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[Starver]

There'd be little material value in grabbing-for-recycling (or other re-use, etc) non-working sats or bits of sats. No more than visiting your local scrapyard in constructing your new Hubble/whatever. (Almost anything usefully prefabricated could probably just be re-fabricated from scratch better. Unless you used you last half kilo of Unobtanium-13 in the original item, maybe, but that's not gonna be the case this side of a dreadfully-laboured film plot.)

And some objects up there, with military/intelligence missions to them, might be designed to not to be captured, and their owners not look kindly on non-owners potentially retrieving any bits.


The big need is to just stop the bits floating around out there (without any hope or need to get them home). Sooner than later, ideally, before it gets to the point where they're unmanagably numerous.

Of course, sending rockets up with things on them that can get other bits down is tricky enough, and you don't want to risk adding to the problem (your garbage-collector hitting other things badly, breaking so that it becomes garbage, leaving its own extra bits like rocket-fairings that reach orbital heights), and you're having to spend money on a launch that isn't adding communications, space-telescopy, supplies to spacemen, etc. So it has to be a harder sell. Luckily, some people take the Kessler thing seriously (as others did viral epidemics, so that might be scant reassurance).


Oh, and unless you're Wile E. Coyote, you generally can't hold a magnet out in the direction of a distant object and have it magically zoom towards you (usually including unforeseen things like stray airliners and mysterious anvils, as well as the ball-bearings that you previously hid in amongst the pile of birdfeed). Anything on Earth that could reach up magnetically to orbit and usefully help (with the Nickel, Iron, Cobalt or Steel bits, unless you can induce complimentary electromagnetism in other conductors as well, which is a thing in, e.g., aluminium sorting and recycling) is probably very much weaponisable here on Earth so not casually available for orbital cleaners to play around with.


Hence why it's still a very much embryonic concept, loads of ideas that are very rough and ready but no definite answers yet. The best current idea, in use, is just to try to make sure any sat you send up has a 'death reserve' of propellant, and the wherewithall to use it as your final act of control, to make sure the thing can be pushed down/up[1] and somewhere it is safer.

[1] As KSP players will know, it's not really those, but let's say it is to save time, eh?

[Madman198237]

Anything on Earth that could reach up magnetically to orbit and usefully help (with the Nickel, Iron, Cobalt or Steel bits, unless you can induce complimentary electromagnetism in other conductors as well, which is a thing in, e.g., aluminium sorting and recycling) is probably very much weaponisable here on Earth so not casually available for orbital cleaners to play around with.

More importantly any such magnet strong enough to meaningfully affect something three hundred kilometers up is strong enough to screw with things HORIZONTALLY out to a comparable radius. So, yes, if you could magic up the supermagnet to end all supermagnets you'd be able to force material (and live satellites) down for sure, but you'd also screw with every cable, piece of steel, and refrigerator for hundreds of miles all around.

[KittyTac]

snip

I agree with you on this. As long as NASA (or the government itself) still has the power to shut anything too disruptive, corporations won't be able to, say, project a Pepsi logo in space. It would interfere with their observatories and be a collision risk. I actually want an arms race, because, as MM described, it probably won't involve outright war.

[Starver]

NASA (and its government, with or without SPAAAACCCEEE FOORRRRRCCCCEEEE...) don't have a monopoly on launches. They can't even currently do manned ones for themselves (though they've got two or three contractors/corporate suppliers gearing up to the capabilty) meaning Russia has the main job of lofting people, and maybe they could have gone to the Chinese too.

Unmanned, however, you can add such as India, Europe-as-a-whole[1], Israel, South Korea, maybe their bestest friend and neighbour as orbit-capable, and an untold number more have suborbital vehicles that might lead onto orbital ones if they worked on them/imported mercenary expertise.

'Moon-capable' would be a list of at least Russia (if not other ex-Soviet states, by technicality and continuation of some personal space system), US, China, Japan, Europe, India and Israel. Only the US (and Kubrick, and the Third Reich) have put men on the Moon and not every attempt I'm listing has arrived intact (in the intended way), but that doesn't stop them doing something lunar enough times to get someone's message across.


It depends what you need to do to "light up the Moon". If it's projection onto it from Earth (or LEO, which is practically the same) then you're out of luck, but it might be easier (half the 'light flight' distance, so roughly a quarter of the attenuation and concentrated where you want it as well) to land a lot of floodlights in various spots and flare them up during a new moon.

Or just send nukes to flare up at the right time, maybe also leaving some discernable pockmarks afterwards, when the illumination passes over the sites.


Not sure what's most feasible (maybe just bombard the place with dust, the opposite of the "pixel-preserving post-pickaxing painting" I mentioned in another post) and who the people with the necessary cash to spend would go to in order to spend it. But the realm of possibility is flying its flag from just over the horizon at least.

[1] And various component nations in Europe did some launching of their own. e.g. UK could, pre-ESA, and might be able to cobble together something from its people's time in ESA if it officially pulls out, but I'm not holding my breath. At least not in a vacuum.

[Iduno]

The moon conversation reminds me of The Tick.

[Madman198237]

UK could, sort of, except they killed their own space program as soon as the Black Arrow rocket had its first successful flight, because Parliament.

Anyway, all of the things you're proposing, Starver, are pretty much not reasonable. Yes, a bunch of nations can reach the Moon with small landers, but only the US and SLS (hahahahahahahahahahahaha darnit why is NASA governed so much by Congress) could loft a reasonably large payload to the Moon without needing hundreds of launches or more.

Nobody is going to go slinging NUKES of all things at the Moon. That's silly and it has zero relevance to the question of "will lunar industry ruin the view of the Moon". Why is anyone intentionally going to the Moon to place floodlights and how are they keeping them powered? Fields of solar panels and even more massive batteries?

It's just not going to happen, not really.

[Egan_BW]

Besides which, it would just be super sweet to see cities on the moon come on.
That's the most HFY view this side of a dyson sphere.

[wierd]

The light on the moon is not filtered by any atmosphere. Solar concentrators and molten salt thermal storage could conceivably work on the moon quite well, using the regolith as the thermal energy sink.

The issue is the rather long lunar nights.  You would need to lay back a LOT of molten salt in insulated vessels, or have reserve chemical batteries to handle them.

On the plus side-- overhead wires on telephone poles would not have near the problems they have on earth, either with voltage bleed from producing HV coronas, or from wind, rain, or animals.  Would require a radical redesign of power transformers though to deal with heat and near vacuum...  but not impossible. That way you could make use of the fact that only at certain semi-rare events where the earth fully occults the sun, the sun would always be shining somewhere on the moon, and the nearly completely reversibility of the surface would let you put such power lines everywhere.

SpaceX is working on its super-heavy as well-- while not able to lift whole damn factories at once, it is much beefier than any of the other rockets out there besides SLS.

[Madman198237]

SpaceX is working on its super-heavy as well-- while not able to lift whole damn factories at once, it is much beefier than any of the other rockets out there besides SLS.

Unless they've been decoying us all with the Starship work, SH is, in addition to all the good things about it, also the most overpromised rocket probably in history, given that we've not yet seen a single test article and Elon is, as usual, promising that the whole Starship/SH stack will be flying by the end of THIS YEAR.

Which, well, that ain't happening. It's yet another case of Elon Time^TM.

[Starver]

The issue is the rather long lunar nights.  You would need to lay back a LOT of molten salt in insulated vessels, or have reserve chemical batteries to handle them.

This is another of my long-standing thoughts on Lunar Development. Encircle the Moon with photovoltaics (or even grid it, my favourite is to go all icosohedral[1]) and anything else pre-planned, as very thin (lower than causes issues with my "Face Of The Moon Protection Act") corridors to allow light-side and dark-side activities to cooperate at all times to pool consistent power and ship it where it's needed (for artificial light, exactly the oposite side in effect).

Lesser feeds (in or out) could be extended across into the spaces delineated by the corridors from the most convenient points, whether that be spoke-like (towards the poles, if equatorial; towards the far/near-sides if rim-circling) or irregularly stellating the polygon faces (as with the icosohedral version, which newly services more Moon surface better once it is built).


But I'm worried that power-transmission is vulnerable. Outside the Earth's radiation belts, we may be subject to a kind of
Carrington Event for every solar storm that comes vaguely our way, without attenuation. Needs to be hardened. Also, though it's more work, suspending the prime transmission cables within tunnels, albeit those tunnels being a megaproject of their own, would seem more physically resilient than linesmen stringing wires across the bare surface, open to micro(/notsomicro)meteoroidal impacts.

I envisage the tunnel-digging to also add value to the Face Protection aspect while (and this is maybe my Fortress experiences influencing me) getting a whole lot of prospecting done by making it near impossible not to find some interesting rocks as we dig.


[1] Except in Quiet Zone, though maybe if the zone radius fitted neatly into the furthest of the far-side triangles (I worked out the extent, once, and I think it's about 30° around the antipode that would fit within the grid) it would still work.

[Reelya]

Put the collectors at the Lunar poles. You get continuous light then for 6 months, and putting them on towers means year-round power. Also, the angle of the sun doesn't matter as much as it would at the Earth's poles, since there's no atmosphere in the way.

http://theworld.com/~reinhold/lunarpolar.html

[Starver]

Which is why I favour rimward encirclement (if we're circling the Moon with collector farm power transmission), given all the other factors. And icosahedrally orientate to have points N and S rather than faces N and S. Extend the polar collectors' power (and ground/underground transit routes) down across the hemispheres by whichever plan you initially adopt until you have both systems connecting at the equator and a ready-made zoning system handily mapped out.


I've thought a lot about this.

[wierd]

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41541-020-0172-y

Great implications for human therapeutic use there!  Very good news.

Still too early to celebrate-- Murine model != Human model, et al--- but still very promising! I can hardly wait!

[Starver]

On the environment, and maybe engineering, still no need to worry about the fires raging around Chernobyl.

It's a change from viruses, at least...

[Iduno]

I was just reminded that stationing exists.

You'll see something like 1145 + 86.1, which means the location is 114,586.1 feet from. Why are the numbers grouped wrong? Why are we using decimal feet? Why would you use a coordinate system with no direction or explanation of where the numbers are starting? Because civils are the dumbest people on earth.