Posted on 05/10/2014 6:31:17 AM PDT by rktman
While the plot of the hit Hollywood film "Gravity" is fictional, the United States must bolster efforts to address the alarming amount of space junk surrounding Earth, or risk potentially catastrophic collisions in orbit, lawmakers said today (May 9). Such real-life accidents could resemble the horrifying destruction depicted in the movie, they said.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
99.9% of all the stuff in orbit would burn up on re-entry.
This is just alarmism and chicken little talk.
Fifty foot holes with trampolines. Isn’t that the new plan?
It must be the fear of that .1% smacking their house that they are really scared about. See maps at link:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=40173
A cost effective idea I like is nicknamed “a big ball of goo”. A satellite is launched, and once in orbit its protective shell is discarded. The satellite then projects telescoping tubes. The end of each tube is attached to a large “tent”, so as the tubes extend, the tent expands to become an irregular “big ball”.
An inert gas is pumped into the vacuum within the tent, which warms in sunlight, then a high expansion polymer foam is sprayed into the tent. When warmed by the Sun it is a sticky goo, and shaded by the Earth it is hard but flexible.
After that, the idea is to either collide the ball of goo with space junk, or for the space junk to collide with it. That it punches holes in the tent does not matter. And though its inertia will destabilize the orbit of the satellite, it can be adjusted by pumping inert gas through some of the tubes.
After colliding with perhaps tons of debris, its orbit is decayed so that it all burns up in the atmosphere.
‘Simple. We just launch a couple of space shuttles and tow big nets behind them.”
Right, and how do they deal with all of the air resistance? The nets will pull the Shuttles straight down.
~99.9% of all the stuff in orbit would burn up on re-entry.
This is just alarmism and chicken little talk~
So good that all the REAL problems are long solved.
Now we have so much time and resources to deal with this problem and don’t foget about Globull Warming....
LOL! Deploy the nets AFTER they reach orbit. Oh, wait. We don’t do that anymore anyway. I’m thinking the Smithsonian ain’t giving hers up anyway. Or LA or the one at the visitors center at KSC either. Not to mention, the infrastructure has been rendered useless already. Now, where’s my hard hat?
Attain orbit, then deploy nets.
I wasn’t even thinking that...but yea, those nets would have to deal with some pretty violent heat from the engines at launch. LOL.
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - Chapter 8
Even that miniscule portion of space inside the orbits of Geostationary satellites down to Low Earth Orbit is a volume on the order of 100 Trillion cubic miles.
Give the job to Congress, the Treasury or Obama'a Budget gurus, they think nothing of dealing with Trillions of this or that.
"Oh My God....They Killed Kenny"
I can see it now. The BSM* will get funded to address the issue.
*Bureau of Space Management
“the United States must bolster efforts to address the alarming amount of space junk surrounding Earth, or risk potentially catastrophic collisions in orbit”
This is not news. That risk has been there for a long time already.
*Bureau of Space Management
The project will be halted until an Environmental Impact Study is done concerning the Endangered Flop-Eared Space Tortoise.
They just figured that out huh? We’ve only known there’s a dangerous quantity of man dropped crap out there for 20 years, maybe more. But somebody makes a movie and suddenly the government listens.
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