“with the current failure rate there is some risk involved with the shear amount of space debris finding its way into low orbit and traveling at thousands of miles an hour and creating a very risky space two or three hundred mile above the earth that could impede future projects and make them risky for decades to come.”
The space junk problem is a real threat to future space exploration. I hope we have some great minds thinking of ways to bring it back to Earth (huge magnets of some sort? I don’t know. I’m not a scientist/physicist), or blast it out to space farther.
But I hope we have our best and brightest working on it. I’m sure Trump came across the issue while formulating the Space Force; perhaps that is one of its mandates.
Did Biden cancel the Space Force?
Funny how our best modern presidents are thinking ahead, in space. Reagan had the missile defense program, condescendingly referred to as “Star Wars,” and Trump had the Space Force. You know he was right; China wants to be there, so does Russia, so we’ve got to get there first.
What did Trump get for his forward thinking? Mocked by the MSM and a funny show, “Space Force,” that depicts the head of the agency, played by Steve Carell, as a bumbling moron. He usually gets the job done, but just barely. It’s more a matter of luck than competence.
Biden’s presidency is the same, except Slow Joe has run out of luck and he never had competence.
There is currently no good way to trap and collect metal and composite materials circling the globe at many thousands of miles per hour, much faster than bullets or shrapnel. And given that above the atmosphere there is essentially no friction they just keep going round and round and will continue to do so. Intact modern satellites have systems to alter their course to enter the atmosphere so that they will burn up, but on the failed satellites these systems typically do not.
That is why SpaceX, the darling of many here but the current source of more dangerous space debris than all others combined has been raising a lot of red flags especially with our foreign partners. I am no fan of Bezos but he is just the latest target of Musk's ire. The FAA, NASA, FCC, OSHA and other regulatory agencies have been more frequent recipients. I admire Elon Musk a great deal but he has a long history of belittling any agency or individual attempting to rein in his sometimes ill-advised efforts.