can't we just detonate a frick huge nukes and let the blast push up all the debris away ?
would nuke even works in space ?
Kessler syndrome
can't we just detonate a frick huge nukes and let the blast push up all the debris away ?
would nuke even works in space ?
>would nuke even works in space ?
>Should we just EMP our entire planet to clear some garbage?
it'll be just like the movies! we'll be back in the stone age!
no scientific evidence to suggest emps are real
they are real, they just dont really go anywhere without a physical conductor to travel through.
Lack of atmosphere is what makes high altitude nukes spread EMP so far.
Nuke blast make gamma rays. They fly until encounter atmosphere (thousands miles radius) below.
Gamma rays ionise atmosphere.
Ions been charged particles startd moving along magnetic lines
Big amount of the charge moving in the same direction creates electromagnetic induction aka EMP.
In the atmosphere such ranges are impossible because gamma rays are stopped after several miles in atmosphere.
they also just don't do enough once they hit things beyond the immediate impact because half of what an EMP moving through metal is, is basically a power surge.
And surge protectors are built into a lot of shit.
sounds annoying.
Significant EMP were observed after both Hardtack Teak and Fishbowl Starfish Prime. Now let's see if you go for "intentional obtuseness" or "merely pretending to be moronic".
Electromagnetic fields and radiation do not require any medium whatsoever to propagate. They figured that out a century ago.
they are gonna propagate a lot farther through a conductor than they will through an insulator, anon. we are in atmosphere.
thicker walls or multiple walls will block it outside of bigger emissions, and everything we build is surrounded by air or walls.
as it is now the most we would see from a nuke going off is some frickery within the small ionizing radiation area
>as it is now the most we would see from a nuke going off is some frickery within the small ionizing radiation area
Hardtack Teak damaged electrical circuits from New Zeeland to Hawaii. Whether you call that large or small, and regardless of the size it would have been in a medium with different electrical properties, that's more than enough for EMP effects to be an issue.
Simply assuming a solution will materialize before the problem gets out of hand seems like it could backfire a bit. Plus we already have enough shit in space that it'd be a bad time all around if our satellites all got fricked. Not end-of-humanity-apocalyptic, sure, but very much something we want to avoid.
>damaged circuits
where did you get that from?
that was an atmospheric test that borked radio comms, which would be expected.
where are these mythical damaged circuits?
are you moronic, anon?
"Trinity and Beyond", (1995)
Another case is Bluegill Prime that took out a few hundred street lights in Hawaii, read about it here: http://ece-research.unm.edu/summa/notes/SDAN/0031.pdf
>Trinity and Beyond
so you got your shit from a movie that doesn't delve into the specifics and focuses on a basic timeline...
meanwhile I don't see anything talking about it.
on the other hand its interesting to look how how VULNERABLE older wiring was to voltage fluctations. see this https://www.usni.org/sites/default/files/2022-05/Operation%20Hardtack%28Teak%20and%20Orange%29%20FINAL.pdf
to read about issues with the elevators BEFORE hardtack teak was initiated.
and as for your report....
anon.
did you even read that report properly?
that is barely worth mentioning, and the result of a power surge from the EMP.
They are not even sure how many were actually damaged as a result of the high altitude detonation.
basic surge protection can deal with that.
1% of streetlights going out from a surge in voltage is nothing.
All that nuke did, was blow a couple of the larger fuses those street lights used.
Meanwhile there are other factors complicating the matter with a transformer loop that wasn't grounded.
Literally ever bit of damage from that nuke would have been fixed by modern electrical engineering, and replacing ancient fuses with breakers.
flip the breakers back on and BOOM!
no damage.
kessler is a meme
Kessler syndrome would only last a few years, most satellites burn up in the atmosphere without regular station keeping
Aerospace engineer here. I studied that shit. Kessler syndrome is already happening and has been happening for years. The biggest culprit are anti-satellite tests, they filled LEO with a crapton of debris. Yes, lowest orbits decay, and debris burn up as they touch the atmosphere, however a significant portion of debris stays up and spreads around. The most dangerous space debris is the one we can't track, but only estimate their quantity and position, which is the vast majority. Impacts at the km/s scale mean that even a BB-sized pellet of literally any material will go through structural components, let alone mission critical stuff.
>let the blast push up all the debris away?
I can't be fricked to do the math, but I'm pretty sure you might need a lot more energy to accelerate/decelerate those peaces of debris to a point where they reenter the atmosphere or escape earth's gravity well
>The biggest culprit are anti-satellite tests
I was amazed when our prof showed us how much debris those caused. Weren't there only a handful of them too?
Yes, but those fricking morons keep doing them. I remember some years ago Russia did an anti-satellite dickswing, probably as a response to Starlink constellation buildup, except they didn't warn anyone, especially Roscosmos, and decided to target one of their old decommissioned spy satellites, with the result that the cloud of debris endangered the ISS. Before them, in the last 20 years or so, India and China had a test each IIRC. It doesn't take much to shit up orbits.
>nooo not the iss
Stfu
moron
Even if I didn't care about the ISS, Russians have a huge stake in it: they have entire modules and cosmonauts up there. It's like shooting your own foot because your brain doesn't communicate with your hand.
>inb4 noo not the footerino
No, that's not so dramatic, not in the short term anyway. Realistically it would make space access more expensive, as you'd have to reach higher safer orbits, maybe reach them as fast as possible if the situation is dire, meaning lower efficiency, meaning overall smaller payload for any given booster. In any case time is an important factor: space is insanely huge and the probability to be hit by space debris is insignificant at any given moment, even in a doomsday scenario, however most space missions range between years and decades, meaning that cumulatively the chance of being hit at least once over the life of the spacecraft becomes significant, and each orbit has its own threat profile, and as I said, it takes just one hit in the right spot to end a mission.
>Even if I didn't care about the ISS, Russians have a huge stake in it: they have entire modules and cosmonauts up there. It's like shooting your own foot because your brain doesn't communicate with your hand.
Not for much longer tho. The ISS will be de-orbited in 2030, the Russians have no budget whatsoever to build a space-station of their own, they're not gonna participate in the construction of the ISS's successor and the Chinese have refused allowing them to participate in their own domestic Space Station program.
>Weren't there only a handful of them too?
Yeah, they rarely ever happen because even colossal idiots like the Chinese understand the massive economical damages that could be caused once parts of their GPS constellation gets dabbed on by a cloud of high velocity flak.
So essentially in a few years we won't have any satellites or even a way to leave the planet anymore?
the lower orbits actually clean themselves up really quickly
Could you send up a constellation of satellites that fold out large shields (presumably of some sort of foam material) to catch all the tiny debris in a given orbit?
No. It's possible to soft catch particles at km/s velocities but thickness of such catcher is beyond anything you can deploy and unfold in space.
Only practical way is very high power lasers that can evaporate particles. Ironically such lasor would also make great ASAT weapons.
Alright. I figured you could at least decay the orbit of such particles even if stopping them outright is impossible, but I have little understanding of the crazy velocities involved.
In short: no. We're talking impacts in the tens of kilometers (or miles don't matter) per second, the interactions at those energy levels don't follow /k/ ballistics. Moreover each impact creates even more debris, with smaller dimensions. Pic related is what happens when a 1/2" in diameter pellet hits a 7" thick metal plate at 4 miles per second. Look for hypervelocity impacts if you want to know more.
The effort now is to find a system that can reliably capture and deorbit the biggest pieces of space junk, like decommissioned satellites, spent booster stages, and so on, that could potentially make a huge mess if they ever collide with each other.
Eh, let's not exaggerate now, yes the debris impacts are nasty when hitting monolithic materials, but whipple shields can quite comfortably catch most of the smaller stuff which is what we're primarily concerned with. It's more of a question of practicality than anything else, sending up a frickhuge whipple shield panel and trying to clean up the orbit of those tiny particles is pretty impossible, especially with all the orbits they're in.
Eh, he's exaggerating but debris impacts in low Earth orbit are getting more and more common, not quite Kessler-syndrome scale but it's still something we should consider before blasting satellites in a dick measuring contest.
Why don't they just make spacecraft out of whatever the BB is made of? It didn't deform at all.
We need a really big magnet
Why do you lie? Kessler is a meme, any debris moving at enough velocity to damage a spacecraft in a stable orbit would have to be moving the opposite direction or be completely tangential. At that point there’s really no chance of a collision since space is big as shit. We would have to put a hundred times more tonnage into space than we have now before it’s anywhere near saturated enough for Kessler syndrome
>blast waves require some medium to propagate
>on earth this is done by pushing air
>in space there is no air
How are you going to push anything away?
>>in space there is no air
What about aether though
photons hit things, right? I can push bugs away with a flashlight.
>I can push bugs away with a flashlight.
What about dead bugs. Can you push them with photons?
Ok memes aside, PrepHolegay here: yes, photons indeed have a force but it's comparably tiny and the photons generated from nuke that propagate in all directions would not have enough energy to push anything away significantly
Funny enough there was some shizo tier project Excalibur with goal to generate x-rays in space with a nuke to blow up soviet ICBMs
You could just make frickhuge nets and clear out orbital lanes then throw the trash either into the ocean or into space.
Kessler syndrome is already a reality. Not like a crazed cascade reaction that feeds itself like "Gravity" movie, no. Like a LEO saturation with a gorillion debris that need to be catalogued, tracked, taken into account when scheduling launches and/or orbital transfers. Also enjoy your new shiny 10 billion $ scientific instrument pierced clean through by a bb-sized piece of polycarbonate traveling 20 miles/sec because it was radar-transparent and never been catalogued as a orbital junk.
>can't we just detonate a frick huge nukes and let the blast push up all the debris away ?
>would nuke even works in space ?
Yes we can. Yes they work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H9gmXOjxlM
The problem is, there is not enough medium around even at LEO to create a proper blastwave. So, to destroy stuff outside of fireball effective diameter, instead you need to rely on radiated energy to ablate things around with a massive burst of Xray like W71 warhead were supposed to do. Problem is, W71 were 5MT devices with a solid gold tamper (or hohlraum, can't remember shit these years). You know, like outrageous amount of gold.
Even this will give you a 20-25 miles kill radius on a smaller debris.
You'll need a huge stockpile of legendary, exorbitantly expensive nukes to clean up a country-sized sector of space (which is a total waste of effort with *orbiting* junk). They WILL fry and maim tons of sensitive satellites and spacecraft. They WILL do massive comms blackout and will frick up SW propagation big time by chaotic ionization of wrong ionospheric layers an during fallout of ionized material onto polar regions along with magnetic lines. There will be insane auroral anomalies and HF/UHF/VHF messed up for weeks to a certain extent.
I believe it's a task to something like X-37B with a pulsed laser and some sophisticated targeting-guidance-focusing stuff to pop small debris around with a high-joule laser ablation. Otherwise, just overall ban ASAT and hope for the best.
The only real way to combat Kessler syndrome would be for some sort of well funded international agency to be established that was dedicated to radar cataloguing all debris >1mm and pushing them into decaying orbits with high powered lasers. I do not expect proposals for the creation of such an agency to happen before every satellite in LEO has already been reduced to metallic bbs moving at insane velocities.
I would say that we are close to the tipping point of the start of a runaway Kessler scenario. LEO is just so saturated that it would really only take one bad anti-satellite missile test to break the camels back.
The more conspiratorial side of me even thinks that the US government knows this, hence why the USSF is entirely earth orbit focused; Seemingly lacking any interested or even future projected capability that extends beyond LEO. Almost as if us being trapped here by a metallic cloud in LEO in the near future is already apart of military thinking.
> Almost as if us being trapped here by a metallic cloud in LEO in the near future is already apart of military thinking.
it has been as long as ASAT weapons have been in testing. those are area denial weapons, and that area being denied is low orbit
can someone turn the orbit into no mans land
I mean by launching a satellite purpose build to expode and spray millions of debris
Yes, it doesnt need explosives even. It just needs to crash at the right spot. And the no mans land would be everywhere.
That's basically what an anti satellite missile does
>spent an hour building a wall of text just to tell us he’s a fear mongered redditor
>would nuke even works in space ?
they do a real number on spaceships when detonated nearby, but there is no atmosphere so the effective radius is much smaller than on earth
Reminder that a US space nuke test fried UK's first satellite kek
>It was just a prank, bro.
>can't we just detonate a frick huge nukes and let the blast push up all the debris away ?
you dingus, you know how a blastwave works? it pushes air away, theres no fricking air in space
Big nuke can evaporate small debris in about 10 miles radius yes. But. Compare it to the size of the LEO orbit. Space is very big.
When we detonated nukes in space before, they found out that the heavy and radioactive particles from the explosion got trapped in Van Allen belts, making them insanely more radioactive. So for example right now in Van Allen belts you have maybe electrons and protons. But after the nuclear explosions Van Allen belts had heavy nucleus of uranium and other alpha particles racing up and down on magnetic lines from South pole to North pole. Let me tell you its a big difference whether your spacecraft is hit by an electron particle accelerated by magnetic field or by a much much more heavier uranium nucleus accelerated in magnetic field. Those little shits stayed in magnetic field of Earth for months after testing, creating much more challenging environment for satellites and communication.
Why did they draw her snout like that, it's so jagged and weird
kessler syndrome is a non-issue. by the time we have such a need for space travel that it is a concern, we would have the technology to make resolving kessler syndrom relatively trivial.
>can't we just detonate a frick huge nukes and let the blast push up all the debris away ?
Doesn't work like that since there's no matter in the vacuum of space to push with an explosion, therefore there's nothing to blast the debris away. The only viable solution to Kessler syndrome that I can think of right now are ground based lasers hitting the debris in orbit and using the heat of the laser to partially melt the debris, causing the release of gases that will provide thrust to push the debris away from our more valuable orbits.
A: Radiation pressure.
B: Don't melt with a laser, melt with nukes.
Might not work very well though, and since it'd be death for nearby satellites too it wouldn't really be useful until we've lost all satellites even assuming it does get the job done. That's a bit late really.
>B: Don't melt with a laser, melt with nukes.
That's stooopeeed. Let's collapse civilian electrical infrastructure to push space debris away, what the worst it could happen?
Ideally you'd have some kind of gravity mine that attracts debris like a gigantic magnet as it goes along on an orbit, and your notPlanetes crew then drops by later with a drag net once the battery of that mine starts running low.
Of course, this being the universe where no fun is allowed (thanks physics!), all we can probably do at the moment is the drag net, really.
OK, remember that any orbit is bigger than the entire surface of earth. How big of a bomb do you think you'll detonate at any given level that won't totally frick the ground under it, but do a significant amount of pushing in a vacuum?
>moonbase launches giant magnetic net swarm
>rocket motors launch it back towards the moon's orbit after a few days of catching stuff
>space nets lands back on moon
>materials get recycled or something
>repeat
>would nuke even works in space ?
It would, just not in the way you think it would. Basically when it comes to blast, the area would be where radiation pressure would have effect, so that would be miniscule. In Project Orion nuclear propulsion set up detonation distance for 0.3kt nuclear devices was in 20 to 30m from spacecrafts pusher plate.
>can't we just detonate a frick huge nukes and let the blast push up all the debris away ?
So basically to clear any substantial amount of space junk with nukes, you would need to detonate thousands of 'em at low earth orbit.
I wonder what effects a more energy inefficient method would have?
put out "dragnets" to try and just sit for a bit, catch a bunch of stuff, and go out of orbit or come back down with it?
I suppose the big issue would be catching stuff without it creating more fragments.
Small maneuverable satellites to hunt down derelict satellites and attach some kind of breaking system that will expedite re-entry of derelicts. Solar sail, tether or possibly even rocket motor. Launched in excess capacity of regular satellite launches. Still everything would be easier if each satellite launched would solve the trash problem by having enough fuel to de-orbit the satellite at the end of service. It isn't much more fuel for maneuvering thrusters of a satellite if you are fine with rather long de-orbit time, it might take decades for satellite to actually re-enter the atmosphere after the final burn.
I am talking about the floating small debris anon.
The paint chips and similar.
There is very little we can do that kind of stuff, maybe a laser satellite, assuming you can detect it, there is serious problem in tracking that kind of stuff. Best way to deal with it is to have less dead satellites, used rocket stages and other debris on orbit, that may be impacted by things about size of bolt or nut. Preventing collisions in first place prevents clouds of tiny debris from forming in the first place.