Space Junk: Maybe we need Andy Griffith's Salvage 1?

William Atkins
Friday, 18 April 2008 01:06

Science - Space

Many techniques have been suggested to eliminate, or at least reduce, the number of space junk out there in space.

So far, however, nobody has really done much about actively building something to deal with space junk.

One proposed technique is found on the SpaceFuture.com website “Orion’s Laser Hunting Space Debris” by Ivan Bekey.

Tethers have also been tested, with some success. Tethers are used to slow down old satellites so they de-orbit faster than if nothing is done.

A French Spot-1 satellite was tethered successfully in 2003. It is now scheduled to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere at the end of the 2010s.

One (almost) gone …. only thousands to go! We might say, "Space Junk--the final garbage frontier!"