DAT Mass! (Of Space Junk)

             Just when I thought that life in outer space was nice and dandy I've begun to hear about some sort of space junk. So I thought to myself, couldn't be too bad... I mean all we had to do was just clean up after ourselves or companies had to take the responsibility for it. I mean even the international space station MIR (Peace/World in Russian) was sent to the bottom of the ocean somewhere back in 2000's (I guess someone had a tough Russian mom that taught them to clean up after themselves too!).

              So now I'm thinking to myself, if space junk is in space, then it has to orbit and it has to go really fast to do so, while being pretty massive.... so if it were to somehow find a way to hit a satellite or a space rocket, it'd be pretty GG (Good Game - which for your newbs means game over, or just go google GG meaning) for that satellite or the rocket... And what do you know, there IS plenty of junk out there on all kinds of orbit. And with Chinese testing their anti-satellite weaponry in 2007+ added a wee bit more debris from already polluted orbits by the USSR, US and other previous space exploring nations' testing/experimenting. (Video below).

So I've read multiple articles and I can't seem to find a definite number for a critical mass of junk that would have to orbit Earth to create a space exploration Apocalypse, but seems like it has already been mildly reached. Because all the junk already in orbits WILL create more debris, it's just a matter of time. Since collision of 2 separate junk masses WILL break up into more pieces upon a collision at high speeds in orbit. Therefore I'd assume that it has been reached, however, may be not as menacing at the moment as it will be in a couple decades. But by that time nobody cares, because they'll just leave it to their grandchildren to deal with, just like with our current situation with global warming. GREAT...


The speeds of satellites could be calculated as:





Therefore for an orbit (From the center of Earth) 6.47 x 10⁶ m, will yield a speed of 7.85 KILOMETERS/S!!!! With G (6.673 x 10^-11 N m²/kg²) and Mass of Earth (5.98 x 10²⁴ kg) as constants, we see that speeds in orbit are pretty effin' huge the lower the orbit, the more HUGEr the speeds get! So imagine hitting a Russian made wrench (We saw what those things can repair with ease, thanks to Armageddon with Bruce Willis) while on your trip to space this summer.

Happy Happy fun time since High school

These are the things that I'll be talking about in my blogs. =)
outdated, since these are all around year 2009 and MUCH has happened since. But I'll do some extra digging on these subjects sometime later!

Level " " please (See what I did there? " " = space)

Space Elevators sort of speak have been an idea since long ago. I bet every kid wondered, if we have elevators that go on 99th floor of a building, why not build an elevator all the way to space... but then puberty and growing up and school happened... Shattered dreams!
Or were they, I guess some people never grew up and continued with the idea! (Which is effin' fancy!)


So at the core of it all lies an E&M problem, how much current will be generated with some kind of a wire traveling through a magnetic field. Well, as it happens magnetic and electric fields/forces are pretty real and we can use them to push or pull once we are "high" enough. It is the way to solve asscention and descention from and to space.As described in Scientific American. (I will expand on it later when I visit my parents' home and pull out the magazine)


However a Soviet way is a bit simpler with huge complications: http://kp.ru/daily/23170/25116/?geo=1
In 1960's Yuri N. Artsutanovanov, a soviet physicist, proposed an idea of using an electric elevator and a cable hanging from space. They proposed that an asteroid could be moved towards Earth close enough to follow us as a counterweight. And a station to be built in the Pacific ocean where little seismic activity or Lightning Storms happen. This station could be implanted into Earth to provide stability. Then the problem of a cable strong enough to hold such weight came to become an issue. And the dream seemed to die, but alas, Carbon nano-tubes to the rescue!!! And the dream is now alive once again! Nanotubes are 5 and 50 times stronger than Steel and they weigh almost nothing. (The strength of the sp² carbon-carbon bonds gives carbon nanotubes amazing mechanical properties. The stiffness of a material is measured in terms of its Young's modulus, the rate of change of stress with applied strain. The Young's modulus of the best nanotubes can be as high as 1000 GPa which is approximately 5x higher than steel. The tensile strength, or breaking strain of nanotubes can be up to 63 GPa, around 50x higher than steel. These properties, coupled with the lightness of carbon nanotubes, gives them great potential in applications such as aerospace. "http://www.personal.reading.ac.uk/~scsharip/tubes.htm") To ensure no breaking of nanotube cable, it will be covered with a thin layer of aluminum. So it will look like a sheet of paper with 100000 km in length and 1 m in width.


The proposed elevator will carry up to 13 tons of stuffs into space. making space deliveries cost almost nothing. 100$ for a kg, while current rates are of 1kg for 10000-15000$! Dayumn! We can get any kind of a telescope out in space without making it unfold in space. How awesome would that be!? More Epic than any of the Space Cats!

And now that I really think about it, it'd be a pretty epic suicide to pay for a 75kg body to be delivered into space with a bit of water and other provisions (Just think about that...)! But thanks to some little dillholes, I bet we'd find graffiti on the elevators if it were open to public!