Space Junk, What Goes Up Must Come Down
Stanford Graduate School of Business
Mathematical analysis by two Stanford researchers suggests that if space programs around the world could be forced to take out their own “garbage,” the problem of colliding space debris could be reduced to less than one chance in a thousand that a live satellite would be damaged by a passing object….
To address the problem, NASA researchers have suggested creating 1,000-kilometer-long (roughly 600-mile) tethers to literally lasso some of the fragments and drag them closer to the atmosphere, where friction eventually would burn them up. Removing the current accumulation from orbit would reduce future collisions. “The problem is there’s no cost-effective technology for doing it,” says Lawrence Wein, the Paul E. Holden Professor of Management Science at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the author of a study recently published in Advances in Space Research.
A better approach than building new technologies to guard against space junk, argue Wein and coauthor Andrew Bradley, a doctoral student at Stanford’s Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering, is to emphasize compliance with rules already on NASA’s books requiring objects be removed from orbit within 25 years of their launch.
“Spacecraft are supposed to have enough ‘gas’ in their tanks to propel them downward toward the atmosphere when their life cycle is concluded,” says Wein. “But international compliance, while perhaps greater than 50 percent, is not extremely high.”
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The problem of space debris must be solved first before we getting further with space exploration to the Moon, Mars or opening Spacehotels or lanch new satelites. Savety first = prevent new crashes in space! How longer we will wait how more terrible it will be!