If a satellite is in a very low orbit then any debris fall to earth quickly. Almost all cubesats have a orbital life of six to five years. The space station, in a normal low earth orbit, would hit the earth in around three years without reboosts.<p>The higher you go, the more absolute volume there is, the slower the satellites there travel and the fewer satellites there are.<p>So that leaves a band of mid-upper LEO satellites to consider for Kessler Syndrome.<p>When you have a collision between satellites, the velocity on average of each fragment is less than it was before, making the fragments decay faster. The fragments after each collision are smaller than they were before as well, thus having more air and solar resistance, which also makes them decay faster.<p>The Chinese FY-1C satellite that was blown up was the absolute worst case for a satellite explosion. It was located on the high side of LEO with a decay time measured in human generations, and it was in a super crowded sun-following orbit altitude, sharing space with lots of weather and earth observation satellites. The explosion generated 150,000 debris fragments.<p>In the ten years since, most of those fragments have reentered. We now have 2,000 golfball sized or bigger fragments being tracked, and over the past ten years, the only casualty has been a small, ten pound reflector satellite. Small debris pieces fall, and big pieces can be tracked and avoided.<p>If every satellite we have put into space magically exploded, and the debris was magically moved to a high LEO altitude and evenly distributed to avoid any holes, then we could still launch through this orbit of death to higher altitudes with only a 1 in 1000 probability of impact.<p>Space regulation has gotten much tougher since the bad old days. Satellites are now required to have deorbit or safeing plans, and the median satellites size has gone down by a couple orders of magnitude.<p>Kessler syndrome isn't something that keeps me up at night.
There's a pretty great manga series (and an anime adaptation, though it's not as good) called 'Planetes', that takes a pretty heavy focus on Kessler Syndrome and humanity's attempts to grapple with it in the near-future. Worth a read, if anyone's interested.
There's no incentive to me to make my satellite safely de-orbit before it gets broken into pieces. So why would I bother? That's expensive.<p>But like all 'easy to litter, hard to clean up' problems of this nature, we have a solution already: require a cleanup deposit ahead of time that will be returned to whoever cleans it up.<p>All space-launching countries should sign an accord that said something along the lines of "Every satellite must have a deposit to the international Kessler Fund", say something like $X/kg, inflation adjusted. Companies would spring up with the sole purpose of de-orbiting defunct satellites. Launch would become more expensive, yes, but soon every bit of metal in space would come equipped with a plan for how we're getting it out of orbit.
Kessler syndrome is why it was so irresponsible of the Chinese to blow up a satellite just to prove that they could.<p>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_missile_test" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi...</a>
The weird thing about Kessler syndrome is that people use it as an argument not to launch sattelites.<p>So it’s kind of like we’re getting the effects of Kessler syndrome by trying to prevent it.
Satellites are a pretty big deal connercially. Maybe something like this would just jumpstart one of our wildly productive bouts of human ingenuity?<p>Getting to the moon was kind of an insane idea until it happened. To someone wholly uninformed, this feels like it could be similar.
Orbital Debris Quarterly:<p><a href="https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/quarterly-news/newsletter.html" rel="nofollow">https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/quarterly-news/newsletter...</a>
Humanity's always had a problem with it's trash.<p>Something I suppose we assume "space people" can deal with.<p>My suggestion: a space catapult (using a spring, not a weight).
One mitigating factor is that Objects in LEO would Deorbit pretty fast. Usually in a matter of years. In higher orbits there’s a lot more space so it’s not quite as bad.<p>Food for thought.
Oh wow, is that where the term "Kessler Run" comes from in Star Wars?<p>If I recall, the Kessler run involved having to go through an asteroid field in the recent Solo movie.<p>For fans, you may recall that in the original Star Wars Han says: "You've never heard of the Millennium Falcon?…It's the ship that made the Kessler Run in less than twelve parsecs."<p>This got ridiculed because parsec is a unit of distance not time, but in the new movie they show that the run can be made longer or shorter.