Ugly Truth of Space Junk 185
fysdt writes "Dealing with the decades of detritus from using outer space — human-made orbital debris — is a global concern, but some experts are now questioning the feasibility of the wide range of 'solutions' sketched out to grapple with high-speed space litter. What may be shaping up is an 'abandon in place' posture for certain orbital altitudes — an outlook that flags the messy message resulting from countless bits of orbital refuse. US General William Shelton, commander of Air Force Space Command, underscored the worrisome issue of orbital debris during a presentation at the National Space Symposium on April 12, 2011. In a recent conference here, Gen. William Shelton, commander of the US Air Force Space Command, relayed his worries about rising amounts of human-made space junk."
Send up a crew (Score:3)
Re:Send up a crew (Score:5, Interesting)
I've always been partial to the 'puffball' technique: using a large (on the order of tens of kilometres in diameter when deployed), low mass loose mesh of fine fibres, with any incident debris vaporising the fibres and coming to a halt over a distance of a kilometre or so, without breaking it up and creating more debris.
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So while I believe a solution CAN be found (after all the USA went from barely being able to get a rocket off the ground to the moon in 10 years) the problem is getting the peoples of Earth to pony up the $$$.
In those years the hyper-rich were having the living shitlights taxed out of them (as it should be), something like 70%+ income tax. The USA will never have that money again unless there's a violent revolt.
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Even assuming you don't need a "one-way penetrable plastic membrane" (good luck) your idea requires launching a lot of mass into space (although using a gas and an expanding foam similar to AB foam might cut down the requirements). It would be good for taking out many small pieces of space junk but wouldn't be worth it for removing larger ones.
I have an idea that could be good for removing larger pieces of space junk. A large number of little unmanned spacecraft are released into low earth orbit. They consi
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Why not just slap a big solar power array in GEO or at a Lagrange point and just shoot the debris with lasers? You can slow it down or speed it up to perturb its orbit. Seems a lot easier than trying to catch stuff without catching stuff you don't want to catch.
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For a moment there I thought you were describing JJ Abrams desecration of Star Trek.
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Different kind of space junk. Hey-o!
For the record I liked that movie, once I accepted that it was basically the Star Wars movie we should have had, in the trappings of a Star Trek movie.
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I just accepted that it was a summer action flick with a Star Trek backstory. Nothing wrong with that.
Re:Send up a crew (Score:5, Informative)
Isn't that pretty much the premise of Quark? [wikipedia.org]
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I was thinking we could send up a satellite with a giant gun thingy, and then give it internet connectivity and hook it up to a flash game. We could call it "asteroids" and get internet users to fix the problem.
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What happens when some griefer starts shooting at the ISS?
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We could send up a crew of young people to have wacky adventures and fixate on each other. In their spare time they could clean up junk manually. I like the manga/anime that deals with this, Planetes [wikipedia.org]
The words "wacky" and "PlanetES" should never be uttered in the same paragraph, except indicating that one is nothing like the other.
I can't say I've ever seen anything more depressing about the future of space travel than that.
Well, then perhaps wacky in the sense that it's an anime with realistic physics, which is so unusual as to be almost an oxymoron. I mean that statement alone is enough to make most of my friends do a double take when I tell them about the series.
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Wangan Midnight and Initial D 4th Stage also have realistic physics.
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Yes, there's nothing wacky about unemployed low-gravity moon ninjas, doing a group good luck dance to win the lottery, or that comic relief guy's weird stunts. This is serious business.
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Isn't manga/anime just a transference of pedophilia from real children to child like drawings?
Only some of it. There's "loli" that is no-excuses drawn child porn (although I don't care because hey, it's a drawn picture) and then you have the recurring theme of sexualized young girls that sometimes appears in more mainstream stuff (which again is gross, but chill, it's a drawing). If you don't seek out the loli and avoid the weird shitty stuff like Sakura Card Captor, you can avoid it pretty easily. Planetes is 100% free of it IIRC.
Self Correcting Problem (Score:2)
Re:Self Correcting Problem (Score:4, Informative)
Won't a large percentage of the junk re-enter the earth's orbit on its own given enough time?
Sure, for big enough values of "enough time". Which could be millions of years.
Although for some orbits not even that. In geostationary orbit I don't think the satellite will reenter earth's atmosphere before the sun goes red giant.
Re:Self Correcting Problem (Score:4, Informative)
There's not as much of a space junk problem at geostationary because there's more room up that far (the amount of room available at a given altitude, after all, increases with the square of that altitude) and we don't launch as much stuff up that far. The real problem is in Low Earth Orbit, because it's so easy to reach and there's so much less space there. Just about anything in LEO will de-orbit eventually, but it may be centuries.
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the amount of room available at a given altitude, after all, increases with the square of that altitude
The geostationary orbit has zero thickness and, therefore, zero volume. Any debris there is a very serious problem.
A small deviation from geostationary altitude will cause the debris to drift east or west and, because the orbit will never be exactly circular, it will cross the geostationary altitude at least two times a day.
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Although for some orbits not even that. In geostationary orbit I don't think the satellite will reenter earth's atmosphere before the sun goes red giant.
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Yes, but "enough time" for a lot of it is centuries or more. Meanwhile, we're creating more at a vastly greater rate than what's de-orbiting.
It depends on the math involved (Score:5, Informative)
and as this is in fact rocket science the problem is we have 3 different "speed bands" we are working with
1 the junk that is going slow enough to fall out of orbit
(in a more or less short period of time)
2 the stuff that is mid range speed (could take like "forever" to fall out unless somebody/something whacks it in the right direction)
3 the high speed stuff (this is very rare and is the stuff that heading out into deepish space)
the problem with 1 and 2 (mostly 2) is hitting this stuff CORRECTLY is very hard to do (ideal situation is it burns up on reentry with "does not hit anything important" as a push bet)
the worst case is you hit somebodies in service satellite or have a chunk of something wipe out a State building or something else and cause an international incident
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The lower the orbit the faster the orbital speed.
It's counter-intuitive, but to catch up with something ahead of you but in the same orbit as you, you need to fire your retrorockets. You will then fall into a lower orbit, exchanging gravitational potential energy for kinetic energy and end up going faster.
Tim.
Global Warming will fix it (Score:2)
We'll warm up the atmosphere so much that the expansion from the heat will thicken it enough to quickly bring down everything in Low Earth Orbit.
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Oblig Simpsons (Score:3)
We've tried nothin' and we're all out of ideas...
Seriously, next batch of research missions should be various cleaning devices to see what they can do and how well they do it.
RTFA (Score:3)
next batch of research missions should be various cleaning devices to see what they can do and how well they do it
"Barring the discovery of a disruptive technology within the next decade or so, there will be no practical removal solution," Kaplan added. "We simply lack the technology to economically clean up space."
Problem is, "space" didn't get that name by accident. It's big. And the debris are millions of pieces. A big laser, you say? The Soviet Union went broke trying to develop one. Perhaps a big sheet made of monocrystalline unobtainium would do the trick.
In the end, we may be able to catch a few pieces of junk
Re:RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space, listen..."
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Lasers might not be a bad idea actually. Place a satellite in high orbit and have it use a laser to push debris down into the atmosphere where it can burn up. Aim it so that if you miss the beam goes off into space rather than towards the ground. In space you have unlimited free energy from the sun.
The only issue I can see is the ban on weapons in space, but given the right power laser and joint control by the UN it should be possible. Anything that gathers debris in space could just as easily be used as a
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It's not unlimited, and it's not free. The intensity of sunlight at any particular position in the solar system is more or less constant but finite. So you can increase the power available to you by increasing the area of your collector, until you have a Dyson Sphere. BUT, the weight you have to put into orbit (more precisely, "into this particular orbit") will increase more-or-less linearly with the area of the collector. And putting weight into orbit is
The solution is simple: (Score:2)
Space sharks with lasers. Duh.
On a serious note, if I was Scaled Composites/Virgin Galactic, I'd start looking at clean-up contracts. While ground-based lasers may lose too much energy trying to make it out of the atmosphere, an airborne system might have a bit more punch....
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What would be the point of using lasers? You're not going to affect the orbit of a piece of space junk just by shining a laser on it.
UH WHAT [upi.com]. We discussed this here but slashdot search is like fucking a blackberry bush
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I really do not want to know how you know what fucking a blackberry bush is like.
OK, I do. If it's a youtube video or something.
I'll just go and prepare some red-hot teaspoons, I fear I may need to scoop my eyeballs out.
A solvable problem (Score:3)
This isn't panic time. Low Earth orbit really shouldn't be much of a problem. Without constant effort stuff tends to come down and the smaller the faster. The higher orbits are high volume areas. That only leaves the middle to really worry about, right?
Yea a lose bolt can really ruin your day (or satellite) right now but we are going to have to develop some defenses. Otherwise micrometeors will eventually score a hit. Again, take it in threes. Come up with some sort of armor for microscopic stuff to embed into, some sort of active (laser?) defense for medium and dodge anything big enough to see in time to light an engine.
But while Science! used to be optimistic and forward looking these days it is timid and obsessed with Doom! and what might go wrong.
Re:A solvable problem (Score:5, Informative)
The higher orbits are high volume areas
Not quite. The geostationary orbit, one of the most valuable commercially, is infinitesimally thin. Any debris that goes by there requires maneuvers from the operating satellites, which burn fuel and take a toll on the useful life of the satellite.
Are lasers even legal? (Score:3)
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Since when does the US give a shit about international law?
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The US owns nearly half of the total orbiting satellites.
http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_weapons_and_global_security/space_weapons/technical_issues/ucs-satellite-database.html [ucsusa.org]
Total - 957
US - 436 - 10 Civil, 193 Commercial, 118 Government, 115 Military
Russia - 100
China - 69
49% of those are in LEO
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The relevance of this to the legal ramifications of the US shooting down space junk are what exactly?
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> A "navigational" laser capable of vaporizing "medium" sized objects might fall under some kind of prohibited dual use technology.
Probably not. Remember the scale of the problem here. Small is paint flecks and such, large is a small washer so medium is between those ranges. Sure the usual suspects at the Parliament of Tyrants (UN) might bang their spoons on their high chairs but we can ignore that.
Re:A solvable problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Without constant effort stuff tends to come down and the smaller the faster.
Not necessarily true. It's all dependent on the atmospheric drag that the object generates and what orbit it was launched into (on purpose or accidentally) to begin with. Some LEO junk will at this rate stay up for millions of years.
Come up with some sort of armor for microscopic stuff to embed into
Unfortunately the problem there is that armor inevitably adds weight, and every pound is precious in the design of a satellite. Until we have some orbital launching mechanism more efficient than our current chemical-based rockets, it will always be an inefficient tradeoff to take on the extra weight of armoring a satellite versus the likelihood of there being an impact that the armor would mitigate.
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um.... (Score:2)
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NO! It becomes art!! :)
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Yes. But would you prefer me to hit you in the face with a rolled up newspaper or throw the shredded bits at you?
Depends. Who has to clean up the mess afterwards?
Too early to worry about this, surely (Score:2)
And also we haven't been dropping crap up there for too many years, from too many spacecraft. We're sort of like Columbus and his boys worrying about a toffee wrapper that someone left behind on the beach somewhere in the Caribbean.
Can we get back to this in, say, two centuries when there's enough crap to worry about? We have other issues mor
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Yes, space is really big - but we've already had collisions [space.com]. It's a little like the turn-of-the-century automobile crash in Kansas City - which only had two cars registered therein.
Then there's the Kessler Syndrome, in which case a single collision's fragment could cause additional collisions, and on and on in a chain reaction that leaves us unable to pass a belt of grinding metal bits.
OK, that may be a bit hyperbolic, but still. It's not too early to start thinking about this.
My personal suggestion is a
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What could possibly go wrong?
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Its a geometric, not a linear, problem ... (Score:4, Informative)
... we haven't been dropping crap up there for too many years, from too many spacecraft. We're sort of like Columbus and his boys worrying about a toffee wrapper that someone left behind on the beach somewhere in the Caribbean.
Wrong analogy. To continue with the Columbus theme a better analogy would be dropping off a bunch of pigs at each island you visit. When you return later you find far more than the few pigs you dropped off. Like pigs, satellite debris "breeds". 1 item of debris + 1 item of debris = *many* items of debris, where many can be many orders of magnitude larger than two.
Consider the example from the article. The number of debris items increased by 25% from a *single* event, China testing an anti-satellite weapon. While this may be a worse case event, an accidental collision between two satellites could similarly generate a cloud of thousands of debris items.
Can we get back to this in, say, two centuries when there's enough crap to worry about? We have other issues more pressing that this (oh sorry - forgot this was slashdot....thought I was in a US Government thinktank...).
A think tank would hopefully possess enough potential to realize that when TVs go blank, phones no longer make connections, ships/planes/cars can no longer navigate, etc then the average person might care.
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Correct, but you missed a subtle point - Free Bacon on selected Caribbean islands.
Now do you understand the problem?
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Oblig quote: - remember that "Space is Big, Mind-blowingly big.
Interstellar space is big.
Earth-orbital space is depressingly small, because there are only so many useful orbits.
Wow. (Score:3)
U.S. General William Shelton, commander of Air Force Space Command, underscored the worrisome issue of orbital debris during a presentation at the National Space Symposium on April 12, 2011. In a recent conference here, Gen. William Shelton, commander of the U.S. Air Force Space Command, relayed his worries about rising amounts of human-made space junk.
Two generals with the same name and the same job, expressing concerns on the same topic!
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But one of them _underscored_ their worries, while the other _relayed_ them. Clearly two very different personalities despite their other similarities.
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This is what happens when parallel universes collide.
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Indeed, the clean-shaven Shelton is the one who has worries about the debris, and the Shelton that has a goatee is the one who prefers to underscore the debris.
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Two generals with the same name and the same job, expressing concerns on the same topic!
Personally, I welcome our army of clone warrior overlords.
Giant Acme Magnets (Score:2)
Problem solved.
What proportion of the space junk is military? (Score:2)
Cleaning military bases that are de-comissioned is usually a very expensive task : the military doesn't take care of their own environments.
Did they do better in space?
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About 25% of it is from a Chinese ICBM being crashed into a satellite, the rest is a mix of commercial, military, government collisions, wrecks, decay and accidents.
Nuke it in orbit! (Score:2)
Yet another problem that can be solved by suitable applications of high explosives.
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So we all just need to learn to stop worrying and love The Bomb.
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Fortunately, thanks to the scientific miracle of Viagra, we no longer have to worry about water fluoridation and the sapping of our precious bodily fluids!
I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.
He's working for THEM (Score:5, Insightful)
He's just trying to clear a nice approach eliptical for the mothership to come down and enslave mankind. Don't listen to a word of it. Space junk makes intraorbital navigation hazardous, and that hazard is our best unnatural defense against the alien overlords.
--
Toro
Which I for one do not welcome!
Did anyone play the RPG Rifts? (Score:3)
It was an 80s-ish RPG. One of the background stories was that Word War 3 broke out and because of all the space weapons and counter-weapons blasting each other to bits and throwing up buckshot at each other, Earth's orbit becomes full of so much shrapnel that it's impossible to achieve orbit. When the Chinese tested that laser on a satellite target, that's what I immediately thought of. Space weapons are a stupid, expensive, potentially disastrous idea. Look at how bad space junk is getting and we haven even *tried* to fill orbits with crap.
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It was an 80s-ish RPG. One of the background stories was that Word War 3 broke out and because of all the space weapons and counter-weapons blasting each other to bits and throwing up buckshot at each other, Earth's orbit becomes full of so much shrapnel that it's impossible to achieve orbit.
I did play Rifts. That bit about orbit was a nice touch, but also clearly a game-balance thing to keep players of sufficient resources from dealing with that whole alien-insect infestation in Minnesota or the Spluggorths (sp?) in Atlantis by going up into orbit and dropping rocks on them.
But nevertheless, yes, it does bring to mind the dangers of letting space junk get out of hand.
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It was an 80s-ish RPG. One of the background stories was that Word War 3 broke out and because of all the space weapons and counter-weapons blasting each other to bits and throwing up buckshot at each other, Earth's orbit becomes full of so much shrapnel that it's impossible to achieve orbit. When the Chinese tested that laser on a satellite target, that's what I immediately thought of. Space weapons are a stupid, expensive, potentially disastrous idea. Look at how bad space junk is getting and we haven even *tried* to fill orbits with crap.
Just to clarify: Space weapons are a bad idea because weapons in general are a bad idea. If it weren't for the mentality of some humans' that cause some of us to refuse to cooperate and instead drives the desire to destroy others, the weapon problem would not exist.
Tools, on the other hand, can also be dangerous, and extreme caution should be used when using dangerous tools...
Spaceball Vacuum (Score:2)
Can't we just borrow that?
On a more serious side, I read an admittedly far fetched idea of putting a 'fishing nets' in the orbits of the smaller bits of debris. Yes, tons of problems with it, but it would be nice if we could 'sweep' up a bunch of the smaller stuff. I forget the details, but from what I remember (that's a chancy proposition in itself) it seemed to be plausible.
I admit, I am way out of my league here, so feel free to ignore as hard as possible.
The answer is always sharks. (Score:2)
Space sharks. With lasers.
Superman (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure this can be solved by Superman. He can just go around the earth a few times to speed up the rotation, and thus, gravity, sucking in all the shit up there back into our atmosphere so we can start from scratch.
Right?
Sunspots - warning: real science discussion :-) (Score:3)
Denial-of-Space Weapons? (Score:2)
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The Bubblegum Solution (Score:2)
1. Pick a substance that can be shipped to space fairly gracefully in large, thin, flexible sheets. You'd need BIG sheets. This can either be something that is already adhesive or can be activated or coated with adhesive in orbit. Either way, it should be cheap and disposable. The edges of this material should be fairly durable so that if it tears, the torn bits will hang on to the edges. High relative-velocity impacts should either go right through the material or stick to it.
2. Attach a small, single-use,
Re:The Bubblegum Crisis (Score:2)
Sure, all we need is a huge amount of unobtanium.
Unfortunately, the technological advances developed during the search for and manufacture of said unobtanium also vastly cheapens the cost of computer AI and cyborgs which leads to the rise of a global military industrial corporation named Genom.
After the Second Great Kanto Earthquake of 2025 divides Tokyo's in two, physically as well as culturally, the vast difference of wealth distribution sparks a cultural upheaval and Genom looses its cyborgs on huma
Causation != correlation (Score:2)
Even the smartest of us didn't forsee something as simple as "Hey - if you put something up there, you're going to have to deal with it."
Unless of course you don't believe in global warming, then please take your trollisms elsewhere.
Simple engineering issue. (Score:2)
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I think the point of the article is that no such material exists yet, and we have no clue how to make something like that in an economic way.
The biggest problem with most of these solutions, is getting them "up there". Moving things to space is very expensive. It's hard to get a feeling for it.
I once compared it to the the Trust SSC, the first car to go Mach 1: 1,228 km/h (763 mph). To reach orbit you need to go about 40,000 km/h, given that the energy goes with the square of the speed, you need (40,000/1,2
Read the article (Score:4, Informative)
One expert is - "orbital debris expert within the Space Department at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md."
The other is - Gen. William Shelton, commander of the U.S. Air Force Space Command, who has been assigned to USAF space posts since 1976.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_L._Shelton [wikipedia.org]
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Read the article, their expertise is in understanding the dynamics of the problem and the threats the problems raise.
It's like saying an oncologist can't treat cancer because he didn't make up the chemotherapy drug, thus he isn't an expert.
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Your definition may cause you no problems when communicating with yourself. However since the general purpose of communication is to communicate with others, then it becomes necessary to stick reasonably closely to what other people mean by words. Consult Tweedledum and Tweedledee for further discussion (not debate).
An example : I am a geologist, and I pay some fair amount of attention to seismology
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I do not have, and do not know of any credible expert (by my definition) seismologist who claims to have, any solution to the problem of predicting if there is going to be an earthquake of more then magnitude X in geographical region Y in future time period Z.
Predict them? That's nothing, we need you to stop them! Until you have a solution to preventing earthquakes, you sir, are no expert!
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You do realize life extension creates more problems (overpopulation and surrounding ethical issues) than it solves (a few (pathetic) old folks not happy with their already extended lifespans?)
Also I hope you do live to see life being found on Europa so you can see that space is not all "rocks and vacuum" (if you must make it sound so boring). One of the creatures there may hold the key to your immortality for all we know ;)
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The adults are working, child, go back to your crayons and Star Trek dolls.
They are action figures dammit!
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At these speeds, I'd suprised if anyone could manage to manually hit anything at all, even by sheer luck.
Re:Build lasers and let kids operate it (Score:4, Funny)
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No. Sharks can't survive long enough in the vacuum of space, and would freeze to death in the ionosphere. Think man! THINK!
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Re:Is this a real problem? (Score:4, Informative)
Express-AM11 was knocked out by space debris, Kosmos 2251 and Iridium 33 collided destroying both.
Challenger STS-7, Endeavor STS-59, Atlantis STS-115 and Endeavor STS-118 were all hit in widows or radiators while all the shuttles, ISS and MIR were regularly hit with smaller debris.
ISS has over 100 Whipple Shields installed to reduce the impacts of small objects.
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I guarantee you if I step off the ISS, I'm plunging to earth.
you might be a troll, but I'm answering any way. You would not plunge down to earth, but you would just float next to it, maybe slowly drift away from it. There is no air to slow you down.
The whole trick is that you are actually going quite fast, about 16,000 mph or faster, you do fall down, but the earth is curved and drops away at the same rate. That's how things stay "in orbit". As there is no air, nothing slows you down and you just keep falling in a circle around the earth, constantly missing it becaus