Hacker News Reader

Comment by ohyes | Hacker News Reader

And frankly, it must be stopped. We can’t have loads and loads of space junk floating around in near earth orbit.

Space isn’t the internet, you “can’t move fast and break things,” and you can’t just create more of it. We have to be careful and systematic and decide exactly what is important enough to be placed into orbit.

Having a high cost at least prevents a glut of crap being put up there, if it doesn’t necessarily prevent meritless things from being launched.

Someone has to say humbug to this before the Lords of Silicon Valley screw it up and make the rest of us pay for it.

View on HN

Poorly placed comment when the parent was discussing things like cubesats. Tiny satellites like these are probably better in the long-run for orbital debris due to a number of reasons. Firstly, by virtue of being smaller, atmospheric drag is greater and their decay is faster given a certain orbit. Second, they're more disposable than the larger sats, meaning lower orbit more economical when weighed against the capital cost of the mass-produced device itself.

The real problem for debris is higher orbits that don't decay after a reasonable service life. Those just accumulate forever.

On that subject, you would have a point for things like SpaceX's recent idea of putting up internet satellites, because those would be slated for orbits higher than more LEO missions, and would involve a large number of heavy objects there effectively on a permanent basis.

Atmospheric drag affects small satellites more than large satellites, all other things equal?

I think it's more than as you go smaller the mass reduces faster than the drag, thus resulting in a higher amount of drag per unit of mass.

In other words, typical cubesats have a low ballistic coefficient.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_coefficient

Roughly speaking, mass (which needs to be decelerated by the drag) is proportional to the cube of the size but drag force is proportional to square of the size; so yes, atmospheric drag affects small satellites more.

I don’t see how. You miss with cubesats it still ends up being a complete fucking disaster.

The point is that this all has to be done correctly and carefully. I see a very cavalier attitude about it because of SV startup culture and the expectation that getting things wrong is okay in the name of progress.

I’ll admit I was more directly thinking about stupid publicity stunts like Tesla Roadsters in space, but the gravity of the situation doesn’t really change because a mistake is slightly less of a disaster than an apocalyptic one.

Cubesats are typically in pretty low orbits that decay fairly fast. I wouldn't worry about junk at that altitude very much.

If I am not mistaken the roadster is not orbiting the earth it is in solar orbit near or past Mars. It's not endangering earth's access to space in anyway.

The roadster is not orbiting the Earth. You lack understanding of the topic and thus fall victim to fear mongering by clickbait articles. Right now, with little done to protect from debris the chances of Kessler syndrome actually happening are tiny. Also most of the new constellations that are coming up in the following years will be in LEO where atmospheric drag is enough to get them down and burn in the atmosphere on their own within months of them malfunctioning. The problem is in higher orbits in which the amount of space is multiple orders of magnitude bigger and the number of satellites is much smaller as well. Also those higher orbits have little financial incentive for the new space age companies.

Depends on the orbit: the ISS is in an automatically decaying orbit, as are quite a lot of near-earth satellites. It's geostationary that we need to worry about crowding.

We need to worry more about LEO. Orbits decay automatically, but less and less the higher you go while still within LEO. There are many polar launches which makes debris come potentially from any direction, while in GEO all satellites go in roughly the same direction.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com