Donald Kessler about SSPS

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Wed, Apr 07, 2021 at 10:33:40AM -0700, Keith Henson wrote:
> Kessler is due to satellites hitting each other at high relative
> velocities due to different orbital inclinations. Those conditions
> simply do not exist in GEO.
>
> KeithH

Thanks for "KeithH". Now we can be individually blamed
(or praised? HA!) for our own individual emails.

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Excerpt from a 2009 essay on Donald Kessler's website, archived here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180520054307/http://webpages.charter.net/dkessler/files/KesSym.html

"Aggressive space activities without adequate safeguards could
significantly shorten the time between collisions and produce an
intolerable hazard to future spacecraft. Some of the most
environmentally dangerous activities in space include large
constellations such as those initially proposed by the Strategic Defense
Initiative in the mid-1980s, large structures such as those considered
..................................................................
in the late-1970s for building solar power stations in Earth orbit, and
..................................................................
anti-satellite warfare using systems tested by the USSR, the U.S., and
China over the past 30 years. Such aggressive activities could set up a
situation where a single satellite failure could lead to cascading
failures of many satellites in a period of time much shorter than
years."
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Whatever triggers a Kessler exponential, the exponential
increase can occur an SSPS constellation as well.
I exchanged emails about this in 2009 with Don Kessler.

Given the gynormous surface area of an SSPS constellation,
and the gossamer nature of SSPS design, it won't take
much to knock loose some bits. Stationkeeping requires
about 50m/s/y of correction thrust, and any loose bits
will evolve towards "rather nonstationary" over time.

This happens with entire comsats, lost on the way to
station or lost on the way to graveyard orbits.

Debris-multiplying collisions are almost inevitable.
I believe debris can be managed with /quick/ and
/aggressive/ cleanup, using resources planned and
deployed far in advance of need.

Those resources may include off-peak use of SSPS as
gynormous radar illuminators, and tweaking SSPS phase
detection systems to act as gynormous radar detectors.
There may also be "space Remoras", scavenging and
chewing off loose bits the way Remora fish clean sharks.

KeithL

P.S. As we used to joke in the integrated circuit design
group at Tektronix, "what could possibly go wrong?"
Quite a lot, actually, and entire product lines could go
dark and line workers on furlough if we let something go
wrong, then needed another six-month design-fab-test cycle
to fix the fix that didn't get fixed. Only the paranoid
design integrated circuits successfully. It's an attitude
that I apply to future space designs.

--
Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com