"With the commercial space industry booming, the number of satellites in Earth's orbit is forecast to rise sharply. This bonanza of new satellites will eventually wear out and turn the space around Earth into a giant junkyard of debris..."
All modern commercial satellites are required to have a safe deorbit plan. The FCC regulates that LEO satellites must deorbit within 5 years of mission completion.
Disclaimer: I work for a commercial satellite operator. Our satellites deorbit and burn up without intervention at the end of their lifecycle.
Typically yes... Alternative mechanisms include using solar panels to increase drag, and some companies are experimenting with devices that interact with the earths magnetic field to produce electromagnetic drag…
But reserving fuel for “decommissioning operations” is standard practice for satellite operators and the space industry in general.
Are there any unboosted or boosted orbital trajectories that deorbit by "ejection" rather than atmospheric friction and pollution?
Is the minimum perturbation necessary to "eject from earth orbit" lower in an Earth-Moon Lunar cycler orbit? (And, If decommissioned, why shouldn't the ISS be placed into a Lunar Cycler Earth-Moon orbit to test systems failure, lunar cycler orbits, and extra- Van-Allen radiation's impact on real systems failure?)
Couldn't you build those out of recyclable proton batteries and heat-shielded bioplastic?
There sort of are some ejection disposals, but they are rarely used due to how specific the orbital parameters need to be in order for that to be the “cheaper” option.
You usually find it’s not exactly the sort of disposals your expecting though. Several space probes have used launch trajectories where their final booster stage will be placed into a heliocentric orbit, with the general trajectory placing it on an uncontrolled gravity assist and then the space probe will use a very small amount of fuel to precisely control the gravity assist it receives in order to get where it needs to be going… and the booster stage will have its already heliocentric orbit further changed by the gravity assist.
It’s all about the deltaV … it takes way less to deorbit LEO and even some of the MEO satellites than to perform a lunar orbit raising, and GEO would be too costly to do either when which is why the GEO graveyard orbit belt is quite well defined… as for boosting the ISS up towards the moon to perform a Salyut 7 style long duration equipment survival experiment…. That’s a lot of fuel, and we already have that experience since we’ve been monitoring the entire ISS since we launched it…
Would it be easier to band together the currently-unrecyclable orbital debris and waste and boost bundles of usable material with e.g. solar until it's usable in orbit or on the ground of a planet?
Someone probably has the costs to lift n kg of payload into orbit then and today in today dollars.
Matter persists in cycler orbits around attractors.
Is there a minimum escape velocity for each pending debris object, and then also for a moon gravity-assist solar destination orbit?
How much solar energy per kg of orbital mass is necessary to dispose by ejection in some manner?
I'm reminded of Wonka's cane and the Loompland river. Can such orbits be simulated with Kerbal Space Program 2?
There’s two fundamental issues with that sort of approach:
1st, is the deltaV difference between useful and desirable orbits that satellite operators want to be in and the selected “disposal orbit band”… with GEO it’s just a small deltaV Hohmann transfer “up” into the geo graveyard “band”… the graveyard starts just 300km further out from earth and the geostationary satellite typically use on the order of 11m/s… which is bugger all. The Manned Manoeuvring Unit “EVA jetpack” had approximately 25m/s.
2nd, is sometimes overlooked, but nonetheless quite important aspect. Any graveyard orbit intended for use by multiple objects should cross the orbits of as few active spacecraft as possible and have as low of a relative velocity between the objects in that graveyard orbit as possible… Geosynchronous satellites are basically above all but a small number of very specific satellites in places like lunar orbit or Lagrange points, and “in a ring” so, performing a gentle boost to the graveyard orbit gets them out of the way of almost everything and they are at least as far as satellites go, not moving particularly fast relative to each other, and they are so high up nothing else is going to regularly cross their obit, so it’s a relatively low risk environment for a satellite on satellite collision…
the majority of cycling orbits tend to have a LOT of relative velocity compared to the orbits they cross, tangential crossings leave high relative velocity, and the elongated orbits tend to end up crossing through a lot of space as the orbital precession moves along… on top of that the deltaV to go from most orbits to a cycling orbit tends to be relatively high, not as much as a full transfer to lunar orbit, but it’s basically in the same ballpark as using the moon to kick yourself into a solar orbit, which while potentially doable at considerable extra cost for a GEO satellite, is completely impossible for the sort of smaller LEO and MEO satellites without an entire kick stage, tug or other propulsion which would at least for LEO probably weigh more than the satellite does.
Is there an effective fulcrum on a lever in space if you attach thrusters at one end; like a space baseball bat?
MEU: "Mission Extension Unit"
How many kwh of (solar) electricity would be necessary to transfer to and from lunar cycler orbit to earth orbit to stay within the belt? 8, orbit, 8; or 8,8,orbit,8,8 etc?
FWIU there are already-costed launch and refuel mission plans?
Launch rocket_2 with fuel for rocket_1 which is already in orbit, attach to object_1, and apply thrust towards an optimal or sufficient gravity-assisted solar trajectory or bundle of space recyclables.
Is there any data on space stations in Lunar Cycler orbits?
Are there Lunar Cycler orbits that remain within the van Allen radiation belt?
What would be the costs and benefits of long-term positioning of a space station or other vessel with international docking adapter(s) in a Lunar cycler orbit?
I apologize, I couldn't find somewhere that specific information is publicly documented and I need to stay on the legal side of ITAR. I think you can find that information from public sources about other CubeSats, though.
Maybe it's not a big deal, but it seemed weird to me that this article didn't mention that the cleanup satellite would need to burn fuel for propulsion to drag things around. The way it was written seemed to violate conservation of energy: you zap a junk satellite with this magic beam, and it starts moving without having any effect on the cleanup satellite.
You would of course need fuel to propel both satellites together into the disposal orbit, and then more fuel if you want to come back for another load. (Ok, maybe not fuel, if this is slow enough that solar power would be enough. But you'd still need reaction mass of some sort.)
“The electrostatic tractor would use a servicer spacecraft equipped with an electron gun that would fire negatively charged electrons at a dead target satellite, Champion told Live Science. The electrons would give the target a negative charge while leaving the servicer with a positive charge. The electrostatic attraction between the two would keep them locked together despite being separated by 65 to 100 feet (20 to 30 meters) of empty space, she said.”
So by that description we're still talking space tugboats. I guess the advantage is supposed to be a lower chance of collisions damaging the tug and producing extra debris?
Physically attaching something is probably really complicated and you need to make sure the junk doesn't rotate out of control as you burn to de orbit it.
Solar electric (ion drive) would work fine here, a few kg of xenon would last for a long time. And you could feed the tractor beam with the electrons stripped from the xenon atoms…
All modern commercial satellites are required to have a safe deorbit plan. The FCC regulates that LEO satellites must deorbit within 5 years of mission completion.
Disclaimer: I work for a commercial satellite operator. Our satellites deorbit and burn up without intervention at the end of their lifecycle.