One to think about, especially if you’re putting stuff up via any means!
Something fundamental has changed in space. After decades of slow growth, the number of spacecraft launched annually has doubled every two years since 2015. And the trend shows no sign of slowing, with tens of thousands of planned spacecraft to be launched over the next few years. This exponential growth is reminiscent of Moore’s Law, the decades-long observation that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles every two years. The consequences of the continuation of Moore’s law and the ever-increasing computing power for lower costs over the past six decades has changed the course of our society, our economy, and our way of life. Could we be witnessing a similar revolution in space?
Gordon Moore wrote his seminal paper, from which Moore’s Law derives its name, when the exponential growth he observed was based on less than six years of data. Similarly, the trend line for this proposed Moore’s Law for Space has only been exponentially growing for just over eight years. In that same spirit, it is useful to consider what might happen if this trend continues.
Full article, HERE from Spacenews.com
And the graphic from LEOLABS-
It’s a ‘tad’ busy up there, and yes, the Astronauts are trained for the ISS taking a hit and how to survive it.
What is getting worse is the launch phase, as you have to get ‘through’ all that mess to get up to altitude. I can’t help but wonder what is going to happen when we lose a crew, or some other country does, when they take a major hit…
It’s getting more and more crowded up there. They may need to put red lights up to control the traffic. If not the satellites will start crashing into each other eventually. Then what goes up must come down but who knows where?
The aircraft and air travel industry grew slowly enough that after a few collisions Big Gubbmint stepped in and created the FAA and air traffic of all sorts is overseen by a network of human controllers because gubbmint. In the drones industry, collision avoidance is still mostly the responsibility of whomever is navigating the craft. Kinda like SS Frankfurt *not* relaying radio messages from RMS Titanic because Titanic’s radio operators were Marconi employees and Frankfurt’s operators were Telefunken employees – the equipment came with operators, just like many US land-based radio stations had RCA operators. For now in the drone world, there is no supreme overseer of drone traffic, and a farmer selectively applying insecticides over a field with a drone is at risk of collision with an autonomous Amazon or Dominos delivery drone taking a shortcut across the field.
I am seeing this in the patent application world as there has been a huge surge in onboard collision avoidance inventions (many using LIDAR.) Many are taking the approach of detecting and avoiding a “dumb” flying objects like a toy drone or RC aircraft, and rocketeers of the future may need to include some means of detection and short distance maneuverability on the way up and through, especially with a lot of “dead” junk up there.
One cool drone company I saw 2 years ago at a tradeshow is proposing a line of microwave towers from around Spokane WA to somewhere in Colorado, and drone delivery companies would pay a fee or subscription to have their flights managed by the system – kind like setting up “sea lanes” to organize travel in each direction. Wild stuff.
Big Sky – Little Aircraft theory.
People look at those maps but what they don’t understand was that if those satellites were represented on the same scale the Earth is, you wouldn’t be able to see them.
If you took every satellite in orbit today and set them on the ground side by side, how much area would they cover? Bet it would be less than 20 acres.
Heck, I’d be surprised if it covered more than 6.
Same with shotgun pellets.
I wonder what percentage of those were launched by SpaceX.
Most. SpaceX almost reached 100 launches last year. Each launch of Starlink was between 50 satellites (early versions) and 22 satellites (the latest version.) Not all SpaceX launches were Starlinks, but a significant number were.
John- Not only that, but how BIG a piece where.
TPG- Interesting…
John- Some of them are fairly large, but the real issue is speed/size. It doesn’t take much to hole a satellite or space station and make it non-functional
TOS- Probably less than 20% would be my guess.
The orbital dangers, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, are not about the known knowns, nor the known unknowns, but more of the unknown knowns and the unknown unknowns.
Meaning. We know where all the satellites are (the known knowns.) We know where all the significant pieces of debris are, the ones we can ‘see’ with eye or radar (the known unknowns.) We even know or can guess where weird stuff like very old pieces parts that occasionally show up, like old Apollo equipment, are or will be (the unknown knowns – stuff we know is out there but we really don’t know it until it pops up on radar or on view.)
It’s the unknown unknowns, stuff that’s too small to track or debris from various antisatellite tests (we did ours in very low orbit, China and the USSR, not so much, heck, the USSR had a cannon in space and fired the damned thing) that are the real threats.
But there are companies working on it. Various ion-thruster ‘tugs’ that can latch on or grab or stick to old dead crap and push it either up into a parking orbit in known ‘garbage patches’ or down into the atmosphere to burn up. There are plans for drogue tape sticky thingies that will attach to a piece of debris and basically serve as a ‘sea anchor’ to slow a piece down and thus deorbit it. There are even plans for net scoopers or sticky walls to ‘catch’ things from either big sized to micro sized.
It requires, duh, a cheap launch to orbit rate. Some of them have already been tested, thanks to SpaceX’s ride-share programs where smaller satellites can ride up if space is available. And, of course, once Starship and it’s 100 tons to orbit, soon to be 150 or 200 tons to orbit (or more if on an expendable launch) the price per kilogram to orbit will drop to the hundreds if not lower.
This is all known, about the debris issue. Saw a NOVA program maybe 30 years ago about it. And the answer, of course, is as always is cost. It was more cost effective to launch satellites without ways to deorbit than it was to launch with deorbit capabilities. Even so, most commercial satellites after 1980 have deorbit or parking orbit capabilities built into them, unless the satellite goes dead before the ability to move it is used. But now in Space 2.0 (the age of private space launchers) the cost is coming down enough that something or somethings can be done about it.
So, the orbital equivalent of the NAMCO game “Katamaro Damacy” where you can roll up all the garbage into a big ball? 🙂
typo: “katamari”
Moore’s law gets cited for a lot of predictions, but physics puts some pretty hard limits on us.
It still takes a certain amount of energy to lift a given mass into orbit. Barring some real sci-fi tech like anti-grav, it always will.
We are still using chemical rockets, why? Because we have nothing else yet that can safely and economically do the job.
I’m thinking that mass space-transport is going to require a technological advance as great as the transition from the horse to combustion engine. (And I’m including the steam engine in that)… We’ve done an awful lot with the principle that if you burn something, you can create expanding gas and use that to make something move, but it has hard physical limits.
Electricity has hard limits – so far – on our ability to store it.
Nuclear shows more promise if we can crack the cold-fusion nut, but turning heat into motion without requiring large amounts of reaction-mass seems even further out of our reach.
We talk about FTL , “wormholes”, “jumping” and “warp-drives” but we still can’t make a really worthwhile electric car.
So far we haven’t been able to take the “fi” out of sci-fi.
There’s a need for a space elevator.
Do the physics actually work, and do we have the materials fit for the job?
It’s a cool idea, but so is teleportation.
BEST think like a “space elevator” I’d ever seen was this bit of CGI fun from a SIGGRAPH convention in the mid-1980s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGKu-u947cA
Years later I cracked up in the middle of watching “Total Recall” in the theatre as they had used the spinning Botco sign as an ad on the onboard screens of the public transportation on Mars.
No audio of course, so nobody got to hear the tagline:
“Botco. Tomorrow’s fuels. Tomorrow’s prices.”
Airborne collision avoidance without ground control is a reality and has been for 20 years. Look up “FLARM”. Used by sailplane pilots and others. See also TCAS.
Flarm uses GPS to broadcast your position and altitude and listens for same signals from others and displays target position relative to you.
Needs to use a longer range frequency pair and be automated in drones.
Not too difficult.
One BIG problem is orbital dynamics. Fire a rocket in orbit and the maximum effect is 1/2 orbit away. That is, if you’re in Earth orbit and need a little course correction to avoid some junk, you should make that correction when you are on the other side of Earth from the projected collision point. You can’t just look at what’s near, you have to look at _everything_ and figure where it will be when it and you have both swung halfway around Earth.