Old Content:

The New Era of Spacecleanup?

February 13, 2009 by Kyle Brady
Tags: Earth, Government, Military, Security, Space, Trash
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When you're a little, wideyed kid, you hear about space.  You see pictures of the Earth from orbit.  You see pictures from, and of, the Moon, and you're enamored.  For some, life goes on, but for others space remains a thought in the back of your mind to one day show itself via a career in engineering or physics.

I'm somewhere between the two.

But what they don't tell you as a little kid is how cluttered both Low and High Earth Orbits are becoming.  As we've seen, collisions in space are far too real, and the "space trash" problem is apparently becoming worse, as more and more people send up devices, sometimes only for testing purposes, that largely get left when their creators are done with them.

The official story is that the American satellite was a Motorola one, but I'm betting that's, at best, only part of the truth, since any number of government organizations have the option to piggyback on your space hardware.  Put this together with the fact that the Russian satellite's collision came as a surprise, when we supposedly track "all objects larger than a football" in orbit...

And I think you have a recipe for a new era of spacecleanup.  Maybe "cleanup" isn't the right word, but at a time when satellites are destroying each other and being shot down from Earth, I think our military agencies are going to suddenly care more about the spacetrash orbiting our planet.

The idea of an automated, or semiautomated, orbit debris cleanup system via robots with manuvering capabilities is not new.  But the realization that we're fixing our own satellites, and, in all reality, disabling others, is new.  If we can manage to fix and destroy satellites from orbit, then wouldn't creating a dumptruck-like manuverable robot be less difficult?

I can imagine this trash collector orbiting Earth, selecting which debris is trash (based on human-maintained lists), and scooping up the true trash.  After compacting it, ala Wall-e, it could be sent in a proper trajectory to burn up in the atmosphere.

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Further Information: For some pictures and video check out the coverage on the Inquisitr [1] [2]

Old Content posts are leftovers from a less structured, less civilzed era that are kept for posterity.
Kyle can be found on Twitter and MySpace, or reached via email.