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The Space Thread

Cundies undies said:
I'm going to respond as if you aren't a troll... its a vague of hope of mine to meet a forum of non trolls, but nvm.

I am an ex MoD electronic engineer, I began my career working on communications satellites before moving onto making flying things not.
I admit I am not the most intelligent person I have met in my field, however I have "networked" with Dr Brown and the likes.

Space is "larger" at these altitudes than say, the surface of earth, that's not a hard concept to grasp, farther out on a circle is bigger, even flat earthers can grasp that.

However, the average car crash on earth, (although contested) is less than 30mph. Add in gravity at this level and most debris lands within 12 feet.
The latest incident involving Space X (because its always Elon talked about), happened at approx. 14.4miles ps, or around 52000 Mph.
The ESA sat had to take unilateral action, because SpaceX didn't receive the info due to a "bug". Make of that what you will.

Now add in the 3000 sats that spaceX has, plus added they want (another 4000 was what I heard... pls note I heard). China has 2 "private" operators wanting similar access, India ofc wants theirs, EU is planning on launching another 600 (I have heard more). Russia will want theirs, etc etc.

It is all explained, far more concisely than I can, in Dr Kesslers paper, submitted in 1978. general Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

I cant find the edu link, however I can share it myself https://drive.google.com/file/d/1V3WxucRUZfRQN86tZzW4aRfoMS_-FM-M/view?usp=drive_link

Hopefully anyway. :)
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I'm not sure the analogy with cars works.

Cars are driven (almost entirely) by amateurs. By people with the free will to turn, brake or accelerate in any manner and at any time. Often (from my own observations), these movements are without any form of sound reason.

A better analogy would be aircraft. They travel on planned routes at planned speeds at planned times.

There are around 7500-8000 satellites in orbit in an area, as you correctly pointed out, far larger than that of the surface of our planet. It's also 3 dimensional in a way that our roads are not. There are well over a billion cars on the roads. Whilst I'm sure it's not intentional, that kind of analogy could easily be considered to be scaremongering.

I understand the concern with Kessler syndrome but if those collisions were to start due to bad actors or sloppy build/coding then the increase in satellite numbers will barely be a bump on the chart compared to the number of pieces of debris.

StarLink satellites are in low earth orbit - their paths (and that of any debris) decay and will eventually burn up. The plan might be to launch a lot more, but you also have to factor in how many will be removed from orbit in the next few years.
 
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scaramanga said:
I'm not sure the analogy with cars works.

Cars are driven (almost entirely) by amateurs. By people with the free will to turn, brake or accelerate in any manner and at any time. Often (from my own observations), these movements are without any form of sound reason.

A better analogy would be aircraft. They travel on planned routes at planned speeds at planned times.


I understand the concern with Kessler syndrome but if those collisions were to start due to bad actors or sloppy build/coding then the increase in satellite numbers will barely be a bump on the chart compared to the number of pieces of debris.

StarLink satellites are in low earth orbit - their paths (and that of any debris) decay and will eventually burn up. The plan might be to launch a lot more, but you also have to factor in how many will be removed from orbit in the next few years.
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I'm sure there's a way to reply to parts of the convo, I am however pretty ignorant of social media, so I will do it in order.

Cars are driven by amateurs, mostly. I am sure you have seen the clip of (I believe) waymo cabs in the car park, honking like fudge at 2 am in some car park because they couldn't sort out wtf was happening...

Also I would like to point out this gem

Now, I realise that's only 2 examples from 1 company, that for some reason is allowed to trial these on the road. I would also point out Tesla with their "full self driving" mode which apparently comes with the ability to mow down motorcyclists as a baseline package.
You may now be saying to yourself, "yeah but that's sod all to do with space companies", and I applaud that thought.

I say to you, have a look at Eutelsat's one web incident, just a few days ago. They fudged up with leap years (somewhat like Y2K) and lost contact with all their sats, 80% were restored on the 1st, 100% on the 2nd.
Now luckily this happened only to the ground based systems, had it happened to the space based systems, which use, like GPS, position and time, then avoidance moves happen (if they happen at all) either twice, not at all, or delayed by a day or 2.

StarLink takes about 5-6 yrs to decay, being very low in LEO, however LEO is the easiest of orbits to screw up. If one or two sats crash, then the debris is de-orbited in, lets call it 6 yrs (for musks, could be up to 10). However when a collision happens the debris does not just go sideways or down, it also goes up... yes I know that isn't quite true when you start talking about space orientation, gravity, impacted freefall etc, but debris spreads, by quite a lot. It can easily take 200 meter diameter and on and on.

The thing with LEO, it's easy to fudge up, its also the quickest to recover. So most of the worry isn't about that, its about higher up. A clusterfudge in LEO may stop launches for a decade, (are you gonna provide insurance?), When it starts to get slightly higher, recovery increases by orders or magnitude.

I've lost where I was... err next ish. Oh analogy of aircraft. Aircraft collide quite a lot, a "boat load" if you like. They also, if you fly a Boeing, dive straight to the ground, or eject, possibly doors?

Even if you want to go really really er deep, there was, about 3 years ago, a collision of submarines in the Atlantic, by 2 countries that co-operate fully, their plans and movements are fully approved and prep-planned. If that had happened in space where the debris stays in play for years (maybe decades, centuries or millennia) and travelled 1000 times faster then I wouldn't be going sailing.

From my friends and wider network, the argument that it is a thing is no longer in doubt, the argument is now, has it started?.
And despite movies like Interstellar, it will take decades, if not centuries to have a conclusive answer. (I believe 900Km orbit takes a millennia to decay).

Also while I've been typing this, NASA's JPL has been evacuated, so that could potentially take any human fault checking out of the question (if that was JPL's job).
 
Cundies undies said:
I'm sure there's a way to reply to parts of the convo, I am however pretty ignorant of social media, so I will do it in order.

Cars are driven by amateurs, mostly. I am sure you have seen the clip of (I believe) waymo cabs in the car park, honking like fudge at 2 am in some car park because they couldn't sort out wtf was happening...

Also I would like to point out this gem

Now, I realise that's only 2 examples from 1 company, that for some reason is allowed to trial these on the road. I would also point out Tesla with their "full self driving" mode which apparently comes with the ability to mow down motorcyclists as a baseline package.
You may now be saying to yourself, "yeah but that's sod all to do with space companies", and I applaud that thought.

I say to you, have a look at Eutelsat's one web incident, just a few days ago. They fudged up with leap years (somewhat like Y2K) and lost contact with all their sats, 80% were restored on the 1st, 100% on the 2nd.
Now luckily this happened only to the ground based systems, had it happened to the space based systems, which use, like GPS, position and time, then avoidance moves happen (if they happen at all) either twice, not at all, or delayed by a day or 2.

StarLink takes about 5-6 yrs to decay, being very low in LEO, however LEO is the easiest of orbits to screw up. If one or two sats crash, then the debris is de-orbited in, lets call it 6 yrs (for musks, could be up to 10). However when a collision happens the debris does not just go sideways or down, it also goes up... yes I know that isn't quite true when you start talking about space orientation, gravity, impacted freefall etc, but debris spreads, by quite a lot. It can easily take 200 meter diameter and on and on.

The thing with LEO, it's easy to fudge up, its also the quickest to recover. So most of the worry isn't about that, its about higher up. A clusterfudge in LEO may stop launches for a decade, (are you gonna provide insurance?), When it starts to get slightly higher, recovery increases by orders or magnitude.

I've lost where I was... err next ish. Oh analogy of aircraft. Aircraft collide quite a lot, a "boat load" if you like. They also, if you fly a Boeing, dive straight to the ground, or eject, possibly doors?

Even if you want to go really really er deep, there was, about 3 years ago, a collision of submarines in the Atlantic, by 2 countries that co-operate fully, their plans and movements are fully approved and prep-planned. If that had happened in space where the debris stays in play for years (maybe decades, centuries or millennia) and travelled 1000 times faster then I wouldn't be going sailing.

From my friends and wider network, the argument that it is a thing is no longer in doubt, the argument is now, has it started?.
And despite movies like Interstellar, it will take decades, if not centuries to have a conclusive answer. (I believe 900Km orbit takes a millennia to decay).

Also while I've been typing this, NASA's JPL has been evacuated, so that could potentially take any human fault checking out of the question (if that was JPL's job).
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Sorry, I thought we were talking about LEO as you mentioned StarLink.

Which orbital level is it you're concerned with them?
 
Bezos latest Rocket (New Glenn) was due for its first launch today but has been postponed - not due to weather - and has not yet rescheduled.

Also NASA set out its approach to returning the Martian rock samples collected by the Perseverance Rover. See link here for more information:

NASA sample return proposal
 
scaramanga said:
Sorry, I thought we were talking about LEO as you mentioned StarLink.

Which orbital level is it you're concerned with them?
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LEO is without doubt the most at risk. It does however contain very little of value. Oh a multitude of Billionaires and various Govs will cry (cause of spy sats) and my poor expensive and monopolised internet will be impacted. The biggest thing that will be impacted from LEO, from a human pov is Sat phones (Iridium Go), this will result in human lives lost, it's used by ppl in remote places doing risky adventurous things, think mountain trail hikers and ocean sailors etc. They use it to get weather updates and daily check-ins etc.
Other than that, earth sciences (climate monitoring) and google earth.

I read (or rather scanned) a NASA paper a few years ago that painstakingly went into detail about size, surface area, colour, general shape and material for minor collisions in (and this is my memories fault) either LEO in general or ISS lvl specifically, I really cant rem which, but the result in a generalisation was for small collisions (i.e. bits of a big thing) were mostly deorbited in 4-5 months, with some stuff lasting a year. I'll point out that doesn't include massive collisions of 2 or more sats.

I have absolutely no doubt, that if a catastrophic event was to start in LEO that the main Govs, if they got on the same song sheet, were decisive and steadfast, the whole thing would be over in 6-7 years tops. Simply say if your sat has fuel to make it to X altitude, maintain that alt, perform X avoidance manoeuvres and perform a deorbit burn afterwards, you're good, otherwise deorbit now.

Law basically says, "You do what your country of launch tells you". I also have no doubt it would never happen like that, MP's yap, cry, put off. Lawyers insert themselves and corporations lie, say yeah we're good for that, and suddenly, oh that prolonged burn vibrated of the fuel tube. Prove it lolz.

MEO is the real fudger, all the sat nav systems are there, most of the important communications stuff (mobile broadband included), PLB's/EPIRBs etc and this is the clincher, it would last well beyond our great great great great (and on) grandkids, you're talking millennia here. LEO would be a nuisance, MEO sets navigation back to the 80's and will slow down flight control/landing so less flights. Cargo shipping will no longer be under the watchful eye of underpaid drunks, so crap from China will no longer be so cheap.

We can live with a LEO cluster fudge, we'll be long dead before a MEO snarl-up is sorted.
 
Steve Awol...

Damn I cant quote brick

I seen that and immediately dismissed it, then I seen it quoted an "expert", UK Dir of we have a space presence or something.
It's not from Ariane, or any space launch with the possible exception of SpaceX. Not that I'm saying its SpaceX, because it isn't.
3 reasons,
1, Its made of steel. Ariane 5 and 4 before it were (and I would like to say just about every rocket ever) used Aluminium and/or CFRP, exclusively for that part, maybe Gemini? long time ago, or steampunk.
2, It seems to be of a 2 piece design. I'd be willing to bet Scara's left gonad that everything of that size and importance, going back to WW11 at least was of a single cut.
3, It does vaguely look like the real deal, except it's way
too beefy. It simply weighs too much (which is why its not SpaceX).

For SpaceX, they use stainless steel, because it's cheap, very thermal resistant (reusability) and needs very little knowledge to manufacture. For this Item I don't believe anyone would use SS, it's easily disposable, easily made in aluminium and weighs about 1000 pounds less, so bigger payload or massive fuel saving.

As to the Director ("Expert"), I can probably say with a good degree of certainty that he's a business manager (that's basically a directors job). If he has ever seen the thing in real life, it's probably in passing to a 5 hour liquid lunch followed by blackjack and hookers. It does bear a passing semblance to it from the outside, and I think he's probably been tricked into saying what he did... "here's 3 photos Ariane debris, can you identify them?" sort of thing and he's been naïve enough to answer.
 
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For the Ariane debris, I've uploaded this file https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Y0CqAPQM-_tAdPvAaTWjMPtjcqCfnaD4/view?usp=sharing

again from my drive... I'm sure I have one from the manufacturer somewhere, lists the actual size for each module and then the amount made. Basically unless the "8 foot" is a guesstimate they are wrong.

If anyone wants it, I'll take a look, its here somewhere lol

Oh yeah it's mainly pictures so you can see the diff/similarities to the BBC article.
 
Cundies undies said:
LEO is without doubt the most at risk. It does however contain very little of value. Oh a multitude of Billionaires and various Govs will cry (cause of spy sats) and my poor expensive and monopolised internet will be impacted. The biggest thing that will be impacted from LEO, from a human pov is Sat phones (Iridium Go), this will result in human lives lost, it's used by ppl in remote places doing risky adventurous things, think mountain trail hikers and ocean sailors etc. They use it to get weather updates and daily check-ins etc.
Other than that, earth sciences (climate monitoring) and google earth.

I read (or rather scanned) a NASA paper a few years ago that painstakingly went into detail about size, surface area, colour, general shape and material for minor collisions in (and this is my memories fault) either LEO in general or ISS lvl specifically, I really cant rem which, but the result in a generalisation was for small collisions (i.e. bits of a big thing) were mostly deorbited in 4-5 months, with some stuff lasting a year. I'll point out that doesn't include massive collisions of 2 or more sats.

I have absolutely no doubt, that if a catastrophic event was to start in LEO that the main Govs, if they got on the same song sheet, were decisive and steadfast, the whole thing would be over in 6-7 years tops. Simply say if your sat has fuel to make it to X altitude, maintain that alt, perform X avoidance manoeuvres and perform a deorbit burn afterwards, you're good, otherwise deorbit now.

Law basically says, "You do what your country of launch tells you". I also have no doubt it would never happen like that, MP's yap, cry, put off. Lawyers insert themselves and corporations lie, say yeah we're good for that, and suddenly, oh that prolonged burn vibrated of the fuel tube. Prove it lolz.

MEO is the real fudger, all the sat nav systems are there, most of the important communications stuff (mobile broadband included), PLB's/EPIRBs etc and this is the clincher, it would last well beyond our great great great great (and on) grandkids, you're talking millennia here. LEO would be a nuisance, MEO sets navigation back to the 80's and will slow down flight control/landing so less flights. Cargo shipping will no longer be under the watchful eye of underpaid drunks, so crap from China will no longer be so cheap.

We can live with a LEO cluster fudge, we'll be long dead before a MEO snarl-up is sorted.
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Obviously without the natural orbit decay, MEO is a theoretically more dangerous consideration.

But it's also a really huge area. And it's less populated than the Spammer's ground on a Saturday afternoon.

Care to hazard a guess at how many satellites are in MEO?
 
scaramanga said:
Care to hazard a guess at how many satellites are in MEO?
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I'd give a guess of somewhere just shy of 200 known sats.

That looks set to grow rapidly, Methara Global is a UK based company that has plans to put 128 sats into MEO.

I think mangata networks (prob misspelled), planned around 800 split between HEO and MEO.

Viasat and others as well as various Govs have plans/permission obtained. India wants a system for broadband with a mix of orbits, US spaceforce are putting up 6 more missile warning systems (I think taking the number to 12 in total).
 
Cundies undies said:
I'd give a guess of somewhere just shy of 200 known sats.

That looks set to grow rapidly, Methara Global is a UK based company that has plans to put 128 sats into MEO.

I think mangata networks (prob misspelled), planned around 800 split between HEO and MEO.

Viasat and others as well as various Govs have plans/permission obtained. India wants a system for broadband with a mix of orbits, US spaceforce are putting up 6 more missile warning systems (I think taking the number to 12 in total).
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Sounds about right.

So let's assume worst case scenario and MEO is a layer of 0 depth at the very lowest level of MEO (because it's early and I want to simplify the calculations).

By my calculations, that's a surface area of around 882,000,000 km². Phrased another way, a space of around 750-800km² for each satellite - and that's assuming MEO is flat, which we know it isn't.

I'm not panicking any time soon.
 
scaramanga said:
Sounds about right.

So let's assume worst case scenario and MEO is a layer of 0 depth at the very lowest level of MEO (because it's early and I want to simplify the calculations).

By my calculations, that's a surface area of around 882,000,000 km². Phrased another way, a space of around 750-800km² for each satellite - and that's assuming MEO is flat, which we know it isn't.

I'm not panicking any time soon.
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I agree they are big numbers, until you realise the speed of sats in that orbit is over 11000 km/h on average and will continue to be there for longer than matters to us.

I've already stated that this problem will play out and probably not be recognised as started for decades if not longer.

I think your last line about not panicking soon sums up our different opinions nicely. I say why panic when we can actively do something now to prevent it becoming a panic situation.

I'll link this study of collision projections, I have to say GEO surprised me

 
After hearing Trump and the "we will stick a flag on Mars" claim, I did abit of reading yesterday and it seems the idea is more far fetched than it even seems. So is it purely bluster and PR? Personally I think it is
 
Grays_1890 said:
After hearing Trump and the "we will stick a flag on Mars" claim, I did abit of reading yesterday and it seems the idea is more far fetched than it even seems. So is it purely bluster and PR? Personally I think it is
Click to expand...

Probably just an excuse to fund Musk. If it leads to him going there I'm all for it.
 
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