OT: Governmental Space Agencies or Private

[PvK]

There's already a large amount of debris in low Earth orbit from all the human space activity so far. Dead satellites, and bits and pieces of various devices, floating around at orbital (read: very high) speed, providing obstacles for anything else that wants to operate in low Earth orbit.

Sending such stuff "to the Moon" isn't a practical or useful task at present.

PvK

[Jack Simth]

PVK:
Well, yeah - cleanup of the junk thats already up there is going to be extremely impractical any way you slice it: little of it is plotted, much of it is too little to see and plot easily yet large enough to cause severe problems if it happens to hit you or yours, and it is spread over a humongous volume of space in many different orbits - the main problem in disposing of it is finding and retrieving it to dispose of it; that wasn't the idea of my post. The idea was to stash further grabage in such a fashion (except on things where you can be certain of a clean re-entry burnup - the standard disposal method for current new satelites - then you can just dump it into Earth's atmosphere). Sorry I wasn't clear on that point.

[geoschmo]

Eventually it could become a real problem. But that's where Q.U.A.R.K. comes in.

[ June 01, 2004, 20:50: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

[Suicide Junkie]

My plan involves giant metal shovels in counter-rotating orbits to sweep up all the junk and deflect it down into the atmosphere.

[geoschmo]

That sounds like something Doctor Evil would come up with SJ.

People of earth! I will rain down space junk upon your heads unless you pay me one Million DOLLARS!

[Narrew]

bah, there would be some fool that would pay millions to put it in their collection. And if we could get to the moon and bring back the Apollo Lander and such equipment, that would bring in the bucks...

Of course the nazis...err...NASA people would confiscate it *sigh*