from Hacker News

Chinese 'space cleaner' spotted grabbing and throwing away old satellite

by rburhum on 2/8/22, 3:14 PM with 4 comments

• by BitwiseFool on 2/8/22, 3:28 PM

  I had an idea for a 'space cleaner' and I have no clue if it is actually viable but I figured that I would share it anyway.

  1) Create a suborbital and reusable rocket that launches and lands vertically.

  2) Launch it upwards so that it approaches the target satellite near its apogee.

  3) Around the apogee, it releases a stream of gas in the path of the debris

  4) The gas will dissipate quickly, but the goal is for the cloud to buffer the satellite and take some speed away without directly colliding with it and making space junk. I figure suborbital gas molecules would impart a decent amount of slowing force on the object.

  5) The sounding rocket then returns to earth and can be re-launched for multiple successive passes at the target satellite.

  Would this work?

• by PaulHoule on 2/8/22, 3:20 PM

  The tools to fight space junk are also anti-satellite tools.

  It's only a matter of time before somebody deploys a baby deathstar that moves satellites around by pulsed laser ablation. Otherwise LEO is going to be unsafe at any speed.

• by hnthrowaway0315 on 2/8/22, 3:32 PM

  Is there an estimation how much help it can be to the astronomers whence we manage to move all garbage (dead sat for example) from the space?