LEO Garbage Business

Status
Not open for further replies.
S

spacelifejunkie

Guest
What is the profitability prospects on running a business to cleanup the spacejunk in LEO? Eventually, spacejunk is going to cost somebody's life. I'd like to think we could solve this problem before it ever goes that far.<br /><br />SLJ
 
B

brandido

Guest
I don't think there can be much profit from garbage collection itself, as it is a classic tragedy of the commons - everybody wants to use the resource, but it is not in their economic interest to indiviually pay for maintaining it. <br /><br />I think the way it could be profitable is if it became possible to reuse/recycle some of the debris. Maybe taking satellites tthat are out of power/fuel but still technologically sound and repurposing them - your basic salvage operations. Longer term, if we actually develop industrial capabilities in LEO, the debris may be able to be broken down to raw elements and reused.
 
N

nacnud

Guest
One of the more interesting garbage clean-up ideas I have heard of is to use a laser and slowly push the debris out of orbit. So you'd need a tracking system, (big radar) and a laser. <br /><br />A bit too close to an Asat weapon for the military to let a comercial company operate me thinks.
 
C

CalliArcale

Guest
Yep. That would definitely be something they'd want to own and classify. It might also be forbidden by space demilitarization treaties. After all, if you can shoot down junk, you can shoot down satellites -- including manned ones.<br /><br />The main stumbling block to space junk businesses is that it takes a considerable amount of energy to deorbit each chunk -- and the bigger it is, the more energy it will take. An earth-based system would be plausible with current tech, but you would have to arrange for entries which consume the junk, which means you can't get any money from the salvaged scrap. You'd have to charge somebody for the service of clearing junk, and I don't think anybody's really prepared to pay for that at present. Reclaiming space junk isn't practical, however, because not only will you need spacecraft that can safely reenter with it, but they need to acheive many enormous plane shifts (lots of delta-V) in their operational career, and they need to not contribute just as much junk from their boosters/payload fairings/etc as the stuff they're cleaning up after. It would cost way more than it would make, and is probably dependent on new tech.<br /><br />The laser is probably the most practical at present, to be honest. And even that isn't going to be something done commercially; there's really no return on it. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em>  -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>
 
R

rubicondsrv

Guest
they have lasers that can hat satelites. one such laser was fired at a derelict satelite in a test of it's ASAT capabilities and melted half of the surface of the satelite.<br /> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>
 
R

rocketman5000

Guest
Like somone mentioned earlier, I think it would depend on when space eventually becomes well inhabited or when the moon is colonized, or if satelittes begin to be taken out on a regular basis. The chips and other associated hardware would have good economic value to a resource or manufacturing strapped space colony. ie moon. Currently I don't think it is something that has economic viability
 
R

rocketman5000

Guest
it wouldn't neccessarily take that much energy to deorbit. I have read about space tethers that would use the flow of electricity gathered from a suspended wire and the earth's magnetic feild to create drag that would bring the satelitte down. I think that would be a better way of cleaning up LEO garbage would be to require all future satelittes to have a tether that would deploy as a deorbit at the end of its life. Consequently if electricity is fed from the tether to the magnetic feild propulsize force can be added rather than drag.<br /><br />It wouldn't do much for what is currently in orbit, but it could solve future problems. One drawback however is I believe the technology isn't quite ready for deployment.
 
M

mlorrey

Guest
The bigger stuff is all tracked, and countries are getting better about deorbiting upper stages when they are done with them, but the big threat are the orbiting bits that are too small for radar to track, from bolts on upward. <br /><br />An idea I had for this would be to boost up a series of large balloons, like the Echo satellites, but inflate them with aerogel. With this setup, objects that strike will, unless they are very large, decelerate in the gel and get stuck, like flypaper or ballistic gelly. Eventually the large size of the balloon sat will cause its orbit to erode, carrying along all the junk it collected.<br /><br />Who would pay you to launch such satellites? Companies that insure satellites and manned launches. There should be a business case to be made that makes such sats economical for the insurance industry to fund. One problem with this becoming reality is that it is usually hard to determine the cause of a satellite failure unless a person or a camera can catch it. Sending insurance adjusters into orbit isn't worthwhile yet, but until they have collected accurate data, they don't know exactly what the true costs of space junk are and what the threshold would be for making junk cleaners worthwhile.
 
V

ve7rkt

Guest
<i>An idea I had for this would be to boost up a series of large balloons, like the Echo satellites, but inflate them with aerogel.</i><br /><br />I read a sci-fi short like that once. Lost American suit glove + dead Russian weather sat = satellite chunks. Satellite chunks + another satellite = more satellite chunks. More satellite chunks + more satellites = yet more satellite chunks, etc. etc. until it threatened the orbital stations. The solution was to send out giant foam rubber balls in a retrograde orbit; big debris would tear through but lose enough velocity to drop, and small debris would stick in the ball and slow it down for eventual deorbit.<br /><br />Trouble with using that outside of a cutting-Earth-off-from-space crisis, giant foam rubber balls don't steer very well, and there are a lot of good, useful satellites in the way. <img src="/images/icons/wink.gif" /> <br /><br />There's a Japanese animation called PlanetES which centers around a group of trash collectors in space. It's pointed out -- often -- that the debris collection division is the only part of the company operating at a financial loss. The largest corporations that rent space on the LEO stations appear to be required by law to field these debris divisions, or maybe they get tax credits, or something like that. Maybe the company's rationale is explained better in the books. At any rate, the importance of debris collection is made clear: seven years before the show, a suborbital spaceliner suffers a massive depressurization when an errant screw (philips head!) meets a window at 8km/sec.
 
J

josh_simonson

Guest
Junk in LEO will eventually De-orbit due to drag, exactly the way the ISS will when we stop re-boosting it. This is a significant reason for having manned stuff in LEO - less junk. Farther out is where space junk can maliciously circle indefinitely. I doubt junk will be much of a problem near the moon either since the moon would tend to catch or deflect garbage with it's gravity well.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest posts