I wonder if any money could be made in space salvage. There's got to be a lot of precious metals and other valuables floating around up there. Could a civilian company buy an old space shuttle and make any profit out of going up there and salvaging stuff?

There's an anime series called Planetes that deals with this issue. The shows starts off with the event that spurred the programs to clean up space: a plane orbiting space was struck by a screw and pretty much caused it to be destroyed as it entered the atmosphere. The series is pretty technical, and deals with some very important concepts of living in space.

I remember at the start of this school year, in my Environmental Science class, a student jokingly proposed that we should send all our trash into space. I was dumbfounded, thinking of said anime, and said that the trash would gravely damage our spaceships.

Quoting my Environmental Science book, "there is no away". We can't throw our trash away - it'll always come back to us (Futurama, anyone?). Of course, the best way to prevent this trash is at the source, but us humans can't seem to get that through our heads.

@diverguy: I think we should try terrestrial landfill mining before we go MINING GARBAGE IN SPAAAAAAAACE!!!!!

The only way space as a garbage dump makes sense is if we can send it away from our atmosphere, which with existing technology is too costly.

...Even then there's always the chance it'll hit some passing alien family's space-station wagon, out for a daytrip to Saturn's rings, and set off the interplanetary invasion that wipes out out species.

Can't we just shoot our garbage into the sun?

A Cassini probe designer here at the U of AZ proposed a pretty cool Wall-E sort of robot that would orbit the earth with a claw and a large mirror. The bot would grab the junk, and then use the mirror to weld the trash on to itself, building an even larger mirror.

Upon reaching a critical mass, we could then drop it on an odious nuisance, like Michael Crichton.

@Dug: I like that. It has a sorta Von Nuemann approach. What if it achieved sentience?
"ATTENTION MEATBAGS: SEND MORE TRASH!"

One man's trash is another man's alien invasion defense shield.

Well its not like the whole idea of space junk being hazardous didn't get started with the space program because it did.

They have known all along how bad it could get if launch garbage was left unchecked, and yet they never did anything about it and its gotten bad...

Imagine that...

To get rid of all the orbital is difficult and expensive. At the moment there is a very limited global launch capacity, and the price per pound to get to orbit is still very high (not to mention that all of those launches ALSO leave junk in orbit). Basically, unless someone looses their life because of this, I do not foresee any of the current space organizations launching a serious clean-up-space effort. Manned flight and the scientific community would rather have their missions flown, and those are the ones that return data and pictures that get funding. Unfortunate but true.

If you can bring down the cost of launching (something people have tried for years...but I think we're drawing closer) and develop more frequent launch technology (again, a long time dream) it becomes more realistic for the public space programs to deal with the issue. Should a private investor want to finance a space clean up mission, the rules are of course different.

IMHO, we could deal with it by collecting or destroying the junk. Since its up there, if you could pick it up you have raw materials that you don't have to boost to orbit. With cheap launch technology, you might have the start of a space industry. By disintegrating the junk - drop it into the atmosphere (which is another set of problems I know) or boost it into the sun, it goes away. Unless it lands on your head, a definite and serious consideration.

@Sh1fty: The reverse is also true, and it shows that there's really no worry of space catching up with the oceans. As you mentioned, putting anything into space right now is rather pricey. So it's not exactly economical to send our used condoms up there. On the other hand, it sadly costs nothing to drop one into a stream, or flush it down a toilet into a failing sewer system, where it will eventually end up in the ocean. So the same problem preventing us from collecting trash also keeps us from putting too much up there in the first place. (Chinese missiles not withstanding.)

The space garbage thing reminds me of the PLANETES anime. In my opinion it's much better than the manga on which it was based. It's much more realistic in its depiction of a team of space debris collectors.

Unfortunately, the Wikipedia article on this mixes up the anime and the manga in a very confusing way.

Reminds me of a short story (this story was from the pre Fall of the Soviet Union days) where Canada unilaterally launched tons of fine metallic chaff into earth orbit as a way to keep either superpower from launching a first strike. As a result, the rest of the world was rather resentful of Canadians as this kept not only ICBM's but anything else from reaching orbit.

@DeadlyRaptor: I used to be one of the people who thought shooting our garbage into orbit was a good idea, until the Planetes manga introducing me to the wonderful horrors of the Kessler Syndrome.

@B: umm, no.
The Earth has an orbital velocity around the Sun of approximately 29.8 km/s. We'd have to negate most of that velocity (or sling shot enough to enter a Sun intersecting orbit).

Debris is a serious issue. Most rockets produce debris. ASATs/Exploding spacecraft and rockets produce far more debris.

Besides reentry into the Earth's atmosphere (not realistic for spacecraft above 1400 km), passivating space objects is the next best thing to do.

Salvage would be great and could make you money if you can also figure out how to reuse the metals, etc. in orbit. Easier said than done.

Retrieval is only practical for the largest rocket bodies or defunct spacecraft. Refuelling spacecraft and swapping out burned out components will likely be more profitable in the short run. Again, easier said than done (though Orbital Express did okay in this area).

Check out [orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov] for more info.

@lever2k: "the rest of the world was rather resentful of Canadians..." Business as usual then?

Debris in orbit is something I remember a astrophysics prof talking about when I was in school. He said we were dooming ourselves, building a "cage of death" around our planet. He would hold up a little scrape of metal and talk about ballistics and impact energy and so on.

I think the answer will be the Bean Stalk. The BS and the cars that run up and down it will have to be strong, much stronger than you could expect from ships that are restricted by fuel concerns. An entire TV series could be focused on this technology and it could be called, Jack and the Bean Stalk. How original.

i would love to read a story or see a movie that tackles a future where theres no satellites cause of trash. no more cell phones, weather reports etc.

and no more space program

Ok, wait a moment, calm down & relax....

Whats not being mentioned is that most of the really dangerous stuff is in low or eccentric orbits. Debris in these orbits burn up upon re-entry within a couple of years. Not so much a cage of death dooming ourselves, but a temporary problem.

The larger hazards in higher orbits can be tracked with a high degree of precision, which mitigates the risks of space travel.

This is not saying there are some dangerous orbits that are now off limits due to debris hazards. Especially the ones created by US and Chinese anti-satellite weapons tests. Doh.

Perhaps some sort of self-maintaining dredger-sat is in order. A series of craft with large, strong nets in tow in orbit could possibly pick up a lot of the smaller junk in orbit right now, and then just bundle it up when the net got full, at which point another craft could collect the full net and replace it.

Well, the obvious answer to "Biggest garbage dumb, oceans or space?" is: Space.

Because in space, stars and planets are garbage.

The problem with space junk isn't that it's "pollution" or "garbage" anymore than the Earth is - it's that it's a navigational hazard in NEO.
-Kle.

Space junk is a potential habitat building resource. Earth junk is a potential nanotech foodstock.

Unfortunately to unlock these potentials, we need to stop wasting shit and really learn how to manage our technologies to get the frak into space.

@B:
...thus solving the problem forever.

Right?

Let what's up there fall down, make as little new debris as economically possible, and track what's left. Voila.

The down side to this solution is that it avoids environmentalist-type hysteria and all the fun talk of celestial garbage scows and self aware space mirrors.