc. The US once tried to steal the wreck of an entire Soviet nuclear-armed submarine off the bottom of the ocean (and mostly failed.) The Soviet response was a request to stop talking about it, because it wasn't worth a war and Soviet leadership didn't want to explain the incident to their own public.
Depends. If they're building satellites that grapple dead satellites, that can certainly be used to attack active satellites too. But laser brooms wouldn't be effective against anything larger than a few centimeters. A space broom might be a cover for a more powerful directed energy weapon, but not necessarily so.
Anyway, China is already toying around with the first sort, and they didn't ask anybody for permission. Their 'authority' to do it is being a sovereign nation.
The cost to "collect" space junk is astronomical. The issue is relative velocities of their orbits combined with the fact that even LEO has a lot of separation between objects.
It's very similar to the issue of extracting CO2 from the air - once it's in the air, you first have to add the energy of entropy to un-diffuse it and then you need collect it. That entropic energy is ENORMOUS. And you can easily generate more CO2 to create the energy to overcome it than you are extracting because most energy generation is still fossil-fuel sourced.
There's a very similar entropy problem with space junk. The energy requires is far higher.
One reason to rush the colonization of the Moon and Mars is that if/once Earth gets Kessler-ed, they will be the only places that can keep exploring and exploiting space.
For those who don't know what "Kessler-ed" means, from Wikipedia:
The Kessler syndrome (also called the Kessler effect,[1][2] collisional cascading, or ablation cascade), proposed by NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler in 1978, is a scenario in which the density of objects in low Earth orbit (LEO) due to space pollution is high enough that collisions between objects could cause a cascade in which each collision generates space debris that increases the likelihood of further collisions.[3] In 2009 Kessler wrote that modeling results had concluded that the debris environment was already unstable, "such that any attempt to achieve a growth-free small debris environment by eliminating sources of past debris will likely fail because fragments from future collisions will be generated faster than atmospheric drag will remove them".[4] One implication is that the distribution of debris in orbit could render space activities and the use of satellites in specific orbital ranges difficult for many generations.[3]
Study the issue, publish debris catalog, fund pilot programs to deorbit debris, encourage agencies and other countries to develop standards about debris...
2 ways to reduce orbital debris: get rid of stuff that's already there, and generate less. This law seems to me like it would tackle both.
More stringent deorbiting standards and better methods for satellites to commit sudoku will reduce the amount of satellites that become debris.
But that doesn't change the fact that the majority of debris in orbit today comes from 2 sources: the Chinese ASAT test and leaky Soviet nuclear reactors. The proposed ASAT test ban helps that from being an issue, but you still need a way to clean up the existing debris (other than waiting decades or centuries)
There is a 3rd method already being implemented,[1] though it is enhanced by your second method. If no more satellites were put in orbit, eventually there would be no satellites (or space junk) in orbit.
How about 150 years? Because due to orbital decay, that is about how long it would take for everything to fall out of orbit. If there is a Kessler Syndrome, depending on its effect at higher orbits, it might take a few hundred more years, but definitely definitely not billions of years.
Commenter is probably referring to this incident[1] where a sodium-cooled nuclear reactor on a Soviet satellite ended up spraying a bunch of small beads of sodium into Earth orbit. The number and density of the beads makes them a long-lived hazard.
There's a few dozen nuclear powered RORSATS. When their start leaking (due to micrometeorite strikes or just wear & tear), they leak out globs of coolant that coagulate together. Each satellite has a few hundred points of coolant, which can make a LOT of 1cm across globs (or larger globs, or droplets that are too small to detect). I don't have a paper handy, but IIRC these droplets were the #1 source of space junk up until the 2007 antisatellite weapon test
> Other Washington companies like SpaceX, Amazon’s Kuiper Systems, and Stoke Space Technologies are also looking for new ways to reduce debris from accumulating in space in the first place or have been threatened by debris.
Good news! Concurrent efforts can work concurrently! Reducing future debris is already an area of active work.
There have been moves to get nations to sign on to a ban on antisatellite weapons. The largest recent contributions to space debris have been tests of antisatellite weapon systems. So that is at least being attempted, but it is a separate track based mostly on foreign relations.
If you've looked at our environmental efforts over the last 50 years. The trends should be pretty obvious :-)
The scam that is recycling exists as an industry mostly to allay the fear of the populace, not address the issue. It's a nice side benefit that sometimes companies can save on costs for certain products.
Yes. OTOH, I've seen New York Times editorials warning that the Democrats will likely lose control of Congress in a few months, because they've been too busy with their ideological d*ck-measuring contests, pie-in-the-sky projects, etc. to pay much attention to the "bread and butter" problems causing daily misery for millions of their potential voters. And a whole lotta those folks are likely to return the "ignore your needs" favor on election day.
Government problem-solving rule #1: Any 5-year-old can recite "my government will solve..." slogans. Actually doing stuff requires that you actually control the government.
Flight volume is an easily solved problem with the near future market, and that cost is the main reason junk isn't deorbited already.