America longs to expand low-Earth orbit economy 'for the benefits of humanity' The US government has published a strategy for low-Earth orbit research and development, anticipating a transition from the International Space Station (ISS) to the use of private sector successors and investigating approaches to address the threat of orbital debris. The US National Science and Technology Council's (NSTC) …
Who else sees the singularity and similarity of the basics proposed in ....
Consequently, it says that the US government should follow a biological and physical sciences program aimed at “transformational” space-related scientific discoveries to improve life both on Earth and in space.A key part of this will be ensuring experiments in orbit are as repeatable as those conducted on the ground.
.... and the detailed live improvement, up and running, and readily available for export and purchase/lend lease and sale and trialing for further stealthy embedding and deployment and employment and enjoyment in applications delivering Merlin the AIMagician and MetaDataBase Physician ProgramMING [Mined Internetworking Network Games], free to share and so recently revealed on El Reg for an exclusive Situation Publishing scoop boldly stating and going a great deal further than many will ever realise simply possible from a complex working virtualised environment for .......
Interesting novel times ahead are, without any possible doubt, surely guaranteed to create quite a desperate and disruptive constructive commotion with nothing more complex than virtually free, universally shared Advanced IntelAIgent Intellectual Property for Virtual Machinery to Program with Projects to Populate with SMARTR Systems Users/AI Netizens. …… for a Revolution Free Quantum Leap Evolution of Humanity into the Exalted Existential Realms of Augmented Virtual Reality with Greater IntelAIgent AI Games to Play for Realisation on Earth.
Vital questions then, to ponder on and ask yourself for clear answering, will certainly include ... And what would you do with it on purchase and delivery? What would be in urGrand Master Plan[s] for such do need to be vetted and approved before AI aided and alien abetted ?
One just can't have any Tom, Dick or Harry Limelight charlatan type thinking future reality is going to be their very own private pirate personal plaything and Greater IntelAIgent Game Space can one? That would just never ever do, for can you imagine the disasters and unavoidable consequences and percussive repercussions likely to ensue?
And a little something the like of a US Cyber Force would greatly benefit from understanding and mirroring with mentors and monitors, and/or even employing to save themselves an absolute fortune in trying to create a pirate copycat clone of it which then either competes against or opposes it in novel deadly dangerous virtual fields which do not take kindly to acts of heroic intransigence and unilateralism.
Such a JOINT* Venture is the simplest of solutions to what can easily become the most complex of troublesome existential problems.
* .... JOINT Operations Internetworking Novel Technologies
And a highly sensible arrangement, easily arranged and delivered to any nation in need of cyber protection and/or virtual assistance.
Thus is such as is a NEUKlearer HyperRadioProACTive IT AI JOINT Venture, an extremely attractive and spectacularly valuable invisible export earner, and Advanced Cyber Treat for Luddites and dinosaurs, wannabe Caesars and stink tankers to view and imagine as existential threats to be challenged and countered in worlds full of fools found to be feeble and fond of following the fake friend into what are in fact a fiction and fields of fantastic and fanciful folly ...... aka Tilting at Windmills
LEO is getting more and more crowded. ISS has been lucky thus far that they've not encountered any serious leaks (unless unreported). Some of the damage on solar panels, heat radiators and even a hole through one manipulator arm is scary. While Starlink is close to 3,500 satellites now, the plan as stated by Elon and Gwynne is to have 42,000 with a five year lifespan (except all of the ones that are already dead). OneWeb is in place and Kuiper is still to start launching their sats and I don't have any ready data on what Russia, China and India are planning. The downside with the short Starlink satellite lifetime is the time it takes for them to deorbit means there could be close to 100,000 in orbit at some point unless regulations are put in place to have redundant deorbiting systems and SpaceX can launch them fast enough and stay in business long enough to fully deploy.
LEO is very precious. Once it's too clogged up with dead sats, explosive bolt fragments and brackets used to hold payloads inside the rockets, the gate slams on sending missions beyond. A piece of debris striking a manned moon mission vehicle at thousands of km/hr could be tragic or at least cancel the mission with controllers scrambling to get the astronauts back just like with Apollo 13. A full blown Kessler syndrome would send the world several decades into going back to purely terrestrial comms and weather forecasting. Gov spy birds won't be much affected since governments will spend whatever it takes to send replacements if something bad happens.
You also have to balance orbit lifetime with energy required to launch in the first place, until we have a solution for gravity!
Until we have a solution for this particular "commons", there should be a moratorium on further commercial launches of LEO satellites. It would be good to include state-sponsored ones in this but that isn't likely to work.
"Until we have a solution for this particular "commons", there should be a moratorium on further commercial launches of LEO satellites."
There are many approaches known to deorbit a satellite in LEO. The simplest is to spool out a long wire with a weight on the end. The interaction with the Earth's magnetic field will drag the satellite down into the atmosphere where we can use them to make our wishes. The problem is that the measures are not mandated so nobody is too keen on adding mass/complexity to their sats until it is. There should be a global mandate that all sats have a completely independent deorbit mechanism before they receive a license to launch. Regulations also need to apply to any debris that is expected to be generated. There is a bunch of video of Starlink launches where you can see a long bracket that is jettisoned just before the sats are pushed out. That might be low enough that it doesn't stay up very long, but it's the sort of thing that needs a lot of scrutiny. There are so many bits and pieces in orbit right now that are too small to track and there is the concept know as the "golden BB".
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