Posts: 130
Joined: Mon Aug 16, 2010 10:41 am
Location: NSW, Australia
Crowded skies?
One lecture from an Australian fellow working with NASA was about the issue space debris. It was his job examine the shuttles on their return for any evidence of micro trash collisions and as I understand it, his work was also in the field of calculating when best to send up missions in relation to how much junk was flying over head, giving missions the go if there was 98% chance of the ship not blowing up or killing a crew member. When asked whether there were any plans to decrease the level of space debris he said that at present, there was not. Apparently the Chinese had tried to get rid of an old communications satellite and in doing so, exasperated the problem by creating a great number of smaller pieces of debris that now needed to be tracked for safety reasons.
So without any way to get rid of space junk, I don't see the situation getting better any time soon.
But the plot thickens!
We later spoke to a number of people involved in scramjet research. It was their prediction that if they succeed in developing working scramjets, it could be viable to launch mini-satellites at a university level cost with a small rocket to get the engine to hypersonic velocities before switching to scramjet until the air becomes too thin and reverting to rockets again. In this way you use a lot less fuel. More efficiency. Cheaper. It sounds fantastic, and in a lot of ways it is, I mean, I could potentially launch a device into orbit for post-grad research. But my concern is that if everyone is sending up satellites into already crowded skies, eventually it may well become impossible to launch anything within a reasonable margin of success.
So, solutions anyone?