[Ground-station] Debris Mitigation - call for comments

[Phil Karn]

I am very seriously concerned about space debris. I just don't see any
easy ways to clean it up. It **might** be practical to demo a robotic
mission to de-orbit some of the larger intact satellites that represent
large chunks of the total mass in LEO, but there's nothing to do about
the zillions of tiny bits with 100x the specific energy of a rifle bullet.

For amateur satellites and cubesats in general I think the only
practical option is to keep them in low, short-lived orbits that will
clean themselves out over time.

I'm very seriously concerned about the part of Musk's huge constellation
in relatively high and long-lived LEO orbits. While all their satellites
are currently in 550 km orbits that aren't terribly long-lived, their
plans change constantly and they've already had approvals to put
thousands of satellites in long lived orbits up around 1,000 km. Each
spacecraft is 260 kg, and 1,440 satellites @ 260 kg each is 374 tonnes.
By comparison, the ISS is 420 tonnes in a much shorter-lived orbit (if
it were to fail or be abandoned).

Despite his best efforts I expect some of his satellites *will* fail to
deorbit and some others *will* get hit and further contribute to the
Kessler syndrome. Already happened with one operational Iridium
satellite and there are many fewer of those.

I still think fiber is the right answer for high speed Internet
connectivity to buildings in all but the most isolated places. The main
obstacle is political, not economic, especially the unholy alliance
between broadband providers and governments to restrict new entries to
the market. And it really bugs me whenever a political problem
encourages the squandering of a valuable natural resource.

--Phil