Most of the list is rocket bodies which are quite large, and rendezvous is already challenging when everybody is collaborating, rendezvous with a tumbling uncontrolled giant piece of junk is even more difficult.
Astroscale is working on that in collaboration with various space agencies, they're currently planning a mission (ADRAS-J2) to connect to an uncontrolled rocket body and deorbit it circa 2027: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/02/astroscale-aced-the-wo...
Theoretically, a cheap option is to modify Starlink with enlarged argon tanks to rendezvous and "shepherd" large debris into lower orbits. Add LiDAR (DragonEye) and "Push Me Pull You" argon thrusters and it can exert a gentle push even when the debris object is uncontrolled and tumbling.
I'm somewhat surprised SpaceX hasn't tackled this problem yet. Even including just one StarCleaner every 2-3 Starlink launches could make a huge difference.
SpaceX even has the perfect test satellite. RatSat was their first successful launch in 2008, and it's barely decayed despite saying it would only last five to ten years.
And to answer the cost question, Astroscale is charging $8-100 million [0] per LEO junk removal mission (small numbers for small failed comms sats, big numbers for a spent upper stage).
The objects in the article are all at the bigger end. Presumably Aeroscale have started with a technically easier mission than some of the 50 in the article, but they will also eventually benefit from economies of scale. So you can estimate the cost to remove the 50 bodies in the single digit billions.
Starship launch costs are hypothetical, but pundits are estimating one to two hundred dollars per kg, or about ten million per launch. This would shave a significant amount off the cost of launching something big enough to de-orbit a large target, like an upper stage. Still, even if you spitball a figure like 20 million for each removal that’s still a billion dollars in total.
That tumbling should be conveniently predictable in absence of aerodynamics, but then even the best prediction would leave you with a tough nut to crack. I guess trying to solve that problem could be very helpful as a reality check to reign in any space mining fantasies?
You can deorbit things by pushing them "up" from Earth which lowers their perigee on the other side of the orbit.
A ground based high energy laser could ablate material from Earth which would provide propellant mass and incrementally knock objects into deorbiting trajectories.
Pushing "up" on an orbiting body causes no change to the altitude at the other side of the orbit (that is, 180 degrees around the orbit). However, it does raise the orbital altitude 90 degrees ahead, and lowers it 270 degrees ahead.
And what happens to the ablated material? One large stage that is easily tracked via radar is preferable to tens or hundreds of milimetre size chunks that could potentially flake off while ablating the surface of a rocket stage or derelict satellite.
Flakes of solid material are typically far more than dense than structures made of the same material.
Therefore flakes' orbital lifetimes are likely longer than structures made of the same materials.
I used to think engineers should get all the credit for the successes of big engineering projects, and they should probably get more credit than they do, but over time I’ve realized how important good leadership is. SpaceX and Tesla absolutely would not be where they are today without Elon. Anyone who claims otherwise either hasn’t paid attention or is being disingenuous because they don’t like him.
Credit scores are used for a lot more than finances. You could argue everything they're used for is tied to money some way, but since everything is being sold to us as a service that doesn't leave much out.
The thing about credit scores is that its deterministic. I.e no matter which ideology you come from, you can have a good credit score with deterministic practices.
Meanwhile, in China, social credit is ideological in nature. I.e if you disagree, even if you are factually correct, you get penalized.
housing is definitely a thing -- arguably the largest / main use of a credit score.
clearances don't apply to the population on the whole -- you have to willing apply to a cleared role. and you're going to be spending the gov's money and handling secrets, it makes sense to see if they can handle said money, cuz if they can't they'll sell secrets
I've never heard of a pre-emplyment check requiring a credit score. sexually harassing a fellow employee and getting fired will not end up on your credit as long as you can pay bills, and even if you can't, the lack of bills is what shows up, not bad work behavior
Clearances are a far broader investigation, but to the extent that they look at your credit, I believe it is also to establish your financial status, which is most definitely a significant component of the clearance process.
Preemployment: I admit to not having started a new job in many years... Is there any evidence whatsoever you can present that companies regularly reject candidates not in a position of financial trust for having poor credit?
Hey I see you're quibbling on details, maybe because you feel determined to win an argument to save face or something. I must point out that nobody here cares whether you were wrong, and digging in your heels even after multiple people provided multiple examples just drags the conversation to unproductive places.
As I said in the first reply, there is very little behavior you cannot tie money to in some way, so you can go down this path forever of trying to find a reason why credit scores are totally valid proxies for all human behavior, and you would be technically correct while missing the point entirely.
> Hey I see you're quibbling on details, maybe because you feel determined to win an argument to save face or something.
Ha. Pot, meet kettle.
Two out of the three examples given were not "tied to money in some way", they are examples where the creditworthiness of the person is central to the transaction.
What's your point? If people will extend you credit for things like an apartment (since there is risk you will stop paying) or for a car, it seems sensible to perform credit checks then. What else are scores used for that don't intersect with someone trusting you with their property?
Again, missing the point - it is a system that has become a centralized digital scoring mechanism. This is dangerous because it centralizes power, giving institutions that are not even under democratic control the power to punish individuals or groups as they see fit across all sectors of life.
Is it reasonable to expect concrete examples of ephemeral decision making that happens within opaque organizations, given that the overwhelming majority are not held to explicit disclosure of their decision, let alone a verified paper trail held to such a rigorous standard to count for reasonable proof?
The best you can hope for from a potential employer is to be told they hired someone else. The default experience in America seems to be that they'll simply ghost you.
Many examples were given, please read the linked article. And again, in a society where everything is monetized, you can argue that creditworthiness is a just proxy for anything. So if basic water and electric access or housing access can be, so can anything else where you pay money for a service. You could argue dating apps should have access to credit scores and I wouldn't be surprised if some tried.
What do you think credit is? Anytime someone gives you something and you pay later on, that's on credit. They have to trust you to some extent. If every vendor had to perform due diligence of every potential client I would expect things to get even more expensive or just altogether deny service to people outright.
Then in a subscription economy- where having a poor credit score can result in loss of housing, insurance, and more- opaque unelected beureaus are wielding tremendous power. Perhaps they are not evil or even unfair, but if you'll recall the context of TFA, it bears many of the same failure modes of a social credit system, and will only be as good as the people regulating it.
But it will always be opaque, unelected bureaus, wouldn't it? If credit bureaus were dissolved tomorrow, the decision to extend credit would go back to the opaque, unelected operator of the business.
What exactly do you think is the “more technology development than the current flights actually show“ needed to get into and out of orbit?
My impression is they just need to leave the engines on a little longer to get to orbit, then turn them on again with the ship pointed in another direction to get back to the suborbital trajectory they’ve already demonstrated deorbiting from.
The hard part is reentering through the atmosphere without burning up, flipping, and landing, which they’ve already demonstrated multiple times. There’s no additional atmosphere between where they’ve flown and “orbit”.
A little more longevity and one more engine restart, unless the suborbital is very suborbital, then it also means a lot more delta v. It doesn't seem that far away at all.
What's surprising is that people are still resorting to this silly complaint about not reaching orbit when there's a perfectly sensible complain they could be making instead: that SpaceX hasn't yet demonstrated that they can reach orbit and return safely. The safe return is important because I would expect a failure to return safely to be a big deal: it's not like this thing is going to completely burn up if they don't have control during a deorbit. The inadequate retry thermal protection is a large issue even if the Ship has managed to get to the landing areas on target and soft land in the right spot: the burn through on the control surfaces seems to mean that was as much luck as good engineering that the thing didn't crash somewhere less intended.
I appreciate none of that is as pithy as saying it simply didn't reach orbit, but it's a real concern versus something that is really irrelevant.
Starship returned safely. Safe return of orbital generally means a splashdown within 1500 miles of Point Nemo. They just demonstrated that they can splash down within meters of their target buoy. Even if the flaps failed completely they still would have been far less than 1500 miles off target.
They've done so more than than this time, too. Granted, with a little less "Ship" than they left with on all occasions I know of.
No one (at least not me or anyone I take seriously) is arguing whether or not these suborbital profiles are designed to be safe even under adverse or full failure conditions; though the Caribbean air corridors might have been managed a bit more gracefully on some previous flights... still...
Nonetheless there is a valid criticism that in ten flights they still haven't mastered keeping the control surfaces of the space craft whole during the reentry phase of flight. 1500 miles isn't going to cut it as a safe return zone when they try bring this in for a catch. While I'm as impressed as anyone that they've hit the mark with compromised Ships as many times as they have, neither Port Isabel nor Titusville are 1500 miles from their nearest Ship catch towers and I wouldn't support any attempts for a catch until they can get the whole Ship back in good working order... reliably. While I'm a advocate for this program and SpaceX... I'm not such a fanboy that I can't see there are issues with this aspect of the program. This is ignoring the impact on rapid reusability and simply focusing on the basic safety of the program.
Port Isabel is 6 miles away from Boca Chica. They demonstrated on a previous mission that they can land within meters of their target despite burnt out flaps. If SpaceX tries to catch Starship their launch tower might not be safe, but Port Isabel would be safe.
But they haven't tried to catch Starship yet and likely won't for a while, so you're arguing a silly hypothetical.
They mentioned in the stream they were intentionally stressing the ship on reentry.
But yes, “rapid reusability” is a ways off. I expect they’ll be spending weeks inspecting and repairing ship and booster before reflight for a few years, but they’ll drive it down over time.
TBD how “rapid” the reusability ends up being in the end.
The push for rapid reusability seems somewhat at odds with the push for large scale production of ships.
It seems like if they can get boosters to rapid reuse (a much easier goal), and churn out ships at sufficient scale, they can afford to take time inspecting/refurbing each ship as part of a pipelined approach.
The stated goal was always to have a lot of ships, and also to have them be reusable.
Starship is a fuel-hungry beast - it can get to LEO by itself, but it needs a lot of tanker launches to go beyond. And if your goal is a Mars colony, you don't want to be limited to one launch per launch window.
Halfway to anywhere, but the window to anywhere is quite small. For Mars, I think it's only a few weeks every two years or so. So having a lot of mass already halfway there when the window opens would be quite advantageous.
Their scenario is that the ships are mostly going to be "fuel mules" to ferry propellant to the ship that is destined to go somewhere (i.e. Mars) - so if you want an armada to travel to another planet, you need a much larger fleet of supply vehicles to prepare your armada. Hence the need to mass produce them.
> The push for rapid reusability seems somewhat at odds with the push for large scale production of ships.
Elon always talks about a city on Mars but seeing for the first time the gargantuan size of Starfactory it dawned on me that SpaceX are true believers. It is still a big IF, because the dimension of the mission is absolutely bonkers, but IF the goal is to send every two years hundreds of Starships to Mars (everyone needing around 3-4 tanker missions) you need large scale production of ships.
Ten years ago every expert said a hundred launches a year was utterly impossible. Five years ago they said it was unlikely. SpaceX have launched more than a hundred times this year already.
Anyone who thinks they can’t do stuff is not seeing the whole picture.
Not at odds at all. It doesn't matter how fast you can make them if each one costs $5-10 million. Much better to amortize that over 100+ flights and not waste the booster.
Once the tanker version is needed, a ship ship could go up 5+ times a day. The logistics of backfilling a pad with a new ship is much more involved
> rapid reusability seems somewhat at odds with the push for large scale production of ships
As you say, they reïnforce each other by speeding up the learning curve and deployment of learning to the real world, serving as both a bolstering of the product and experimental validation.
I didn't mean this ship and booster, I mean in a year or so when they're done with the test phase and frequently launching Starlink satellites on Starship.
The nice thing about SpaceX’s rapid iteration philosophy (and having Starlink as its first “customer”) is that they can account for engine unreliability by building extra margin into early launches, fly with reduced payloads, collect data on failures, and improve the reliability over time.
“Tries to block” is different than “fights for a piece of the same pie”.
While Starlink is never going to compete with fiber purely on speed, it’s available now, cheaper, and fast enough for residential customers. It will get faster over time as well.
> Luckily we now are able to launch stuff into orbit a lot cheaper. Including astronomy related hardware.
Honestly once Starship is operational SpaceX should subsidize launches of non-commercial astronomy hardware. Could build some goodwill to offset the negatives.
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