I'm talking to a journalist in a bit about NASA's new "space sustainability strategy" and this one sentence from the abstract seems to sum it up:
"Given the substantial upfront expenditures required to develop and deploy remediation capabilities and the potential delay in receiving benefits, these motivations do not appear to be sufficient to incentivize immediate action"
I'm going to have to read this more carefully, but did NASA just say they don't care about orbit?!
Further critiques on reading further: their satellite collision model only includes US satellites as of a couple years ago (there are THOUSANDS more now than there were a couple years ago!) They do not include satellite-on-satellite collisions, and they don't including the runaway effects of increasing debris after collisions.
So... I think this report is not nearly as worried as it should be about collisions.
@grb090423 The report came out, but I would imagine they started writing it quite a while ago. Starlink had 1800 satellites about 2 years ago, so probably then.
Thank you for responding. It does seem bizarre to release something that's so out of date. Satellite amounts change continually but that is generally known and could be taken into account.
I have an awful feeling they are past caring because they don't have the funding.
So, they didn't include a realistic number of future satellites (they didn't even get close to the CURRENT number of satellites by the time they finished the report) and they seem to have horribly underestimated the costs to operators when all of their satellites have collisions, and the estimates of costs for removing debris are all wild guesses. And they conclude that it's not worth the $$ to remove debris or limit future launches to protect orbit for the future.
@sundogplanets So this means collisions are inevitable, there's no plan, and that the (substantial number of?) fragments that don't de-orbit from collision will result in an increasing cloud of damage to other satellites? Hypothetically.
Well, I got to tell a journalist exactly what I thought about this report, so that's pretty satisfying. Hopefully he includes it in his short article for National Geographic!
@sundogplanets I was actually going to reach out and see what you thought, and then I read the report and was like this doesn't even feel worth covering because it feels so lackluster
@skrishna Well, what I told the other journalist was that this is a good step in the right direction (having a statement at all about "space sustainability" is a good thing, I think), but it doesn't go NEARLY far enough (for all the reasons listed above)
@sundogplanets It's not worth the cost to clean up orbit because they're just going to immediately trash our orbitals again with space war. At least, that's what their actions are saying to me
@sundogplanets question: won’t all the debris and satellites near the 100.000 holdback a significant amount of sun ray towards the earth, and wouldn’t that lead to compensation of global warming by greenhouse gases? 🤔
@Andreas@sundogplanets Sadly, I doubt it. Compare the cross-sectional area of say 100k satellites to the size of the earth, even assuming such satellites re-radiate all energy away from the earth, which in fact they won’t do.
@sundogplanets Serious question: were they laughably out of touch with the real world or is somebody bought off?
And I’m serious. It takes some social skills and knowledge to navigate up to these job positions. When they can’t even get the current number close, somethings fishy.
@KanaMauna I don't get the sense that this is malicious, just scientists working slightly outside their normal area of expertise and perhaps not talking quite enough to scientists who DO have this area of expertise.
What seems necessary is a very serious effort to build a simulation of LEO traffic and stress test it against current and future real deployments of spacecraft. The simulation needs to include realistic and pessimistic post collision Kessler cascade simulations and potential mitigation measures.
Without this we are literally flying blind and headed for certain catastrophe.
@sundogplanets I had read that as a statement of prioritizing preventing creation of new debris and monitoring the debris that now exists over trying to remove debris.
@michael_w_busch Yeah, I think you are correct. I was just blown away by "there's no economic pressure to remove debris" when I have every expectation that debris is going to make runaway collisions that destroy all LEO satellites and make LEO unusable in the near future. I guess they didn't think that scenario is as likely as I think it is? Not sure if that is comforting or not...
@sundogplanets@michael_w_busch There was a recentish statement from a large LEO satellite constellation re if we lose a satellite we have 1000s more. I really don’t think they believe in the Kessler syndrome or that it can’t be fixed by just launching tons of replacement satellites.
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