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This is good, I wonder how they'll actually de-orbit the debris?

You don't. You catch it, heat it with mirrors and lenses. Smelt out the metals. Radio tag for recovery, leave iit at L4.

Good luck to them but I am not really clear on the business model.

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Raise capitol, produce infographics.

2 years late not that, SPAC world went splat.

That sounds pretty impossible ngl

Ever play Pac-Man? They are launching a large Pac-Man that will go around the earth and gobble it up

We had plans to do this in the 80s. This is ....hmm. how did you think we are going to mine the asteroid belt? You catch a rock, put it in an Earth crossing orbit, and refine it on the trip home. The energy is free, just lots of focused light. You set the asteroid in a slow tumble so it heats evenly. Return to Earth orbit with a few tons of refined metals and other goodies, probably already presold.

$29M would beg to differ on the lateness. Apparently a lot of new suckers can be born in 2 years.

Some spicy lagrange'ing is about to happen

There is none without a customer to pay for the service and the only logical customer would be government or similar. We're in real need of some agreements that would actually fund useful cleanup operations, but probably a reasonably long way from getting them.

Why not just… deorbit it? They’re not particularly resistant to atmospheric heating

That's one answer, especially if the final usage is downwell. If it's for orbital or luna construction, you never deorbit to Terra. You thinking parachute/water? I'd rather keep in orbit and start building a space elevator. :-) or a polar shield/mirror :-)

This mission is just about de-orbiting debris, not trying to capture materials for reuse...

For now, but a few cascading collisions away and literally every dollar that's currently related to space stuff is at risk without cleanup.

It's about garbage collection. You seem to be keen to deorbit what they collect. Okay. How many metric tonnes of garbage are we collecting? Is there an estimate?

Probably by just using the satellites onboard propulsion. Although given that this is just a test mission, just capturing the debris would be progress enough

What? From the article:

>This mission will see the ClearSpace use a spacecraft with four articulated arms to de-orbit part of a Vega rocket from low Earth orbit (LEO).

Assuming they're deorbiting the third stage, which has a dry mass of 1315 kg, they would be collecting about 1.315 metric tonnes of garbage.

The only way this business model work is if Starship succeeds in lowering the cost of $/kg in orbit by one order of magnitude. The it will be cheap enough for governments to enforce a "pick your trash" rule on space launches.

Now I just need to build a proper ship to intercept these craft and take the booty for myself. Space Piracy!!

Better hope that parachute works. Might make a good splash at terminal velocity. Keep it in orbit. Smelt when we build the infrastructure.

SMH. If that's your first thought, let's play find the incel.

Lmfao I don’t know how that even remotely would signal me as an incel, I thought your comment was cool and as a sci fi nerd I thought it was a fun idea. No need to be rude!

Dude's been here for almost a year and has less than 1000 karma, yet they comment regularly.

This is a dead giveaway that they're a troll who gets off on instigating arguments. Your statement has literally nothing to do with incels, they're making up reasons to get upset in their head.

Thanks, man! You’re definitely allowed to be a space pirate with me on my ship.

Time to harvest water from Enceladus

I was being straight up. Not being cool. Just noting that your big thought was piracy. Shrugs. Label it what you will. I think of it as our worst species issue, toxic aggression . Just reacting to words used.

I've been on Reddit a lot less than a year lol. I've no idea what reddit uses for karma, or why someone gave me an award, etc. I'm here for interesting discussion. So far, lol, it gets amusing but ottoh, why the fuck would I waste reaction mass boosting someone upwell when I'm just going to have to shoot the wank for piracy someday? :-)

Exactly, u/GotGRR . Let NASA, ESA, or any of the other space agencies lose a few more craft, and they'll beg to fund cleanup.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

|Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |ESA|European Space Agency| |L4|"Trojan" Lagrange Point 4 of a two-body system, 60 degrees ahead of the smaller body| |LEO|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|

^(3 acronyms in this thread; )^(the most compressed thread commented on today)^( has 19 acronyms.)
^([Thread #8453 for this sub, first seen 19th Jan 2023, 21:58]) ^[FAQ] ^([Full list]) ^[Contact] ^([Source code])

I am willing to fund your space piracy. For a share of the profits, naturally.

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Can't we just send everything to the moon for later processing into structures or something?

Fortunately Starship has the potential for as much as two.

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Alright, guess we’re starting a space pirate crew boys! 🏴‍☠️👽🏴‍☠️🛸🏴‍☠️

Whos up for plundering one of the silly little gray guys ships?

Hi I'm here for the gang bang

But of course! We’d naturally need a proper investor! We’ll even let you have one of our flags.

Now that’s what I’m talking about! I hear the gray guys have some pretty neat tech 😎

What have a whole crew now, what makes you think you’d be able to take us all on?

On Reddit? Absolutely nada. IRL? If you guys wanna be pirates I'm sure I'll have more help than necessary.. But then again, y'all give the appearance of think piracy is like a Sid Meier game. Shrugs. Yep, I'd space that flavor human fast.

Hint: debris is not that different from an active Russian satellite if you’re the US military.

With what delta-V?

Basically that, yeah. Debris recovery that involves physical rendezvous is a flashy dead end, but still a dead end.

Don't need a lot to keep it orbital. Keep it in the same orbit, junk should eventually show up in a crossing orbit. If you loft it correctly, just gonna need little gas jets (maybe peroxide). Eventually the the thing fills and the last fuel is used to park it at a Lagrange point send a refueler with more peroxide.

edit: Or hell, park the whole unit.

That sounds like a bad alien horror movie beginning

Ever heard of anything called "High Frontier?"

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What kind of permission is needed to mess with the space junk of others which presumably still belongs to the company or country that launched it