Comments on: Tossed in Space

By: Jerrod Ordon

Jerrod Ordon — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:59:57 +0000

Please figure out more where can i buy vacuum tools cheapest.I wanted vacuum tools.My wife want it this month.

By: Big Blogs

Big Blogs — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 18:06:52 +0000

Big Blogs…

David Archie pics spam!! From the Grammy Foundation Cue the Music event that he tweeted about! thanks for the twitpic taylor_ rei! and thanks for these pics posted on IdolForums , they’ re from the photoshoot with Rick! Major drool warning!…

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 08:02:16 +0000

Garbage scow captain and galactic chef — your careers of yesterday’s tomorrow!

By: Jonk

Jonk — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 06:03:53 +0000

You are seriously suggesting that a 1kg shell hitting a 100kg object at 50,000 km/h will become ‘embedded’?

By: Seriously

Seriously — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:02:44 +0000

A net won’t do : if the piece is too small, it will pass through, if it is to big or fast it will destroy the net. My silly idea : how about a largish sheet of polythene : on impact of the particle the kinetic energy should vaporize and form a burst like a braking thruster, reducing the velocity and therefore send it to a lower orbit where the drag of the lower atmosphere will take care of it eventually. The aim is to reduce the orbit lifetime from decades to hopefully months.

We should only clean for safe corridors in orbits we are interesting in, like with mine sweeping, no point in cleaning the whole of the ocean/space.

And of course the remnant of that PEsheet better shouldn’t fall on a plane below.

By: Thinking

Thinking — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 19:38:17 +0000

Make an inflateable one a la Bigelow Aerospace.

By: Thinking

Thinking — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 19:34:28 +0000

Objects travelling at these velocities would likely be able to pierce the armor on an Abrams M1 from the frontal arc, travel completely through the fighting compartment, power pack and out the back. However, thinking along these line and using some ideas from previous posts how about:

A large as possible inflateable kelvar object, a la Bigelow Aerospace, double skinned with an expandable foam to produce a tough outer shell to collect objects? Even use this idea with multiple iterations, the principle of the Russian matryoshka doll – multiple nested inflated structures with outer skins sandwiching an expandible foam that hardens to absorb as much energy of the pieces of junk. Orbit this thing so that it eventually reenters the atmosphere. Anything striking this ’sticky ball’ would loose velocity…

By: Strange_Bundle

Strange_Bundle — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:41:45 +0000

It’s based on a manga. I read the version translated into English, and I think I liked the books better than what was in the anime.

By: Orion

Orion — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:03:37 +0000

As for the “is that much of a problem” argument, one of the space shuttles came back with a 1″ gouge in a forward viewing port caused by a bolt off a Russian probe from the 1960s. A couple of satellites – very, very expensive satellites – have died suddenly and mysteriously, after having flown through probable debris clouds. Launches from each facility tend to orient along well-defined “skyways” to their intended orbits and while most of the stuff that falls off tends to burn up right away, some of it makes it into orbit and orbits being what they are tend to hurl the stuff back ’round at least a few times before friction knocks them down. It’s starting to become a serious trafffic management problem with the ever increasing # of launches.

By: Orion

Orion — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:51:34 +0000

The trouble is that aside from the debris of a recent launch all that junk is moving on wildly tangential vectors due to tidal forces. I don’t think a single Quark-class garbage scow could carry enough fuel to go after more than a few pieces at a time.

Don’t disparage lasers, btw. The new 100MW military lasers under development could vaporize anything under 1-2 kilos in mass. Judicious targetting from higher orbit could send some of the larger pieces careening into the atmosphere to burn up. Oh, and many of the “dead” satellites up there are actually just in standby mode and have enough reaction mass to crash themselves if the crowding becomes too great.