The Mad Plan to Clean Up Space Junk With A Laser Cannon

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Shooting space junk with a laser cannon sounds awesome. I would televise the event and sell tickets. :D

If a team of astronomers has its way, the International Space Station will be outfitted with a spiffy laser-wielding telescope. No, no, hold on—it’s not to kill aliens or rebel civilizations. It’s to clean up a huge mess.
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yeah how long before the tech gets pointed to the ground. not long.

It would however provide a good test bed for pointing the weapons out ward on other objects or an furry alien zombies who show up on full moons wielding chain saws who want to destroy earth because it is the only source of garlic in the galaxy.. because man .. they hate that stuff.
 
How many things were developed with good intentions that went on to be weapons of war?

This sounds a lot like it could be used as part of the Star Wars program from the 80's. I wonder if it could knock out an ICBM or if it just isn't powerful enough. Maybe we need a big magnifying glass and have one part pointed to the sun and the other to the missile. Fry those ants!
 
Ur_Mom said:
How many things were developed with good intentions that went on to be weapons of war?

This sounds a lot like it could be used as part of the Star Wars program from the 80's. I wonder if it could knock out an ICBM or if it just isn't powerful enough. Maybe we need a big magnifying glass and have one part pointed to the sun and the other to the missile. Fry those ants!
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1
This just wasn't powerful enough. Ground based would be at the wrong point in the missile flight , reentry, the least vulnerable phase.

Orbital has the same issue. Not enough input power. If the intention is merely to push debris into the atmosphere to burn up the power might be adequate.
 
There won't be enough power to make things go boom. Even the one on the Navy ship took a while to burn a boat. This will most likely be used to nudge things into the atmosphere to burn up.
 
It's quite obvious that they can't send a laser up there that can actually do damage. However, even a laser powerful enough to push objects into the atmosphere requires a decent power source. What do they intend on powering this thing with?
 
CaptNumbNutz said:
It's quite obvious that they can't send a laser up there that can actually do damage. However, even a laser powerful enough to push objects into the atmosphere requires a decent power source. What do they intend on powering this thing with?
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A really long extension cord.
 
the-one1 said:
There won't be enough power to make things go boom. Even the one on the Navy ship took a while to burn a boat. This will most likely be used to nudge things into the atmosphere to burn up.
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That's what the article says the plan is, and while on the surface this seems like a good idea I have to wonder is changing the currently easy calculated flight path of space debris is really the greatest idea?
 
I don't understand why people think blowing up stuff , makes it disappear. As far as I know you just get smaller parts which are harder to clean up.
 
redrage said:
yeah how long before the tech gets pointed to the ground. not long.

It would however provide a good test bed for pointing the weapons out ward on other objects or an furry alien zombies who show up on full moons wielding chain saws who want to destroy earth because it is the only source of garlic in the galaxy.. because man .. they hate that stuff.
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You know that shimmering effect you see off in the distance on a hot day? Yeah that's differences in air density bending and refracting light. An orbital laser with enough power to actually do any sort of real damage to a ground target would be more than capable of heating the air along it's several mile path through the atmosphere, causing its own shimmering effect, and defocusing the powerful laser beam into one that just mildly warms the area around the target. The tungsten spikes from the second GI Joe movie are far more practical, terrifying, and apparently legal than any sort of space based laser platform.
 
mr.Loma said:
I don't understand why people think blowing up stuff , makes it disappear. As far as I know you just get smaller parts which are harder to clean up.
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It's a recent trend I've seen, like adding commas and periods within sentences that don't need them. That. Certainly does, not make me cool. Sense. Period
 
dr_evil_laser.jpg
 
Youn said:
It's a recent trend I've seen, like adding commas and periods within sentences that don't need them. That. Certainly does, not make me cool. Sense. Period
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His sentence was intelligible and did follow the phonetics of western speakers. What you wrote, makes no sense.

His sentence was intelligible and did follow the phonetics of western speakers. What you wrote...makes no sense.
 
instead of laser, make a blower aka leaf blower and send it on course to a blackhole
 
mynamehere said:
Great anime. I wonder if things will actually ever get to that point.
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Debris wise- yes it'll get that bad eventually. But manned crews assigned to specifically clean up debris? Space travel would have to be dirt-cheap for that to ever fly.
 
My retired dad is now a scrapper, if he could mount a tractor beam on his John Deer he would take care of this for free.

My question is why do we allow this sort of litter in the first place when there must be a better alternative. I would buy one of the fuel silos from the space shuttle and bury it for an under ground bunker.

We need Chris Roberts to address this issue.
 
I like the idea--it doesn't take a huge amount of energy to de-orbit stuff in LEO. Just slow it by a few m/s, and once it catches a whiff of atmosphere, its orbit will degenerate pretty rapidly. Given the huge amount of debris up there, this seems like a pretty decent approach. I wonder if you could focus enough sunlight to have a similar effect? Probably not--you'd need a huge mirror to collect enough energy for that...
 
Whoops! We missed!
And we hit DETROIT!

*And nothing of any value was lost...*
 
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