NASA's Top 10 Space Junk Missions 103
Ant writes "NASA has identified the top ten space junk missions and said over 19,000 pieces of space junk are known to exist..." That's nothing: You should see my living room.
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NASA's Top 10 Space Junk Missions
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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"
Radioactive coolant (Score:4, Informative)
One of the biggest sources of space junk are the gobs of solidified radioactive coolant from old Soviet satellites.
Re:Radioactive coolant (Score:5, Informative)
A great article on the space junk problem can be found at;
http://www.satellitetoday.com/commercial/manufacturers/Space-Debris-Small-But-Growing-Problem_21599.html [satellitetoday.com]
They discuss the radioactive coolant losses from discarded satellites that were boosted into "graveyard orbits" and how the cooling systems have sprung leaks, leaving behind solidified chunks of radioactive sodium, potassium and lead.
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"radioactive" is a relative term.
Outside the atmosphere space is full of particles (cosmic rays) that can kill you faster than playing handball with radioactive sodium.
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Space sized bin bag (Score:1)
Re:Space sized bin bag (Score:4, Insightful)
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Maybe some international body could charge a property tax on birds up there and use it to fund regular garbage collections, a bit like local councils down on earth.
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Maybe some international body could charge a property tax on birds up there and use it to fund regular garbage collections, a bit like local councils down on earth.
Why? The insurance recovery fee would do more than make up the difference. A $100 million satellite that goes bad because of a $1500 circuit board can be re-activated if somebody could get to the satellite either physically or by remote tele-presence.
The ISS can be setup as a base of operations, but a commercial space station would be better.
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What nation wants to spend money to send people up into space to clean up after what's essentially other people's garbage? There's no immediate gain, so nobody's going to do it.
One man's junk is another man's treasure. I have ideas about this very idea going all the way back to the late 70's. Why haven't I done anything about it, you may ask? Simple, not finding a backer with the funding that also has the forethought to move forward in a time frame that made space collection unrealistic and unnecessary. And now, the necessity is realistic, but now more expensive.
Re:Space sized bin bag (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes [wikipedia.org]
The story of Planetes follows the crew of the DS-12 "Toy Box" of the Space Debris Section, a unit of Technora Corporation. Debris Section's purpose is to prevent the damage or destruction of satellites, space stations and spacecraft from collision with debris in Earth's and the Moon's orbits. They use a number of methods to dispose of the debris (mainly by burning it via atmospheric reentry or through salvage), accomplished through the use of EVA suits.
The episodes sometimes revolve around debris collection itself, but more often the concept of collecting "trash" in space is merely a storytelling method for building character development. The members of the Debris Section are looked down upon as the lowest members of the company and they must work hard to prove their worth to others and accomplish their dreams.
Planetes & Quark (Score:2)
Another dealing with space junk cleanup was the comedy series Quark, which was also excellent, but in different ways.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_(TV_series) [wikipedia.org]
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It ran for 1.5 seasons back in 1979-80. It was one of the many things that sparked my interest in space exploration when I was a kid.
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Space Fish? (Score:2)
Re:Space sized bin bag (Score:5, Insightful)
Much of the space debris is in very small pieces like paint chips, pieces of thermal blankets, screws/nuts/bolts, etc..
The volume of near space that is "polluted" is vast. It is a constantly evolving three dimensional environment with debris moving at all sorts of crazy trajectories that change frequently depending upon the solar wind, geomagnetic field and the swelling and contraction of our tenuous upper atmosphere.
It would be like searching the beach in Fiji, looking for a particular 1957 nickel. The efforts to chase down each individual piece of trash is much greater than the risks of that particular piece.
We need to;
1. Stop spewing little parts, disgards and trash into space.
2. Do a better job of tracking what is up there.
3. Harden satellites to be able to survive the impact from a very small object.
4. Come up with a clean way to dispose of old space hardware other than abandonment in "graveyard orbits".
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"It would be like searching the beach in Fiji, looking for a particular 1957 nickel."
By that analogy, how do fishermen around Fiji actually catch fish? Chase one around with a net until they get the advantage? No, they cast the net, catch what is there, and throw back the rest.
Who sent a satellite to capture comet dust? Oh yeah, us. "Stardust'. Aerogel as a capture mechanism for comet material.
Why not try sending some aerogel into LEO and use a similar method? Send it through debris fields, verify use
Re:Space sized bin bag (Score:4, Interesting)
Setting up a net isn't that easy. Aside from the 19,000 "large" items (those over about 10cm), there are tens of millions of smaller items like washers and paint flecks. Let's say there are 50 million such objects between altitudes of 150 miles and 300 miles. That space totals up to 11.7 billion cubic miles for an average about 235 cubic miles per piece of debris. There are, of course, higher densities in some spots, but not enough to make something like this economical.
Additionally, aerogel is some fragile stuff. I know it is, because I have some at home. It came from a polite request to purchase some small, random piece from an aerogel manufacturer about ten years ago, and the person who replied was kind enough to simply put a piece of shop scrap in a plastic box and send it to me (complete with MSDS). Within ten minutes of opening it and despite what I thought was careful handling, I had broken the piece in two, and in the intervening years, it has broken further into about six major pieces and a dozen minor bits. It may be good for capturing micrometeors, but it would shatter if it were hit by a bolt, adding to the debris problem.
As for who gets back the space debris and whatever else is deorbited, the answer should be "nobody." Send it to break up over the Pacific. If a country wants something back badly enough, they can design the important parts to survive re-entry and bring it back on their own, or provide funding for a dedicated retrieval mission.
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Alternatively, there are other ways to catch debris if you don;t much care what shape it is in when you catch it. A few layers of metal and some intervening goo, for instance. But aerogel is so light that it's cheaper to send up, it captured comet debris adequately, so it would probably be great to catch a lot of small stuff. Larger items may need a bigger or better 'net'.
There's a big difference between catching an interplanetary dust particle and catching a tiny screw or even a paint chip. A paint chip is going to be a thousand times heavier. A screw will be a million times heavier. So you're talking aerogel that is meters thick. Anything small enough to capture with aerogel is going to be essentially worthless, so there's no money to be made sweeping space of small objects
There must be no debris resulting from the collision, including aerogel. Since you're not going
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Cosmos 2421 (Score:1)
Re:Cosmos 2421 (Score:5, Informative)
http://russianforces.org/blog/2008/03/cosmos2421_completed_its_missi.shtml [russianforces.org]
Time to develop.. (Score:1)
.. a tractor beam, and depending on how wide the beam is, in 24 hrs, an entire strip across the sky could be debris free.
Could also be a national attraction watching things sparkle and burn up as it's doing re-entry.
Re:Time to develop.. (Score:5, Funny)
Most of this stuff is metallic right? Possibly even magnetic? Methinks we need a Wile E. Coyote style ACME space-junk removing magnet! As an added benefit, it may trap fast moving birds in its steady stream of space debris!
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Vaporizing stuff on orbit with a high powered laser sounds like a cool idea, but you're going to end up putting someone's eye out 4 light years away. Sure, lets find out if there are aliens by trying to blind their kids. =)
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"Vaporizing stuff on orbit with a high powered laser sounds like a cool idea, "
The object will have a different form afterwards with not a single gram removed.
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True, but the vapour will be affected by the tenuous atmosphere a lot more. Plus it will do less damage if it does hit a ship. Consider the difference in damage caused by an ice cube and the equivalent mass of mist.
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Methinks we need a Wile E. Coyote style ACME space-junk removing magnet!
So when the inevitable big space junk collision happens with the ship will it spring back entertainingly like an accordion?
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Think of the "GULP .... AWWWW CRAP!!!" look you could give the camera just before you start to plummet when you step off in LEO.
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Nope and nope.
Most is aluminum and titanuim. Nobody has launched cast iron rockets cince the 30's.
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..magnetic field there would have to be enormous, which is not easy to do. Using the one that comes with the planet, could be touchy, as side effects could be unexpectedly bad.
Inducing a charge to the particles to have them be more attractive to an oppositely charged collector system perhaps. What kind of storm can one engineer that high up?
Out military does have high power lasers now, that can track fast moving small objects, and vaporize them. Lots of target practice.
Problem remains, space is full of dust
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Methinks we need a Wile E. Coyote style ACME space-junk removing magnet!
ummm i dont think that would be the best method because ACME products always ended badly for him
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A small black hole in orbit would do just fine. we have a better chance at making that before a "tractor beam"
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Not really. A black hole isn't a magic vacuum cleaner, it's just a gravitational mass. It's not going to suck up anything that isn't in an intersecting orbit anyway. And we would have to get the mass to make it somewhere, meaning we'd have to boost up enough mass to make it, which is hellaciously expensive. If you try to make one that only weighs a few hundred kilograms, it's going to be even less effective than the equivalent in conventional matter, since it would be a point, even its event horizon wou
Re:Time to develop.. (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, well while you're developing presently impossible Star Trek gadgets like a tractor beam, why not just develop a matter transporter and beam the shit down, Scotty?
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.. a tractor beam, and depending on how wide the beam is, in 24 hrs, an entire strip across the sky could be debris free.
Could also be a national attraction watching things sparkle and burn up as it's doing re-entry.
Come back from the 23rd century, Buck Rogers, in realistic terms, a high tech flypaper would be simpler and cost effective.
Is this really a problem? (Score:2)
19,000 is a lot but this is space we're talking about, it seems like it would be rather easy to avoid. We're no where near the threat of Kessler syndrome.
I'm not saying we should just go around dumping stuff in random orbits
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Well, the damage from any of these objects is potentially catastrophic. It's not like getting a flat tire ... the relative speeds here are enough to cause major damage. The pieces also look like they're fairly well spread out in orbit.
From the linked article, that Chinese satellite that got shot down has created some 2841 pieces -- imagine something the size of a pea striking your orbiter at, what, 10000
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From the linked article, that Chinese satellite that got shot down has created sometrackable 2841 pieces
2841 trackable pieces = 80,000 actual pieces.
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Which is another thing.
What good is it going to do for one country to take up the space mop if other countries keep using it as a dump?
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Which is another thing.
What good is it going to do for one country to take up the space mop if other countries keep using it as a dump?
Easy, kick it back down stairs where it came from. Keep doing it until they (being those that are called them) get the idea to assist in paying for the cleanup. Just like dog owners picking up after their dogs.
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If it seems easy to avoid debris, then I suggest you think through the problem again.
First, in orbit you can't move freely. Most of your movement is governed by gravity. Every time you want to deviate from that path, you must spend fuel. You only have so much fuel, you must reserve enough to get home, and you must ensure at the end of each burn that you're still in orbit. You can't just carry more fuel, because fuel takes up launch weight.
The debris is, of course, also moving in an orbit governed by gra
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Not to mention that is anything collides with any of those 19000 pieces, it'll change orbit and you get to recompute everything.
Summary a bit vague... (Score:3, Funny)
That's nothing: You should see my living room.
So...you're either a heroin addict, a messy slob, a collector of Chinese model boats, really do have pieces of souvenir space junk, or have a hobby for acquiring pickled male genit...okay:
Tell us Ant, which 'junk' is most true for your living room?
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Well from context I'm assuming they're talking about space junk... But that still doesn't answer the question of what kind of junk. Space heroin? Space Chinese boats? Space genitals?
Also from context, I'm assuming they're implying that entering their apartment will result in one being torn apart by said space junk much like a satellite caught in the path of orbiting debris.
Which makes the possibility that they meant genitals even more horrifying.
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You should ask CmdrTaco, I didn't put my living room but he did in my story. In fact, I don't even have a living room where I live. However, my room is messy though! :)
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Yeah I realized that some time after I hastily posted just prior to resuming work - I think Rob was trying to be funny (?). No way would he get away with a typical bachelor's household in his status.
Furthermore...being a millionaire you'd assume he just hired a maid in twice weekly to clean up his lounge excesses. Hence me thinking his summary as more a bad joke than a comment on his home as it is.
Chris made a good point over the vagaries of the Slashdot summary; I enjoyed the thought of Taco's home being r
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Get off it, you have no alien friends. My alien friends say so.
Anyone claiming to have "alien" friends, probably doesn't have any friends.
Questions questions questions (Score:5, Interesting)
For the sake of discussion, let's assume this report showed a problem orders of magnitude worse, and we were on the verge of Kessler syndrome conditions. What technologies exist today to combat the problem? (Yes, I know, no government today would unilaterally scrub space without a quid pro quo...)
If there are 19,000 trackable chunks of debris, how many untrackable (and just as deadly) small particles are there? I know that particle densities are minute. If we launched an array of satellites with Aerogel paneling, is it reasonable to expect a significant improvement in "air" quality up there?
What about that heat-ray device recently pulled our of Afghanistan? Can we launch one of those to spray microwaves tangentially to the Earth's surface? Would the heat applied to a paint-chip sized debris particle be enough to change the orbit? It doesn't take too much delta-v to alter the eccentricity of a paint fleck enough to burn up in orbit, does it?
(Less coffee, more sleep next time, methinks)
Re:Questions questions questions (Score:5, Informative)
A ground based laser broom with adaptive optics is probably the only remotely cost effective way of mitigating the problem. From the ground you can't easily reduce an objects velocity but you can push it into a more elliptical orbit, if you can get it elliptical enough you put the perigee inside Earth's atmosphere and let that do the rest. It's the only way I've heard about that doesn't involve a ludicrous number of launches but at the same time will work only for relatively small pieces of debris in low orbit. Luckily, that's where the majority of the problem lies so it might be effective enough until we can deal with the rest.
brooms, plural (Score:3, Interesting)
The inverse of that minuscule proportion is the number of brooms you'd need.
Forget the energy needed and environmental impact of blasting a terawatt (ok, then... how big?) laser into s
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You could put the laser on a boat with a nuclear power source. We already have both technologies. The firestrike laser comes to mind, it can do 100kw with an array of them. You'd need a longer ablation time, but the junk would still start moving.
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You don't need to cover the entire sky at once, every piece of debris you down is one less piece of debris in orbit. It might take large array of brooms several decades to significantly impact the problem but so what? Since they system is ground based maintenance, upgrades, and expansions are all much easier. The power requirements are high but not unrealistically so, 1W of tightly focused laser is powerful enough to ablate many materials so I can't imagine more than a Megawatt would be required to make
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This http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078681/ [imdb.com] is a much cooler method.
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"Nuke them from Earth. It's the only way to be sure."
Nuke them from orbit (Score:2)
It's the only way to be sure.
Maybe if we had some space-faring sharks with fricking laser beams...
I'm pretty sure this was a Katamari level...
Where's Spaceball 1 when you need it? Just have to make sure Megamaid doesn't go from suck to blow.
That's enough, I'm done.
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if you can get it elliptical enough you put the perigee inside Earth's atmosphere
Lovely, if you can have ALL items touching the atmosphere in the same zone, and they all line up in the same path.
However, the orbits will likely just be in every possible plane and have every possible center. As they approach Earth, they get accelerated by the smaller radius, and pretty soon there will be superspeed space junk everywhere coming from all directions.
A very expensive brute force solution: capture each object and
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if you can get it elliptical enough you put the perigee inside Earth's atmosphere
Lovely, if you can have ALL items touching the atmosphere in the same zone, and they all line up in the same path.
However, the orbits will likely just be in every possible plane and have every possible center. As they approach Earth, they get accelerated by the smaller radius, and pretty soon there will be superspeed space junk everywhere coming from all directions.
No, the whole point of getting the pieces to touch the atmosphere is that atmospheric drag slows them down, lowering the orbit even more until they eventually burn up or crash (depending on the size).
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What you are talking about, of course, is an anti-satellite weapon. Do you foresee any problems with any nation possessing this technology and openly showing it works?
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Short answers, more like guidelines (Score:5, Interesting)
Solve the "how do you apply force at a distance" issue and yer halfway there.
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I am not a physicist, but it seems that inertia would count for something. I could also be misreading it, but it doesn't sound right that the same nudge is needed to de-orbit a paint chip would also de-orbit a Star Destroyer. I would think that an astronaut, matching the orbital speeds, could flick the paint fleck and send it into a terminal plunge. I
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Parent was correct: same delta-v for differing masses. However, since delta-v is nothing more sophisticated than good ol' acceleration (Force x Mass), you do need more force for a greater mass to reach a given delta-v.
My question was along the lines of inducing acceleration in very low mass particles using the principles seen in a Crookes radiometer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crookes_radiometer [wikipedia.org] Possible?
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Regarding the radiometer: The answer is 'yes, but...' You would have to hit the object with enough "photon momentum" to change the velocity, literally, delta the v. The losses of distance, surface area reduce your killer beam to a few photons pretty fast. And
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Magnitudes are your enemy here. If you shot a .308 rifle out the "back" of the ISS (retrograde to velocity), the bullet probably wouldn't de-orbit.
Actually it would. Quick virial theorem estimate says that bullet would hit the ground even if there wasn't an atmosphere. Shuttle deorbit burns are 250 fps. A .308 round has a muzzle velocity of 2820 fps.
If you shot it straight down (down the radius vector), it would loop around you and come back DOWN at you 1 orbit later and at the same velocity it left!
Not quite. You've given the bullet a small apogee boost, so bullet will have a longer orbital period than the space station and will miss by a good margin. Anyway, those are just details. You've got the basics down.
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As to shooting the
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You can release a non-trivial amount of chemical energy through non-uniform heating such as from a remote laser trained on one part of an object. If beam-created local heating causes vaporization, the force applied to the object can be larger than from the energy of the beam alone.
Or so I've heard.
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causes vaporization, the force applied to the object can be larger than from the energy of the beam alone.
Only if the vaporized material is "nozzled" in a single direction. If it just goes everywhere, you get no net change in momentum. AND... if it move "a little" then the beam won't be hitting it. Try sending a bowling ball down an alley by hitting it with a BB gun.
Also, in another post, I stated a "rule of thumb", that a rifle in orbit can't fire a bullet fast enough to de-orbit. Your vaporization won't change the velocity enough to notice, orbitally speaking.
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Any material ablated from the surface of an object that's larger than really tiny is going to be ejected in mostly one hemisphere, therefore will impart momentum to the object in the opposite direction. If the object is so small that a laser shot can completely ablate it so the hemispherical assumption is no longer valid, then problem solved!
I wouldn't expect a single shot to be enough to de-orbit non-trivial objects. My understanding -- which is admittedly limited -- is that the best bet for cleaning up
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* or many smaller blobs, in a variety of orbits, with an effective cross section of 1 km^2. Each blob has to b
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recycling (Score:3, Insightful)
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There is a positive side though (Score:1)
Any incoming asteroids will be obliterated by the many impacts with space debris long before they make planetfall, creating an even larger and more protective Space Shield.
We should develop an X-Prize for a space-junk vacuum, with the emphasis being on something that does not "collect" live satellites as well...
Interesting Headline (Score:2)
Related Short Story (Score:2)
I recently wrote a short fictional story about an imagined "space tourism" business where commercial vessels fly up into LEO for the purposes of "fishing" for debris satellites that are floating around up there. Link is here [robertvandyk.com]
Any chance this may become a reality in 10-20 years?
Spacewar Pollution (Score:3, Interesting)
Military "tests" ("warnings") that destroy orbiting satellites leave junk in orbit that makes future space exploitation more dangerous, costly, and even impossible (vulnerable equipment). It's like the hidden costs of manufacturing (and war) at the surface, which are left as problems for someone else. We humans should quickly force people, governments and corporations which produce debris to either clean it up, or to pay for someone else who cleans it up. We don't want to box in our growing space development just as it's getting started with the pollution from the first few generations.
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The Japanese Saw it Coming (Score:2, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes [wikipedia.org]
Who knew that a decent, but under appreciated manga that debuted in the late 90s would turn out to be a tale of things to come? :)
Mel Brooks had the Answer! Operation VacuSuck! (Score:2)
Time for Mega Maid.. and operation VacuSuck!
Suck Suck Suck!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VptOUWC-Itc [youtube.com]
Real Genius (Score:2)
Doctor Dodd, Hmm Telcom....isn't that the satellite that's raining debris all over Europe?
Vacuum Cleaner (Score:1)
"You should see my living room"? (Score:2)
Your living room has junk zipping around at thousands of miles per hour?
Resources (Score:2)
Hmm, just an idea - maybe we shouldn't try to get rid of this? If we want to establish a larger presence in orbit than the existing space station, wouldn't it be worth collecting this junk and reusing it, since it is already up there? (sorry, just idling)
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