Getting Crowded in Space

unbelievable...!! if you read some of those links... you have to shake your head.... it's the same "OLD" mentality of... there is no problem.. and when there is a problem we'll look at it then....

just like the environment.. we ignored it until there is a problem.. NOW.. it cost to much money to fix....

Scotty.. hurry.. beam me the hell up....

Well Petem,

I don't think anyone will pay attention until someone gets killed. Even then we will here, "Oh it was just a one in a million chance." We will see about that!!
Everywhere humans go we leave something of ourselves. Unfortunately that means our junk too. I would hate for the night sky to become a cluttered orbital landfill:(

Energizing, Captain

I personally am willing to fund a billion dollar space shuttle mission to retrieve each of the million space junk objects, so that we can clean up the space environment...

If it saves One! Life!, its worth any price!

Realistically, we will have to wait for more advanced technology, which might allow an automated device with solar powered ion drive to slowly go around a collect the largest objects. In the meanwhile, we will have to measure the risk/cost-benefit ratio, and accept the occasional impact. The fractional cost of each impact, spread over the cost of all the current space activity, is acceptable.

About the lowest cost route would be to add a control system to the Shuttle's external fuel tank and boost it all the way to orbit on launch, then fill it with expanding foam and put it on intersecting orbit with some of the smaller pieces of space junk. The junk would end up trapped in the foam. When 'full' or the fuel is de-orbit and let it burn up.
Cons: the tank would need to have its own fuel/control system designed and installed, and determining the proper orbital intersection for a 'catch' would be difficult as the collision energy would probably have to fall into a small range.

What we need is a....gigantic space Molly Maid! Now where's Spaceball One when you need it?

Seriously, the automated approach isn't just smart, it's pretty much the only way we can go. We don't have a choice, as spending the amount of man-hours it would take to clear the skies is too great, and the chance of something bad happening to any astronauts running around from garbage pile to garbage pile would be too fuel intensive. There's also the fact that so many maneuvers would entail additional dangers that aren't regularly faced on a standard mission.

So, who's for investing in the SpaceRoomba?

You mean, boost it to greater than maybe 600 km where all the junk we care about is? Sure. Add a sizable RCS to the flimsy shell of the fuel tank on a man-rated mission? No problem. Intersect the junk orbits at just the right speed to absorb the junk without tearing off pieces of the foam and tank and creating more junk while ensuring the deorbit system remains unharmed and propellant bottled up? Piece o' cake. Then, perform controlled reentry with an aerodynamically unstable, humongous dirty space sponge? Oh, yeah, NASA does that every other week.

This is just like global warming. Fake!

Possibly, if the space junk is made up of metal, the satellite sent to retrieve the junk could have some kind of magnetic attractor, and the pieces could float to, say, its collecting bay.

I do not know why anyone would want to deorbit this stuff in the first place; it cost a pretty penny to put it up there. Why not collect all the space junk in a reasonably safe orbit (not at LEO where atmospheric drag still has some effect), all in one location so when we develop space manufacturing techniques, we can smelt down this old junk in a solar powered furnace to acquire some of the raw materials we would need to build the next generation of the ISS.

To move this stuff around, we could develop solar-powered ion tugs to move this stuff into a safe orbit. We have had some good successes with ion spacecraft so far.

We throw too much away here on Earth. There would be a lot of perfectly good titanium, aluminum and such out there is space, why not reuse it instead of trashing it. It is already there, why not reuse it.

Silly me too! Why waste all that xenon for ion power when maybe a perfectly good solar sail would do the trick.

Where did I put my giant space net?