Re: What are we going to do about all the space junk?

Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
20 Apr 1999 19:07:06 +0200

Spike Jones <spike66@ibm.net> writes:

> > Any ideas?
>
> Many, just not necessarily practical ones.

My favorite is to send up a big sponge (i.e. a ball of soft material) and let the debris crash into it. Maybe not perfect for the large chunks (but they are easily tracked) but good for swabbing up the fast and dangerous small fragments. Problem: space is big.

> a notion at one time of trying to modify the orbit of a piece
> of a comet, to place it into earth orbit, then use this large
> chunk of ice to capture bits of orbitting debris.

... and replacing them with ice fragments, dust and gas. :-)

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y