

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton   (Source:











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RE: Obscure comparison
By Solandri on 1/19/2012 1:06:16 PM , Rating: 2
It's a bad example, since the real danger isn't to people on the ground. The atmosphere burns up most space debris before it can hit the ground (or a person), and people just don't cover a significant fraction of the earth's surface for it to be a high risk.

The real danger is up in space. To be in orbit, you have to be moving at 7-10 km/sec. Any orbiting space junk is also moving at 7-10 km/sec, but in a different direction. If the two collide, the relative velocities and therefore kinetic energies are huge even for a small piece of debris.

At the rate we're producing orbiting junk, in 50-100 years we won't be able to put satellites or spacecraft in orbit with the expectation that they'll survive. This is a crater in one of the space shuttle's windows caused by an impact with a 0.2mm fleck of paint. It penetrated about halfway through the window's thickness.

This is the hole left in one of the shuttle's cargo bay doors after an impact with an unknown piece of space debris.

Both of these pieces of debris were way too small to be tracked by NORAD, so they're not included in the half million pieces of debris mentioned in the article.

RE: Obscure comparison
By The Raven on 1/19/2012 1:13:18 PM , Rating: 2
So what you are saying is that we can defend space from our enemies if we put enough junk up there, right?

RE: Obscure comparison
By PReiger99 on 1/19/2012 2:41:24 PM , Rating: 2
In the same line of thought, an enemy not as dependent on satellites could just detonate a missile loaded with small ball bearings and make the space unusable for quite some time.

RE: Obscure comparison
By UnauthorisedAccess on 1/19/2012 6:50:43 PM , Rating: 4
I, for one, welcome our new ball bearing overlords.

RE: Obscure comparison
What if they are over bearing ball-lords??

