Removing Orbital Debris with Lasers · HackerPapers discussions

Removing Orbital Debris with Lasers — mentioned by PaulHoule

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 13:28:16 GMT

It is not always cheap to change orbit around Earth, the old Heinlein quote: "If you can get your ship into orbit, you're halfway to anywhere." is mostly wrong. If you wanted to send up a satellite to pick up little bits of trash and bring them to one place for processing you would have to use fuel to maneuver from one to another: it is cheap to change the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_anomaly but other orbit changes in LEO can be about as expensive as launching a rocket up from Earth. There is no point, for instance, in sending a cargo to the space station and then launching it in a…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Removing Orbital Debris with Lasers — mentioned by hwbehrens

Thu, 20 Aug 2020 17:32:56 GMT

Obviously the best way to avoid Kessler syndrome is to prevent it from occurring in the first place, but given the widespread short-termism everywhere these days, that seems naïve. Are laser brooms the current state of the art when it comes to deorbiting? From this article [0], it appears to be quite slow but at least highly parallel, "cleaning" an object in 3-4 years but all addressable objects in ~5 years. It's still unclear to me if the principles required for them to function effectively are currently available, or if more development is required first. Another concern is that large…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.