Comments on: Space Junk Is Getting Serious

By: Thomas

Thomas — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 18:39:12 +0000

daedalus2u, that idea was used in “Fallen Dragon” by Peter Hamilton. A colony decided that they *really* didn’t want any more visits from Earth so they blew up an asteroid they had brought into orbit and used for mining.

By: daedalus2u

daedalus2u — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 02:52:07 +0000

Greg, I once had the idea that if you did bring an asteroid into a capture orbit around the Earth you would have enough material to do it.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 01:38:27 +0000

daedalus2u: Good point

Anton: Blog it!

By: Anton P. Nym

Anton P. Nym — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 19:58:27 +0000

I've been waiting for well financed gangsters to launch a few missiles armed with BBs into LEO in a east to west direction. The warheads would be set to explode and scatter their cargo of BBs if they don't get regular inputs of an ever-changing password. The price for space to stay open would be a billion dollars a month.

I have a folder in my filing cabinet (gathering dust for nigh-on twenty years, alas) with the failed remains of a technothriller based on something very similar; only the ASATs were disguised as failed launches into polar orbits. Made interceptions a lot trickier; one reason I didn't finish the outline is that the orbital math went waaaaaay beyond what I could handle very quickly, and I soon lost track of what would be plausible and what would just be "crazy Buck Rogers stuff".

Oh well, I guess I blew my chance to be a prophet...

-- Steve

By: daedalus2u

daedalus2u — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 18:49:00 +0000

If you really saturated a polar orbit with debris, you also render ICBMs useless.

By: Jazzee

Jazzee — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 18:07:48 +0000

Dear Team and readers, as a participant of Singularity University ’11 at NASA Ames, I would be very happy to share with you my video about space debris :
http://twitc.com/Prx1eWiui

I hope you will like it and feel free to publish it and share it.
Jaz.

By: NJ

NJ — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 17:52:40 +0000

OK, since nobody else is gonna do it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOmdwCV7YHI

By: Jesse

Jesse — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 17:24:55 +0000

Y’know, I do think it cool that there is a bot that can turn posts into Turkish… but I always wondered why Turkish? I see that alot, is all.

Back to topic.

The down side of the satellite doomsday weapon is that it might preclude someone from launching anything of their own later on, and your allies as well might need their satellites to function.

I’m not sure the effect on the world economy, either — 10 years ago I’d have said that many areas would be fine. Not so now. It wouldn’t be a death blow but there would be ancillary effects from the loss of weather data in some cases and GPS. The telecoms industry would be hit hard. Oddly enough satellite TV would be OK in some cases and many satellites that serve poorer countries would be intact since they are higher up. (Thuraya for instance is MEO I think, but correct me if I am wrong).

But I could certainly see someone accidentally doing the BB thing (or something like it). That almost seems more likely…

By: Joshua Zelinsky

Joshua Zelinsky — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 12:57:07 +0000

Art, that’s a brilliant idea for a hard scifi story.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 09:52:48 +0000

A nuclear detonation in LEO would also be effective. You’d saturate the orbit with charged particles that would render at least civilian satellites useless. (Maybe military ones are sufficiently hardened to survive) This could be an effective deterrent for a small nuclear country like North Korea that doesn’t itself rely on satellites and isn’t liked by the rest of the world anyway.