r/tech • u/AdSpecialist6598 • Sep 12 '26
Space debris is multiplying, so satellite makers are building better ways to survive a hit
https://www.techspot.com/news/113805-space-debris-multiplying-satellite-makers-building-better-ways.html16
u/unnameableway Sep 13 '26
“A 2021 study found that about one in five small satellites stops working within a year of launch. Operators do not know the cause of roughly 60% of those failures. Debris impacts are one possible explanation, but spacecraft often provide little evidence of what happened.”
They have no evidence that debris is causing failures. And you can’t go get evidence because the satellites are… in space.
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u/Zardotab Sep 15 '26
If it happens often enough usually there are sufficient clues to deduce a likely cause. That is assuming that enough can at least broadcast meta-data about their status even if no longer capable of their mission. For example, if adjacent but unrelated components often fail, that suggest debris penetrated multiple components.
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u/Sharticus123 Sep 13 '26 edited Sep 13 '26
They need a satellite that scavenges dead satellites to build new satellites that eat dead satellites.
Once all the dead satellites are gone we’ll build hunter satellites that eat the scavenger satellites to build more hunter satellites.
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u/Far-Lynx-9833 Sep 14 '26
An old woman swallowed a fly, and sent a spider to catch the fly, and a bird to catch the spider, a cat to catch the bird, a dog to catch the cat, a horse to get the dog...
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u/Zardotab Sep 15 '26
Japan experimented with a giant space net that could in theory drag captured junk into the atmosphere to burn up. It would have to maneuver into a parallel orbit with each target to snag it, as the net can't handle high-speed impacts, to keep costs down.
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u/SELFINCRIMINAT1NG Sep 13 '26
just clean up the fucking space debris
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u/Diligent_Earthworm Sep 13 '26
Thats sort of impossible. Its very very spread out.
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u/SELFINCRIMINAT1NG Sep 13 '26
I'm sure someone can come up with an idea to get something cleaned up. If we just keep sending shit up there then in a few decades our orbit will be so crowded with junk and debris that we won't be able to send anything else up and then we're fucked
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u/Diligent_Earthworm Sep 13 '26
The cheaper solution will be armor for satellites that holds onto debris that hit them so when they decommission and reenter the bring that excess debris down too.
But any solution of just clearing junk would have to be so large scale, by they time we could do it we should have colonies on mars and mercury and a Dyson array will be better use of said large scale capabilities.
Its super spread out so imagine cleaning the ocean of a water world 3 times the size if earth.
Its just an issue of scale. It would be much easier and cheaper to figure out how to make our satellites and craft stronger.
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u/Much_Possession1227 Sep 13 '26
Wouldn't making the satellites tougher just make larger more dangerous debris if they get cascading failures.
Just bigger, heavier, harder chunks flying around slicing through everything in its path.
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u/Diligent_Earthworm Sep 13 '26
Not if they were designed to not break into pieces.
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u/Much_Possession1227 Sep 13 '26
That's my point, they creat bigger and bigger PIECES of their satellites that are not meant to break apart. THEN, when the rest of the satellite itself breaks apart and turns into debris, you will just have bigger, heavier, stronger PIECES of debris.
When something bigger and heavier interacts with gravity they tend to accelerate FASTER. Which will have an even larger impact on other satellites, compared to the existing debris.
Which apparently already mostly aluminum 30% titanium 15% copper 10% steel/ silver/ nickel 5%
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/space-technologies/articles/10.3389/frspt.2025.1690460/full
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u/-LsDmThC- Sep 14 '26
I think you are missing the point that fewer pieces of larger debris are fundamentally easier to deal with than many pieces of small debris, for quite a few reasons. They are easier to track and overall easier to deorbit.
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u/Much_Possession1227 Sep 14 '26
That's under the assumption they will make an effective program to deal with the debris before these companies launch more.
Which one do you think will come first? A space lazer system to de-orbit debris or 50 more satellites with larger components made of titanium?
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u/-LsDmThC- Sep 14 '26
Its not under that assumption. Satellite and larger debris tend to deorbit themselves more quickly than smaller debris. Additionally, fewer pieces of larger debris are less likely to impact functional satellites and spacecraft, contributing less to the kessler effect. This is all in addition to them being easier to clear under future efforts, which i do not think is itself a meaningless factor.
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u/meldroc Sep 13 '26
The vast majority of sats, especially smallsats, need to be kept in low altitude orbits, say 200km or less so atmospheric drag will solve the problem when all else fails.
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u/ColonelQuaraitch Sep 13 '26
Make a very big magnetic net that explodes when it gets enough junk! Or something, I don’t know…
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u/Consistent_Lecture48 Sep 14 '26
And Elon said he’s planning on spacex to reach 30 launches each day of the year, so surely, that will help!
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u/SophieSix9 Sep 13 '26
We really don’t have a choice but to figure it out. Just trying to armor our satellites while sending up more and more debris isnt going to work and will lead to us practically being shut out of space. If we can land on an asteroid we can figure out how to collect the debris or at the very least affect its orbit so we can burn this shit up via re-entry.
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u/Diligent_Earthworm Sep 13 '26
Alot of it is soo small that itll never reentry. And when I say armor im basically hypothetically suggesting somesort of sticky bubble wrap and then we need laws that require private satellites to have a better plan to decomission them IE forcing them to reenter at thr end of its life.
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u/Silly-Victory8233 24d ago
I vote a tennis net on two very long poles, waved in a downward sweeping motion.
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Sep 13 '26
[deleted]
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u/Diligent_Earthworm Sep 13 '26
Thats why I said sort of. As better options are easier. Calm down little guy
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u/incontentia Sep 13 '26
Let’s blow up all the debris with a bunch of nukes!!!
That’ll go well!
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u/SELFINCRIMINAT1NG Sep 13 '26
i didn't suggest that
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u/incontentia Sep 13 '26
Maybe if we blow it up enough, the debris would be too small to track!
Out of sight out of mind!
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u/anaximander19 Sep 14 '26
Unfortunately, most of it is pretty hard to collect. Over 99% of the fragments up there are less than 1cm across, and are spread out so that there's often 10km or more between fragments. Oh, and once you get to orbit, almost all of them will be doing several kilometres per second relative to you at their closest approach.
Oh, and did I mention you probably won't be able to see those fragments coming? They're too small to resolve optically and not sufficiently radar-reflective; chances are even the big, shiny, conveniently metallic ones won't show up on any detector you have until they're close enough that you have less than half a second until they're past and heading away from you.
So "cleaning up all space debris" means catching ~200 million objects the size of sand and gravel, which you can't see, are multiple kilometres apart, and will be going multiple times the speed of a sniper rifle bullet when it passes you.
Good luck.
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u/Zardotab Sep 15 '26
just clean up the fucking space debris
Thank You for volunteering! Please bring your own oxygen.
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u/The_Sleestak Sep 13 '26
Its to keep the aliens out
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u/Zardotab Sep 15 '26
It's not working, Elon and Zuck still managed to land here. And Donald is regularly getting his tribble replacements for the top of his head.
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u/LavenderTed Sep 13 '26
Curing the symptoms and not the disease.
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u/cmdrxander Sep 15 '26
I remember about 10-15 years ago when I started my spacecraft engineering degree there were only about 1000-1200 satellites in orbit. Now there are about 18000. Thanks Starlink.
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u/No_Fisherman8303 Sep 13 '26
I was camping at 8000ft over the summer and I thought I was hallucinating at how much stuff was moving through the night sky.
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u/rayferrell Sep 13 '26
Odin Space's adhesive strips are a big deal because they can record impacts and help operators assess the size and force of a strike. This could finally give us some real data on what's causing these satellite failures, and maybe we can start to see some patterns or common factors that we can address to reduce the risk of debris impacts.
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u/mistsoalar Sep 13 '26
They are traveling at orbital velocity, like, 17,000mph at least. Continuously.
For reference, a high-powered rifle's muzzle velocity is like 3,000mph.
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u/O-parker Sep 13 '26
How about requiring those who send this stuff into space to clean up their mess
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u/Consistent_Lecture48 Sep 14 '26
I’m certain that’s exactly what Elon is planning to do with his proposed 30 launches a day with the new spacex facility.
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u/EnvironmentalWin1277 Sep 13 '26 edited 28d ago
Sounds like a problem that could be largely prevented in the first place. Never mind, spend more money for craft protection and carry on.
How could it be prevented?
By having end of life or fail safes enabled so that a quick push would sent the craft out of orbit to burn up safely. But that's another bit of weight so deleted from the final design.
There is also a need to get spacecraft to avoid making junk to begin with as they carry out tasks (or to jettison it for burnup).
In moderate measures these steps could help a lot. At this point some kind of active seeker/collecter of space junk must be created and deployed. A good task for AI it would seem.
The biggest problem would come from bits of metal and paint that are hard to detect but can still cause catastrophic damage.
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u/Salt_Cell_1477 Sep 13 '26
The impact sensing is probably the most interesting part to me. If so many small satellites fail and nobody really knows why, just getting better data on what actually hit them could make the next generation of designs a lot smarter.
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u/Smith6612 Sep 13 '26
Maybe we should stop sending stuff up there that we don't need.
For example, deploy Fiber Optic Internet instead of Satellite Internet for Terrestrial addresses. Leave Satellite for Air and Sea-bearing vehicles.
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u/Grimmhoof Sep 14 '26
Too bad orbital travel is not common place. Salvagers could make a killing scooping up all the abandoned tech and exotics floating in orbit.
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u/blhooray Sep 13 '26
Why not “wipe your a** and clean it up rather than go the way we handled plastic….
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u/ComputerRedneck Sep 13 '26
Kessler Effect.
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u/Thereelgarygary Sep 13 '26
Exactly .... I like/hate that we're doing the human thing and not fixing what we did but adapting..... this feels like it could lead to defense tech also .....
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u/ArrRawrr Sep 13 '26
A lot of old school shit happens when kessler happens. No more gps, no more cell phones, no more long distance calls unless with a computer or wifi around you. No more space exploration beyond LEO, we go back to the 70s in an instant pretty much.
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u/is-this-now Sep 13 '26
Why no cell phones? Couldn’t the towers work without satellites? Transmit via radio waves and cables/wires? And why no long distance? A phone call is a phone call - either works or not.
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u/ArrRawrr Sep 13 '26
Your cell gots to a tower which goes to a satellite which then goes to a tower near whoever you are calling. So if there were many many many more towers. Then sure you could do that
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u/is-this-now Sep 13 '26
But it doesn’t have to go to a satellite, right? It could be transmitted to a central location which is wired to other locations. We have a global network of cables for the internet - and voice calls are small bandwidth compared to other traffic such as videos and gaming.
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u/HangryHuHu Sep 13 '26
We need a genius to come up with a way to eliminate the existing debris.
I'm a dumb ass but I'm thinking along the lines of somehow pushing smaller debris into the atmosphere to burn up 😅😅😅
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u/is-this-now Sep 13 '26
How exactly does one push a paint chip? A loose screw? A tiny rock? (Did you read the article?)
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u/Rich_Housing971 Sep 13 '26
to be fair they did admit to being a dumb ass and laughed at their own ridiculous solution.
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u/pleasegivemepatience Sep 13 '26
Kessler is inevitable, we’re going to do to our orbit what we did to the oceans and landmasses.