Touring space?
Apr 11th, 2008 by Moonage
Sir Richard Branson is doing everything he can to develop and promote his Virgin space tours. Great concept I think. I’d be all over that idea if it weren’t for one pesky problem:
That is just man-made junk circling around the Earth. Now, NASA has a good billion dollar system for mitigating where those things are and where not to send the Shuttle. I’m not sure Sir Richard has the capitol to pull it off. I just don’t see how NASA can even assure me that one of those things floating around might not be where it’s supposed to be. ( Things do bump into each other and go out of orbit ya know. )
Something needs to be done about this, and it needs to be done every soon.
Yes, all that debris could be a problem but remember, Virgin Galactic will only be going up to about 62 miles. Most of the debris in that picture is above the 100 mile mark and a lot looks to be in geosynchronous orbit. I dont think you have that much to worry about. Now, if I were on the space station I would definitly be concerned.
Jeff
Well, I’m not terribly interested, nor do I think most “tourists”, in going 62 miles up. I’d like to orbit a time or two to get the real impact. No pun intended. The 62 mile mark is just the goal right now because that’s pretty much the lowest limit of what you could call “space”. Even at that point, stuff is constantl re-entering the Eart’s atmosphere. As more stuff goes up, it will eventually come down. We only hear about the really big stuff that could cause problems on the ground. If space tourism does take off, then we’ll have to worry about what’s not just on the ground. Secondly, 10 years ago, us and the Russians were pretty much it as far as sending stuff into space. Now, you’ve got about 20 countries sending stuff, with lots more on the edge of doing so. Most of that junk comes from two countries, imagine what it’ll look like with forty countries shooting stuff up. If we don’t start doing something now, it’ll get very dangerous in a very short time with the Chinese, Indians, Japanese, and Brazilians ratcheting up their space explorations. Lastly, I’m still not totally convinced that the last Shuttle loss was purely from frozen foam. Impact is impact, it could have been foam, it could have been a fragment from something floating around up there. Traveling at 20,000, any little thing becomes a missile. We just need to fix this procedurally before it becomes catastrophic.