Space Debris: Is It a Crisis?

Just need to watch that one cowboy Bebop episode where they visit original earth.

It's 8.25 on myanimelist.net

Nice!

Best space-themed Anime I have seen

Was going to say that. I loved that anime.

I started watching that, but I got a little turned off it when it immediately started yelling about s*xual harassment. Maybe I'll give it another go someday

People imagine Kessler as one of those things that happens instantaneously. It's much more likely to happen over several decades. There's a good chance that we'll be able to stop it while it occurs through one of the very expensive mitigation measures that have been proposed.

Kessler is mainly a problem for things in continuous orbit, not for things leaving earth and heading to GEO and beyond.

I will solve this for you so you can worry about other things like the obsolescence of humanity and killer drones/bots.

In 200 years, we will have tamed the ability to generate energy efficiently and have relatively intelligent drones. These drones in swarms can track space debris, match their horizontal speed and push them out to outer space. Space debris will not be an issue. Maybe they can also take little bubbles of greenhouse gases and drop them out into space too.

Interesting: they got Omega to sponsor the time display.

Orbital space tourism and space manufacturing could potentially make a significant market in terms of launch mass (that is, if you launch 1000-ton facilities instead of 1-ton satellites without necessarily occupying a large number of new orbits). But this is kinda speculative at the moment.

I think the real motivation for Starlink is precisely this -- there is otherwise no near-term market for greatly increased launch capacity. Starlink actually doesn't make too much sense from a purely technical perspective: in wireless point-to-point communications, distance is your enemy squared, both in terms of signal power and density. And it only gets worse when you have to punch through a cloud layer. But it is also the only near-term application that could absorb the launch volume offered by the Starship, so the two kind of feed off each other. This is not unlike the past ISS - Space Shuttle relationship, but at least the public is not paying for it this time.

I would hope with all that mass to orbit you can also work on space debris cleanup. For example using lasers somehow.

I would imagine the incentives being aligned (SX can’t make full economic and cultural Starship ROI if there is a planetsized wall of debris they can’t fly through) means that there will be multiple independent overlapping checks both private and government for each launch mission to ensure that it doesn’t become worse.

SpaceX stands to lose just as much as the rest of us if they fuck this up, possibly more.

The term is polycrisis, and it is quite widely used. It's not multiple crises happening in parallel, but fanning each other. Such as climate change putting additional strain on supply chains, that are already strained by global conflicts.

If/When it becomes a real crisis, I'm sure other countries with nascent space industries will then be asked to limit their launches to avoid space debris and when they occasionally launch a satellite you can bet there will be debates and articles about how they are the ones contributing to space debris.

The polycrisis?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycrisis

Indeed. Too much capability, not enough wisdom about what to do with it

Reminds me of the Everything Bubble during the panny-D.

Crisis Era.

CrisisGate

The greatest one is the meta-crisis of mans permanent disability to handle his technological archievments and come to reasonable terms with the limitations imposed by what is essence a mental wheel chair.

Instead we have either the total idealisation, of a utopist - all will be good, all obstacles can be overcome, just more of the same approaches, disasters be damned. The education will fix it. 6 billion, in remedial school, forever.

The other is basically naturalism, snuggling to your emotions is the only thing left, fall back to natural behaviour, no matter how disastrous the consequences and disjunct the circumstances. Ignore all those societies who walked down that road into disaster.

There is almost nobody out in the open in the middle ground. Cataloguing the disabilities, the side-effects and what we still can and cant do, planning moderate dreams and longterm projects that are realistic, even with the roof of the planet coming down.

Cheers for that.

I actually intended to share: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2025/04/Space_Debr...

which is the European Space Agency page link that wraps their 8 minute space debris documentary.

I didn't notice the URL is modified on click through to the generic ESA "space debris" catchall page :/

Youtube hosts the same content .. but lacks the gravitas of the ESA creator host page.

HN allows me to edit the submission title but not the submitted URL.

I believe OP intended to link to this page, which is a text article and a self-hosted (esa.int) video,

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2025/04/Space_Debr... ("Space Debris: Is it a Crisis?")

The page is borked in a way that makes it tricky to find its canonical link.

They've separately mirrored their documentary on YT, which is here,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIsPbysinKw

Serious answer to an unserious question: probably not!

If you're travelling between stars, you do actually need star trek sci-fi shields. The relative velocity turns interstellar dust into bullets that would obliterate an unshielded ship. Assuming those shields can operate in proximity to a planet, they could simply shove their way through the debris cloud.

Alternately, an interstellar ship probably has a lot of power to throw around and likely a lot of time they're willing to spend. It's not unreasonable to think that a starship would be equipped to deal with some amount of orbital debris. Probably point defense lasers or something. Maybe a tractor beam.

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Pushing things deeper into space is tricky because you need to increase both sides of the orbit. It's more common to push things down (or increase atmospheric drag) so that even if the top of the orbit initially stays in a problematic area, the low side gets lower and lower until the object is deornited

Generally the material goes the other way nowadays. In Low Earth Orbit debris even deorbits itself within a few years (or few decades for the higher reaches) through natural orbital decline taking it into the atmosphere where it burns up.

There are startups and research programmes working on Active Debris Removal using everything from nets to lasers to destroy or divert debris (as well as larger tugs to remove whole satellites). It's just an expensive problem to solve, and if Kessler Syndrome were to occur, you wouldn't necessarily want to pause space launches to wait for orbits to be cleared, especially not if you'd just lost critical satellites...

It's probably easier and better to push it down or try to evaporate it with laser from a comfortable distance.

No. Removing space debris is more like snatching bullets from mid-air than picking up trash.

The problem is solvable by stopping people like Musk from putting 42,000 satellites in space.

Especially when the problem he is solving i.e. global access to internet is already solved just not to the level we would want it.

So as a society we have to ask what is more important: watching Netflix on a yacht or having the ability to someday explore the universe.

Why is it bad ? Like compared to lets say a car or any number of industrial products ?

> I heard StarLink satellites eventually re-enter the atmosphere when they are not orbit-stable. Thus this technology is bad for life on earth when it is lauched into space and again when decommissioned.

The fact that they re-enter by itself is not the problem. The problem is that they contain aluminium:

> When Starlink’s satellites reach the end of their lives, they burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere and leave behind small particles of aluminum oxide. These travel down into the ozone layer, which absorbs harmful ultraviolet radiation. Researchers from the University of Southern California found that these oxides have increased eightfold from 2016 to 2022.