UK puts out tender for space robot to de-orbit satellites Britain's space agency is looking for a supplier to build a robotic spacecraft to capture and de-orbit two defunct UK-licensed satellites from low Earth orbit. The proposed Active Debris Removal (ADR) mission proposes to send up a specially designed spacecraft equipped with "cutting-edge British robotic and autonomous …
Has to be the worst, most inefficient way to do anything complex and technical, and gets worse the more complex and technical the thing is
Estimating costs of these projects is HARD.
Companies bidding for the work can either do lots of it up front, knowing that it will most likely be wasted, duplicated effort; or they can employ bullshit artists who promise things that their engineering departments couldn't possibly deliver for the money they said, and then make up excuses for overruns later
Thousands of hours of Uni student time and postgrad time has been spent on trying to figure a cost efficient way of deorbiting space junk. Study of this problem has been exhaustive.
Maybe add an additional mission onto a launch of a new satellite that will be in a close orbit to an object. But it's a one shot attempt.
"Maybe add an additional mission onto a launch of a new satellite that will be in a close orbit to an object. But it's a one shot attempt."
That's really really hard to coordinate. Rideshare missions work as most of the time the lower tier customers are only interested in getting into a particular obit, but not a specific place in that orbit. To gently intercept a satellite is much more difficult and will need to be its own launch. If the deorbit tractor is small enough, it can fly on something small such as the Electron rockets to save money.
"Thousands of hours of Uni student time and postgrad time has been spent on trying to figure a cost efficient way of deorbiting space junk. Study of this problem has been exhaustive."
True, but you need the actual missions to go and try the various techniques, proof of the pudding and all that.
I still think that orbital debris removal is a huge white elephant. As the article alludes to, there are millions of bits of debris up there too small to track but still more than capable of ending your mission early. All you can do to go after the main problem is stick a big net up there and hope you actually catch some bits safely without them destroying you in the process and contributing to the very problem you were trying to solve.
Or, the technical ability to sidle up to an orbiting satellite and take it down is one worth working on, just in case.
"Much like HS2 and all the other "brilliant" projects we get lumbered with here in the UK. Trouble is, Civil Servants are generally involved and they have no idea except how to drive a spreadsheet."
I'm a civil servant, HS2 wasn't a civil service idea, it was a typical "plucked from a politician's bum" idea. As it happens, a bum in Gordon Brown's "Government Of Not Talent At All". When the first estimates offered no payback, it pretty much went back on the shelf, although Gordo and his cronies weren't around for long. Then, Dismal Drip Dave thought it a spiffing wheeze and gave it the nod, and later on Bozo the Clown really put some government welly behind it. During the years of the Dave and Bodger, civil servants were told to bugger off and make the sums work to allow the project to go ahead. So that's what happened. The scant value of a few minutes of Brummie businessmen's time was inflated by an order of magnitude, and that's what the HS2 business case is.
What would you like to be different here? As civil servants, we work for the politicians, not you. This is laid down in the civil service code, our job is to implement the will of politicians, whether we agree with it or not, and that is what we do. I've been involved in things I deeply disagree with, but have done everything in my power to take forward. You might say "well you should present the facts to them!". We do. But if they disagree with facts, and demand a different set of facts, that's our job too. You vote for your politicians, not your civil servants, I'm sure you'd agree that you don't want civil servants frustrating the will of elected members?
But the thing is, the scoundrels, fuckwits, liars, thieves and cheats the public vote for aren't the people to put their hand up and accept blame. Whenever anything goes wrong, they'll openly brief their favoured bit of the press that it was the fault of the establishment, the blob, the civil service, intentionally working to frustrate the will of honest, law abiding, upstanding democratic representatives. And it sounds like you believe that sort of guff?
civil servants were told to bugger off and make the sums work to allow the project to go ahead.
Yet they couldn't write a contract which held the connstructors to those sums, hence it turned out to cost 8x what it costs to do a similar project in, say, France? Civil servants have a reputation for gold-plating everything they touch to make their own departments bigger and more important, value for money is not a prime concern, and "I was only following orders" is never a valid defence.
The scant value of a few minutes of Brummie businessmen's time was inflated by an order of magnitude, and that's what the HS2 business case is.
No, it isn't. The business case is that by shifting express trains onto separate tracks you can then run more stopping and local services, and avoid the limitations inherent in mixed-mode operation. The anti-HS2 newspapers picked up on the "only saves 20 minutes" angle to justify their criticism.
our job is to implement the will of politicians, whether we agree with it or not, and that is what we do. I've been involved in things I deeply disagree with, but have done everything in my power to take forward.
In my experience, you'd be the exception. I know too many civil servants who will enthusiastically work on stuff they like, and allow the stuff they disapprove of to slide, without actually refusing to do it (which would get them a severe slap on the wrist). The NHS is a case in point.
But the thing is, the scoundrels, fuckwits, liars, thieves and cheats the public vote for aren't the people to put their hand up and accept blame
Neither are the scoundrels, fuckwits, liars, thieves and cheats the public don't vote for, Humphrey.
Go work for elected members for a few years and see if you still hold that opinion.
I can only describe it as being ordered (screamed at probably) to juggle jelly using tennis racquets (supplied at great expense by their donor) and if any bits hit the floor having your employer go to the press and having it reported what a stupid idea you had and you sabotaged what could have been a wonderful jelly transportation scheme
"Companies bidding for the work can either do lots of it up front, knowing that it will most likely be wasted, duplicated effort; or they can employ bullshit artists who promise things that their engineering departments couldn't possibly deliver for the money they said, and then make up excuses for overruns later
They can also fold up after the study money is used up and the execs have milked all of it that they can. The IP then belongs to a defunct company and there's layers of legal that keeps it locked up so no other company could take that information (such as it is) and run with it.
Was I the only one to stifle an involuntary laugh at the British in that ?
Pictured a coal powered Heath Robinson cast iron steam space vehicle controlled by clockwork with sharp spinning cavalry sabres ready to chop up any redundant satellite.
Probably entirely unfair but I also shouldn't be too surprised if a non UK tender were to be successful.
UK's quietly successful satellite industry, said to be valued at £18.9 billion ($26 billion) and employing 52,000 people.
Remember they include Sky TV in the "space industry" figure, so you can remove about £11B and 31,000 employees from that figure to get what most would consider the "real" space industry activity.
you can remove about £11B and 31,000 employees from that figure
Not quite.
[in 2025] As in previous years, space applications contributed the largest share (72%, £13.7 billion) to UK space industry income. This is because the segment is dominated by direct to home TV (DTH), which makes up 47% (£8.8 billion) of total industry income.
Space manufacturing and space operations made up 13% (£2.5 billion) and 11% (£2.2 billion) respectively of total space industry income. This represents year on year growth of 7.2% for space manufacturing and 30.4% for space operations. In contrast, space applications experienced a decline of 4.5%, part of which London Economics linked to a “stagnation in DTH broadcasting”
So, £8.8B and 27,000, and falling.
Surely the people, companies and countries launching stuff should pay for the removal?
Why is the UK interested? Competitive tenders too often are based on price rather than quality. So I agree with earlier comments.
Scrap HS2 (But Wifi, tables & seats on trains), end 2 child cap on benefits.
Individuals and some UK companies have come up with some good stuff, but the UK Government has been incompetent about technology since the 1980s.
HS2 has been mostly scrapped thanks to government incompetence. And the ongoing dithering is a large part of why it has cost so much (plus lots of the work done was required preparatory work for the bits they're now not going to build). That, and the consequences of all of the current H&S, environmental, and legal frameworks with which modern large-scale construction projects have to comply. It's not like the old days when no-one minded if workers died, or some wildlife was squashed.
I know lots of people think HS2 was/is unnecessary, but the existing rail infrastructure is overloaded and there's no realistic scope to fix that if new capacity isn't built first (to take enough load off the existing network).
"Why should the state subsidise families that cause population growth we don't need? "
It's a dilemma. The infinite growth model demands an increasing population, but automation and now AI means that industry needs fewer and fewer people to make products and provide services. There's a giant amount of fail in paying for more children to be produced and then needing to be looked after for the rest of their lives.
In Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, a character proposed a 3/4 child birthright. Every couple can have 1.5 children. Since children don't come in 1/2 units, a couple could buy another 1/2 credit or sell one they don't use. Other proposals would make a 3rd child only qualify for 1/2 in tax deductions. A fourth would get no allowances and a fifth would cost a half and so on. Rich people could have as many children as they like, but receive no government allowances for any of their children if they choose to have quite a lot. Multiple births (natural) would need to have an exemption. That would be a risk for couples using fertility assistance that they could go over and may want to not take the chance through multiple implantations (likely there's a term for that) or adopt instead. It rarely ends well for society when a woman has many children with many fathers and they survive on public assistance.
Where's the personal responsibility in this?
Personal responsibility? Such an outmoded, Thatcherite idea. This is the 21st century, everyone is entitled to everything they want today, it's the government's fault if they don't get it, and the taxpayer who is responsible for picking up the bill if the beneficiary can't pay.
(/sarcasm)
Er, because if we don't have any kids we'll be fucked, and there will be nobody to pay the pensioners' pension. ('I've paid my stamp all my life, I'm 95 you know. Don't you dare stop paying me.')
Workers, via their NI payments, pay for pensions. When you retire those currently working pay for your pension. That's how the system works. Remove the flow of new workers and the old are suddenly fucked. Mind you, given how they have shafted the country in recent years it's perhaps not a bad thing.
Er, because if we don't have any kids we'll be fucked
How did you get from "more than 2 kids" to "any kids"? 2 children per couple is close to replacement levels, if people want more then they should be willing to accept the additional cost themselves, and not simply assume that everyone else will be happy to pay for them.
"Er, because if we don't have any kids we'll be fucked"
No worries there, mate. There's zero chance of there being zero kids.
Pension scams should only pay out what a person has paid in plus a reasonable interest earned. The argument that there needs to be new people coming in to pay for older people that have left is a demand for perpetual motion. The US Social Security program is thought to be in trouble as it will pay out more than it brings in. It can do that a little bit as many will not live long enough to collect and others won't live long after they are eligible to receive benefits. That might balance the benefits to people that do live a long time after the begin receiving payments. That's the government being typically stupid. Pensions are something else and should be better run.
I don't have a pension. I've been putting away money on my own and setting myself up to have minimal expenses. I'm not reliant on others to keep giving me money and increasing the amounts as prices go up. I try to spend strategically. I can get tomatoes at the market very cheap so I don't bother with them in the garden and concentrate on more expensive food stuff and things such as herbs that are like weeds so they're easy to grow and really good when freshly picked. The cost of my garden is something I have to watch as one can go nuts. This year I've been lucky and picked up bags of potting soil, tools, fertilizers, etc at some estate sales for pennies on the dollar. I also have a good supply of compost that the worms have found and are turning into really great stuff to grow in. I should have bought some worms a few years ago to seed the compost bin straight away.
BAeSystems' promising REMUSTARD* was hopelessly outbid to the tune of £7bn.
Wallace won the tender with his iGromit, in a close and nail-biting final round against the dastardly Fenders McGrab consortium.
* MUSTARD was genuinely BAC's Shuttle study which preceded and informed the US beasite.
A giant titanium version of a piece of cheese (eh, Gromit) for the debris to bury itself in? Enormous pieces of (bright yellow) sticky stuff? A pair of satellites connected by the world's largest piece of gaffer tape? Dyson 1, hoovering them out of the ether?
The UK has actually had a respectable satellite industry for decades. I do worry though, that this sort of cash will pull in the traditional outsourcers, lining their pockets for a few years before something becomes fiery debris after launching from Car Park Boris, the UK's launch pad.
By debris, do they mean actual debris, or Chinese satellites. Are they really looking for little robots that can attach themselves to BeiDou sats and fly them into the sun?
And is there any point, when world+dog are sending up hundreds more to create multiple satellite internet and GPS systems, because nobody wants to play nicely with each other any more.
A solar powered electromagnetic net? Set it in orbit and it'll collect any ferrous metals as it passes them. What with no air or gravity, it should be able to pull in small parts as it goes around. As it collects more ferrous parts, it should start catching nonferrous parts that no longer fit between the net spaces. Eventually it should collect enough mass that its orbital speed will no longer be enough and it should de-orbit on its own. It also wouldn't be too hard to include a small rocket to force it down into a predictable deorbiting spiral.
Send my one million pound check to Lipvig, MV, PO box 101, Mayberry RFD. It doesn't have to be a good idea, it just has to sound like a good idea to a politician.
" It also wouldn't be too hard to include a small rocket to force it down into a predictable deorbiting spiral."
It doesn't even need a rocket. Reeling out a long metallic line will create drag through interaction with Earth's magnetic fields and drop the craft into the atmosphere.
The problem is that there isn't that much ferrous material used in satellites. If small bits were being collected, a magnet such as AlNiCo with a low Curie temp or even lower grades of NdFeB magnets would work great. They'd demagnitize as they heated up during reentry so all of the small bits of metal they have collected would be blown apart from each other and could burn up before hitting the ground.
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