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93 points cratermoon | 20 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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mapt ◴[] No.42198516[source]
The current trajectory is that SpaceX proved the commercial and military viability of an LEO megaconstellation, repeatedly lowering their target altitudes and raising their satellite count because of debris and cell size concerns...

And now the rest of the world is trying to catch up in a sort of arms race, and not taking any care about debris concerns. The most tempting orbits are the ones in upper LEO that permit them to launch fewer satellites.

SpaceX are going to end up well under 500km (orbital lifespan: a decade) before things are finished, and they switched to very low orbit staging with SEP spiral out to reach final orbit a ways back.

China's newest constellation Thousand Sails is at an altitude of 800km (orbital lifespan: thousands of years), with a thousand satellites in the works over the next year or so and 14,000 planned, and they're launching them using chemical upper stages designed to explode into a thousand pieces at the target altitude. This is sufficient for Kessler Syndrome all on its own, without counting interactions with anything else up there. A catastropic debris cascade at 800km percolates down to lower altitudes over time and impacts.

We need viable treaties limiting development beyond 400 or 500km and we need them ten years ago.

I don't know how to sell the urgency of this predicament. You can have as many satellites as you want, a million uncoordinated bodies, at 400km because direct collision potential scales with (satellite count / orbital lifespan) ^2 . At 1000km, satellites decay so slowly we are already too crowded; we have already overused the space. We are speed-running the end of the space age and we are doing it to save a small number of dollars and to avoid a small amount of diplomacy.

This is not something we get a do-over on. There is no practical way to collect ton-scale debris at present, no way to track kilogram-scale debris, no practical way to shield pressure vessels against gram-scale debris, and even milligram-scale debris can hit with the force of a bullet. After collisions start occurring at a rapid clip, the mass of potential impactors quickly forms a long tailed lognormal distribution that denies us space for centuries.

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1. ryankshaw ◴[] No.42199151[source]
Is Kessler syndrome the Great Filter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter)?

As in, is it the thing that makes it so no one else has broken out of their planet to come visit us?

I could totally see it being the case that as soon as a civilization gets good enough at putting stuff into space, they start putting a lot of stuff into space and then things start crashing into each other to the point that they can’t ever launch any more things into space and become stuck. Trapped by the artifacts of their own progress

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2. ljsprague ◴[] No.42199282[source]
I would guess that it would still be possible to send things beyond earth's orbit with only a low probability of collision with debris but perhaps I'm wrong.
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3. to11mtm ◴[] No.42199339[source]
"Low" is tough to say until someone does some proper sort of 'true mapping' of space debris in the range somehow. Protection would require a lot of complexity and cost due to the need for shielding and the delta-v to move it up there.
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4. JumpCrisscross ◴[] No.42199554{3}[source]
> until someone does some proper sort of 'true mapping' of space debris in the range somehow

You look at which satellites poofed and then figure out the maximum extent their debris could have drifted.

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5. 0x1ceb00da ◴[] No.42199606[source]
Every launch failure will result in more debris and even lower probability of a successful future launch.
6. mapt ◴[] No.42199974{4}[source]
That works a little bit when we're talking about one satellite poofing in a year based on a collision with another satellite, and not at all when we're talking about thousands of events a year, many of which are satellite-debris collisions too small to track (you only get one orbital vector), or between pieces of debris.

Every collision generates hundreds, maybe thousands of pieces of debris, only the largest of which are trackable.

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7. vlovich123 ◴[] No.42200421{3}[source]
Rather than protection on each rocket, couldn't you just send a bunch of fortified rockets that absorb the debris during a collision but don't emit anything. Do that a few times and then all other rockets just reuse the path that was cut?
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8. mapt ◴[] No.42200622{4}[source]
Orbit is not a location. Orbit is a group of velocity-location vectors which form a stable loop around a body, without intersecting that body.

Imagine a bullet circling your head at mach 25. Now imagine a second bullet, circling your head at a slightly different angle, at a slightly different distance from your head. There's a chance that they could collide, and the resulting explosion would leave a great deal of dust... on a mixture of velocities, still circling your head. Now add a third bullet, also on a slightly different vector; Make sure that it doesn't collide with any of that dust!

The actual situation is we aren't dealing with 3 bullets or 100 bullets, we have ~170 million objects orbiting the Earth, and only around 50,000 are large enough to track. They are all moving fast enough in relation to each other that a collision would result in a sizable explosion, not an elastic agglomeration. We have no way of removing them.

The good news is that there is a large volume of space for them to exist in. The bad news is that as we continue to fill it up, odds of collisions increase, and every collision spawns many, many more objects.

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9. vlovich123 ◴[] No.42201029{5}[source]
You’ve explained what Kessler syndrome is but not why my idea doesn’t work.

I’m saying send reinforced rockets through the orbits that absorb the collision instead of generating more dust. That should let you clear a path through all orbits that intersect your path. It’s hard to do and the 3d aspect of it might make it expensive but conceptually it could be a solution. Or use super powerful lasers (potentially mounted on a satellite) to deorbit the dust

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10. lxgr ◴[] No.42201135[source]
I'd consider it much less likely than e.g. nuclear or maybe chemical/biological warfare.

Kessler syndrome (if even achievable with current technology) would be a major bummer for science and the global economy for a couple of decades (no more Starlink, but we still have good old geostationary satellites, so no ships and airplanes would get disconnected as a result), or at worst centuries, but would otherwise not form any threat to civilization, whereas nuclear winter is already very capable of wiping it out.

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11. kmeisthax ◴[] No.42201410[source]
No. The space junk at a given orbit makes it unviable to put more satellites in that orbit, but launching beyond that orbit is still viable.
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12. immibis ◴[] No.42201415{6}[source]
It takes about 90 minutes to complete a low earth orbit. A rocket can't hover in place for 90 minutes at the same altitude, then increase its altitude by its height and repeat. It doesn't have enough fuel for that.
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13. JumpCrisscross ◴[] No.42201551{5}[source]
Not really. There are uncertainty bands. But based on the collision you know which orbits are spoiled for about how long.
14. lmm ◴[] No.42201817{4}[source]
> couldn't you just send a bunch of fortified rockets that absorb the debris during a collision but don't emit anything.

"Just" how? Orbital collisions happen at an average of 10km/s, you're going to make what, some kind of sponge that can get hit by a chunk of satellite going ~8x faster than a bullet and absorb it and slow it to a halt without fragmenting at all? Good luck.

> Do that a few times and then all other rockets just reuse the path that was cut?

Things in orbit are constantly moving, you can't "clear a path" any more than you can, IDK, make a safe route through a forest by walking through it once and moving any bears you encounter a couple of feet.

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15. mapt ◴[] No.42202033{6}[source]
This doesn't work conceptually, but it's hard to explain without attaining a KSP baseline of understanding. https://xkcd.com/1356

"Clearing a path" is something you can do with a bulldozer through a traffic jam, but imagine clearing a path through a belt road by driving through the flow of moving traffic sideways at speed. Ultimately you can't hit every car in the outer lane with just one bulldozer, and the cars will close in and fill gaps because they're moving at slightly different speeds.

The easy elastic collisions you're imagining also just can't occur at these relative velocities. When something hits it looks more like an explosion than a "catch". If you shoot a local stone monument with high explosive artillery shells what happens? Does it reduce the number of things flying through the air or increase it?

16. RHSman2 ◴[] No.42202401{5}[source]
I love this retort. Made my day.
17. fragmede ◴[] No.42202486[source]
> if even achievable with current technology

Launching a nail bomb into orbit would've been possible as soon as we were able to get into space, the only question is motivation. A terrorist state, say North Korea, threaten the rest of the planet and demand concessions once they're able to get any significant mass into orbit.

18. vlovich123 ◴[] No.42202626{7}[source]
Go the other way. Attain maximum altitude and then descend slowly. You don’t need to do this with just one rocket. This would be a clearing exercise composed of multiple rockets.
19. throwaway888889 ◴[] No.42202700[source]
How can you get past that orbit if there is all this junk destroying your rockets????
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20. Retric ◴[] No.42202798{3}[source]
Ideally a satellite is in a given orbit for years. If junk is destroying it in weeks or even months you’ve got a massive issue.

However a rocket is spending in a seconds in that same orbit. Thus a rocket passing through may only have say 1:10,000 odds of a collision on its way to mars while satellites are getting shredded.