Space Debris: Is It a Crisis?
esa.int61 points by defrost a day ago
61 points by defrost a day ago
For anyone looking for a good anime, I would recommend Planetes which is about a crew that protects the Earth from space debris.
Just need to watch that one cowboy Bebop episode where they visit original earth.
I started watching that, but I got a little turned off it when it immediately started yelling about s*xual harassment. Maybe I'll give it another go someday
You are allowed to say sex on this site, there's no rules against it and we're all adults (who aren't fooled by replacing a letter with an asterisk either).
I mean, I couldn't guarantee that we're all adults here... and it was more to make me feel better. Just because I'm allowed to do something doesn't mean I want to
Kessler syndrome is one of the things that give me that dread feelings, one of the things vast majority of people can do nothing about, yet it can derail any dreams of extra terrestial endavours before we even reach that point.
People imagine Kessler as one of those things that happens instantaneously. It's much more likely to happen over several decades. There's a good chance that we'll be able to stop it while it occurs through one of the very expensive mitigation measures that have been proposed.
I will solve this for you so you can worry about other things like the obsolescence of humanity and killer drones/bots.
In 200 years, we will have tamed the ability to generate energy efficiently and have relatively intelligent drones. These drones in swarms can track space debris, match their horizontal speed and push them out to outer space. Space debris will not be an issue. Maybe they can also take little bubbles of greenhouse gases and drop them out into space too.
Steve Wozniak's startup, Privateer[0], was originally created to clean up space junk, but it seems now their “mission” is to develop better tracking of objects in space, and to use this data to help avert disastrous collisions.
On the site is a fun interactive object tracker.
One question I’ve been wondering about (and please hear me out because this is an honest question and I know nothing about this area.)
SpaceX’s Starship is being built based on the (business) principle that extremely low cost-to-orbit will be a good business, because it will unlock a huge market for launches. Some tiny fraction of these launches will probably go beyond Earth’s orbit. A much larger fraction (eg Starlink) will be aimed at low orbits where Kessler Syndrome can be avoided (unless there are major accidents.) But at least some of that new mass is going to wind up in higher orbits where Kessler syndrome is already a risk, and this new mass will obviously increase the risk of a disaster. And so far I’m only talking about Starship and SpaceX, not its competitors.
My question is: is there a world where Starship is a viable economic project — meaning its investment pays back at the rate SpaceX is betting on — but where it does not also dramatically increase the risk of disaster? And what exactly does the model of “successful Starship / no Kessler syndrome” look like in terms of future launches? Has anyone modeled this?
Orbital space tourism and space manufacturing could potentially make a significant market in terms of launch mass (that is, if you launch 1000-ton facilities instead of 1-ton satellites without necessarily occupying a large number of new orbits). But this is kinda speculative at the moment.
I think the real motivation for Starlink is precisely this -- there is otherwise no near-term market for greatly increased launch capacity. Starlink actually doesn't make too much sense from a purely technical perspective: in wireless point-to-point communications, distance is your enemy squared, both in terms of signal power and density. And it only gets worse when you have to punch through a cloud layer. But it is also the only near-term application that could absorb the launch volume offered by the Starship, so the two kind of feed off each other. This is not unlike the past ISS - Space Shuttle relationship, but at least the public is not paying for it this time.
There was no immediate market for low-orbit launch capacity in the manner of Starlink: SpaceX essentially created that market by being its own customer (and having access to cheap excess launch capacity.) Now there are multiple networks being launched, some at higher orbits.
The first question is whether even more low-cost launch access will continue to create more new applications like this one. The second question is whether the business projections for Starship already assume that's the case.
I would hope with all that mass to orbit you can also work on space debris cleanup. For example using lasers somehow.
The energy and velocity and economics and distances just don't add up for that. (I would love to be wrong)
Solar powered satellites in counter-rotating orbits. A low powered laser focused on the leading edge of a piece of debris will (very) slowly bleed velocity until it drops into a decaying orbit. It'd be exceptionally slow, but with machine vision you can just let it auto-acquire targets unattended for a few decades or centuries.
I would imagine the incentives being aligned (SX can’t make full economic and cultural Starship ROI if there is a planetsized wall of debris they can’t fly through) means that there will be multiple independent overlapping checks both private and government for each launch mission to ensure that it doesn’t become worse.
SpaceX stands to lose just as much as the rest of us if they fuck this up, possibly more.
Unsure if facetious, but geostationary is a single orbit, so the crowding is end to end. The space outside of that one orbit is infinite and will never be a “wall”.
I'd bet there is a very wide gray zone between the current situation, and a "planetsized wall of debris", which badly damaged SpaceX's bottom line.
And, in much of that gray zone, SpaceX could be the very profitable leader in a booming market for launching all the replacement satellites, heavier collision-"resistant" satellites, and debris-sweeping satellites.
This is a good point, but I thought the fundamental idea of Kessler syndrome is a cascade trigger point which rapidly and inevitably becomes the point of no return at which the effects become inescapable.
Guess: Doom-preaching scientists often have vested interests in preserving very expensive, hard-to-replace satellites - say, Hubble. Journalists know that "more doom" => "more clicks". Nationalists and military folks love to talk smack about other nations' debris-spreading accidents and ASAT activities. And the whole canon and mindset of Kessler-ology was established before SpaceX made launch (of replacement satellites) anywhere near so quick and cheap as it would be now.
Climate crisis, trade crisis, space crisis … time for a crisis crisis.
If/When it becomes a real crisis, I'm sure other countries with nascent space industries will then be asked to limit their launches to avoid space debris and when they occasionally launch a satellite you can bet there will be debates and articles about how they are the ones contributing to space debris.
The greatest one is the meta-crisis of mans permanent disability to handle his technological archievments and come to reasonable terms with the limitations imposed by what is essence a mental wheel chair.
Instead we have either the total idealisation, of a utopist - all will be good, all obstacles can be overcome, just more of the same approaches, disasters be damned. The education will fix it. 6 billion, in remedial school, forever.
The other is basically naturalism, snuggling to your emotions is the only thing left, fall back to natural behaviour, no matter how disastrous the consequences and disjunct the circumstances. Ignore all those societies who walked down that road into disaster.
There is almost nobody out in the open in the middle ground. Cataloguing the disabilities, the side-effects and what we still can and cant do, planning moderate dreams and longterm projects that are realistic, even with the roof of the planet coming down.
Surely we must rid ourselves from a story with any finality, as it stands, we reach for something, but we've no idea what.
For most people, a better life is a life where their children are healthy, nourished, well-educated and living in peace (technology be damned). More importantly, for most people, a better life for themselves is one of extremely little, basic food, peace, community, movement.
All those children grow up to find what makes them happy is less, not more. We all know it. It's the intangibles, not the material. It's the people, our pets, the sun shining and a bird singing.
The end isn't worth the means, maybe instead of looking for some quant to see it all, we could just see ourselves and move forward slowly with what we know to be good and true, without falling on our face trying to punch a baby.
You might enjoy https://whatsin.space/
Which describes itself as "What's in Space is a realtime 3D map of objects in Earth orbit, visualized using WebGL"
I think you meant to share that link: https://youtu.be/yIsPbysinKw
Cheers for that.
I actually intended to share: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2025/04/Space_Debr...
which is the European Space Agency page link that wraps their 8 minute space debris documentary.
I didn't notice the URL is modified on click through to the generic ESA "space debris" catchall page :/
Youtube hosts the same content .. but lacks the gravitas of the ESA creator host page.
HN allows me to edit the submission title but not the submitted URL.
It looks like this points to a landing page which includes a video with the same title: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRR5f68g3_Q. Is that what was being submitted here?
I believe OP intended to link to this page, which is a text article and a self-hosted (esa.int) video,
https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2025/04/Space_Debr... ("Space Debris: Is it a Crisis?")
The page is borked in a way that makes it tricky to find its canonical link.
They've separately mirrored their documentary on YT, which is here,
When we are locked in by the Kessler Syndrome, are the extra terresterial aliens then also locked out from trying to «visit» us? ;)
Serious answer to an unserious question: probably not!
If you're travelling between stars, you do actually need star trek sci-fi shields. The relative velocity turns interstellar dust into bullets that would obliterate an unshielded ship. Assuming those shields can operate in proximity to a planet, they could simply shove their way through the debris cloud.
Alternately, an interstellar ship probably has a lot of power to throw around and likely a lot of time they're willing to spend. It's not unreasonable to think that a starship would be equipped to deal with some amount of orbital debris. Probably point defense lasers or something. Maybe a tractor beam.
Is this problem solvable by something similar to https://theoceancleanup.com/ ? The search space is much larger, granted, but once you figure out a way to efficiently spot a piece of debris, you could use a <insert name of magical device here> to bump the debris towards outer space?
Generally the material goes the other way nowadays. In Low Earth Orbit debris even deorbits itself within a few years (or few decades for the higher reaches) through natural orbital decline taking it into the atmosphere where it burns up.
There are startups and research programmes working on Active Debris Removal using everything from nets to lasers to destroy or divert debris (as well as larger tugs to remove whole satellites). It's just an expensive problem to solve, and if Kessler Syndrome were to occur, you wouldn't necessarily want to pause space launches to wait for orbits to be cleared, especially not if you'd just lost critical satellites...
Pushing things deeper into space is tricky because you need to increase both sides of the orbit. It's more common to push things down (or increase atmospheric drag) so that even if the top of the orbit initially stays in a problematic area, the low side gets lower and lower until the object is deornited
It's probably easier and better to push it down or try to evaporate it with laser from a comfortable distance.
The problem is solvable by stopping people like Musk from putting 42,000 satellites in space.
Especially when the problem he is solving i.e. global access to internet is already solved just not to the level we would want it.
So as a society we have to ask what is more important: watching Netflix on a yacht or having the ability to someday explore the universe.
Or we could just make a rule that all large constellations have to be put into an orbit under 500 miles where Kessler isn't really an issue and we could have our cake and eat it too.
I heard StarLink satellites eventually re-enter the atmosphere when they are not orbit-stable. Thus this technology is bad for life on earth when it is lauched into space and again when decommissioned.
Here an article on that:
https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/are-starlinks-satellites-...
Quite a crazy example of how costs are externalized, while profits are accumulated at the top.
Why is it bad ? Like compared to lets say a car or any number of industrial products ?
Satellites comprised mainly of aluminium burn up in the upper atmosphere. This likely reduces the ozone layer, as that's where the chemical reactions take place, unlike industrial activity on the ground. A certain amount of aluminium gets injected into the upper atmosphere by meteorites without any human activity involved, but the quantities burned up by modern satellite constellations will significantly exceed that. Nothing different about Starlink satellites compared with anyone else's operating in LEO, but they do operate more than anyone else.
There's considerably more aluminum oxides in the stratosphere from solid rocket motors than satellite reentires, and that's been going on since the 1970's. The 135 Space Shuttle launches burned 160 tons of aluminum powder, per launch, in their SRB's. (22 kilotons in total?) An Ariane 6 launch burns 55 or 110 tons (2 or 4 boosters).
The largest satellite payloads are 20 tons in a launch.
(Al2O3 isn't even the highest-impact ozone depletor within the space industry; that's chlorine. Also from solid rocket fuel).
Yes, I agree launches also contribute and increase frequency is also a plausible risk factor (and is significant increases in launch frequency themselves driven by megaconstellations, though I don't think the Falcon 9 is as problematic as the Shuttle was) Main difference is that the satellites lose most of their mass in the relevant zone, whereas launches pass through it as quickly as possible. Satellites are small, but Starlink's deorbiting cycle is expected to reach 2 tonnes per day.
Why are we comparing it to other things that also have negative ecological consequences? Cars also being bad for the environment doesn't make ozone-depleating space-litter any better
> I heard StarLink satellites eventually re-enter the atmosphere when they are not orbit-stable. Thus this technology is bad for life on earth when it is lauched into space and again when decommissioned.
The fact that they re-enter by itself is not the problem. The problem is that they contain aluminium:
> When Starlink’s satellites reach the end of their lives, they burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere and leave behind small particles of aluminum oxide. These travel down into the ozone layer, which absorbs harmful ultraviolet radiation. Researchers from the University of Southern California found that these oxides have increased eightfold from 2016 to 2022.
> University of Southern California found that these oxides have increased eightfold from 2016 to 2022.
DOGE about to cancel funding for USC
USC is already rescinding PhD offers due to federal funding that got pulled
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