AAA for Crippled Satellites

Effective Space Solutions and their customer service representatives only require the customer to be home between the hours of 8:00 AM to 7:59 AM, Sunday through Saturday, July 1^st through June 30^th.

"who to call when your satellite runs out of gas"

Dead satellites and space junk particularly in geostationary orbits and low earth orbits are becoming a bigger and bigger problem second by second. Less than 60 years ago there was not one piece of hardware in space let alone junk hurtling along at mind blowing speeds which makes even a flake of paint capable of seriously damaging a satellite. Now there are tens of thousands of pieces of space junk and dead satellites hurtling around the Earth. It's a constant problem for the International Space Station which gets hit on a fairly regular basis and has to make expensive and dangerous repairs and manoeuvres to ensure the station's safety.

It wasn't helped a few years back when China despite very serious objections from just about every country on Earth that relies so heavily on satellite technology, decided to see if they could shoot down one of their old decommissioned satellites. They succeeded and now there are thousands of more pieces of space junk in low earth orbit that could potentially destroy very expensive operational satellites, which by the way has already happened when an operational Iridium satellite got wiped out by an out by and out of control satellite.

The so called Deorbiter Satellite that pushes old geostationary satellites into a junkyard orbit that's 300 km higher is just delaying the inevitable because very quickly the junkyard orbit will become riddled with dead satellites and that means it's only a matter of time before two of them manage to collide and break up into millions of projectiles that can hit other satellites and start a chain reaction that pretty much forms a barrier around the Earth that prevents spacecraft from getting out of Earth orbit and out into deep space.

I'm an amateur astronomer and my telescope has a maximum field of view of 30 arc minutes or 0.5° which is roughly the size of the full moon. Now that's a very, very, very small patch of sky, but I can just about guarantee that within an hour of getting the telescope out I'll see a satellite or piece of space junk cross the field of view which to me is extremely concerning.

What we really need to be doing is crashing these things back into the atmosphere where they will burn up to pretty much nothing when they hit the atmosphere travelling at 7 kms^-1 or more if you give them the appropriate push.

If we don't do something about space junk and do it soon we could end up cutting ourselves off from space and all the technology we have become so dependent on completely.

I agree with your assessment.

But if you de-orbit into a re-entry attitude you could lose your tug satellite, or use up the tug fuel faster and reduce the number of possible missions. Bad for the bottom line.

"But if you de-orbit into a re-entry attitude you could lose your tug satellite"

It would definitely require more fuel and a complete rethink of the design of the space junk collecting satellite, but it's no more impossible than the satellite that raises the altitude of the orbit by 300 km. In fact you may even be able to harvest some of the energy from the satellite you are trying to deorbit and use that with the end result that you use less fuel.

I'll have to do some further research into orbital mechanics and at the moment I'm tied up in bed with an O₂ mask on with a respiratory tract infection so it could take some time before I get around to it.