Cleaning up space junk is expensive, so NASA and the world may need a cash advance…

Recently, two satellites collided in outer space. The debris produced by the incident has added to what already amounts to a great galactic junkyard that has clogged up orbit around the Earth. Veronika Oleksyn reports for the Associated Press that numerous nations agree that a “cosmic cleanup” is in order. Others say that preventing future collisions is a better way to spend the money, and that the cleanup efforts would themselves cause collisions.

However, that won’t clean up the mess, will it?

How much junk is out there?

Oleksyn references Nicholas L. Johnson, NASA’s chief scientist for orbital debris. He said that there are nearly 19,000 objects in low and high orbit around Earth. About 900 of the objects are old satellites, but the vast majority is simply… junk. And the more junk there is, the more likely collisions will become. Johnson is one of many supporters of the clean-up approach. In advance, the cash required would need to be earmarked, and the outlay would be considerable.

One idea involves attaching balloons to the junk, which will “increase their atmospheric drag and bring them back to Earth faster.” Another idea requires the use an “electrodynamic tether” which could be controlled from the ground, said Johnson, foresees attaching a 10-mile (16-kilometer) electrodynamic tether to debris that would generate a current, which then could be controlled from the ground enabling technicians to bring it down. It’s the lasso approach.

Study it, sure, but you still have to clean up your mess

Brian Weeden, technical consultant at the nonprofit Secure World Foundation, wants to merely study where the junk is so that alerts can be issued. Ideally, that system of tracking and cataloging will be used worldwide, but only a handful of nations have expressed even informal interest so far. Again, the cost is prohibitive, and a cash advance may be the only way to get things moving. Perhaps when there’s enough debris out there to block out the sun and create a true “Dark Age,” we’ll have figured something out…

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