8 thoughts on “Collisions Hazards And Space Debris”

  1. When this warming shows up, sure, let’s build it there. But they say nothing about logistics until this warming makes the location feasible. Isn’t this near where the global warming folks got caught in the ice again?
    Until we have a way to re-direct or remove the debris, do we really need to be able to smaller pieces of debris?

      1. Yes. I meant that.
        Wouldn’t our resources be better spent on re-fuel of maneuverable craft and removal of unwanted junk rather than more precise detection? I agree better detection would be a good thing, but that suggested location would come around 500 of 501 places it could be located.
        Are we still relying on that radar in western Florida for most of our tracking of space vehicles? If so, that thing is getting long in the tooth.

        1. “Our” resources would be best spent on laser sweepers to actually do something dispositive about sub-trackable space debris rather than the decades of whining about it that seems to be all anyone has been able to manage to-date. I have long since given up any hope of the U.S. government doing any such thing. My current hope is that SpaceX will undertake the job itself – at least for LEO – as a self-defense measure for Starlink. Collision avoidance would be greatly aided if everything up there was big enough to register on radar and all the small stuff was simply gone.

          I honestly am not sure what we’re currently relying on for space object tracking. For a long time, it was a system of three radar transmitters and six receivers scattered across the CONUS, but none of them was in Florida. That system was shut down in 2013. There is a new “Space Fence” being built at Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific that’s supposed to go active very soon. It uses a shorter wavelength than the old system and is supposed to be able to see smaller stuff.

    1. I seemed to remember that shipful of Warmists getting stranded in the Antarctic, not the Arctic. Doing some research, I found my recollection to be correct. That happened back in 2014.

      But, as the Aussies say, you’re not wrong either. There have been two abortive would-be expeditions by Warmists planned for Arctic waters that were both foiled by excessive ice. One of these was going to be in Canadian waters in 2017, the other in Russian waters in 2016. In neither case did any ship actually get stuck. The ice conditions simply didn’t permit either expedition to get underway as ice along their routes was too heavy to punch through.

      The aborted 2016 Russian mission was based at Murmansk which is several hundred miles west of Amderma. That isn’t “near” by usual standards, but in Russian terms, it maybe qualifies.

  2. “We need to be prepared to introduce an international ‘road traffic law’ for Earth-orbiting satellites, including those on the high-inclination orbits, and to control their observation by all participants.”

    Good luck with that. Most of the objects in space are dead satellites, used rocket bodies, and especially pieces of debris. None of those are capable of maneuvering.

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