The space junk crisis needs a recycling revolution
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-space-junk-crisis-needs-a-recycling-revolution/?utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_medium=social&utm_source=reddit
The space junk crisis needs a recycling revolution
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-space-junk-crisis-needs-a-recycling-revolution/?utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_medium=social&utm_source=reddit
2 Comments
Submission statement
Orbital space is a finite resource, and it’s rapidly being consumed by a few organizations, notably SpaceX, OneWeb and Amazon’s Project Kuiper. SpaceX, for instance, owns and operates the majority of all working satellites, and the company aims to launch tens of thousands more satellites to provide global broadband Internet coverage. Similarly, Amazon plans to deploy 3,236 satellites for its broadband network.
If we keep up this pace, [orbital space will become unusable](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/there-is-too-much-trash-in-space/)—especially the most popular region, low Earth orbit (LEO), which extends up to 2,000 kilometers in altitude. When looking at all orbital regions, we may lose services we’ve come to rely on: continuous communications, GPS mapping, Internet, Earth monitoring, and more. Today nearly every satellite that is launched is equivalent to a piece of single-use plastic, in that its fate is to become detritus. We are heading toward a tragedy of the commons in orbital space: giving everyone unfettered access without global coordination and planning means that eventually no one may be able to use it.
Full article: [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-space-junk-crisis-needs-a-recycling-revolution/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-space-junk-crisis-needs-a-recycling-revolution/)
I hope that when creating this idea, it will come to mind where to put the billions of tons of garbage that are stored in Asian countries and not only there, and then think about space debris.