Nanoo nanoo

https://www.france24.com/en/20190713-macron-france-space-force

Uh.
Okay.

Seriously though, if NATO does decide to recognise “space” as a domain of warfare, then we’re all f.. ked. There’s enough dangerous rubbish in orbit that we don’t need to be encouraging tits like Trump to blow up stuff on purpose.

To be fair, the chances of anything falling on you are zero. However, as the Indians have proven, blowing things up in orbit just makes it harder to ever get anything else into orbit safely.

So we’ll be fine, but SkyNet is… hang on a minute.

I wasn’t thinking of stuff falling, more the ever accumulating orbiting junk that’ll keep the aliens out and us forever in. Unfortunately Planetes isn’t real, so who’s going to clean up the mess where a single stray bolt can destroy an entire spacecraft?
War in space, in close proximity (in other words, orbit), is mind numbingly stupid.

Speaking of junk in space, there is the SpaceX’s Starlink 12000 microsatellites project.

Junk in space? – http://clive.semmens.org.uk/Fiction/AnomalousSignals02.html

keep the aliens out

I was going to say something glib about the poles but no, it’s even worse than I thought: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O64KM4GuRPk

And since that video was made, Elon Musk has launched 60 of a planned 12,000 (!!!).

Oh, and at this moment in time, one might consider the 20 odd Galileo satellites to be more debris than active bird… https://www.gsc-europa.eu/system-status/Constellation-Information

It would be useful if those images of space junk in orbit around the planet could be coloured to show what’s active, useful hardware, what’s defunct/retired hardware that could be de-orbited and what is mere debris. I seem to remember reading that Fylingdales radar station in the North Yorks Moors is used to track a lot of the space hardware/debris.

IIRC less than 10% is useful, active stuff.

By numbers, I’m sure that’s true. Whether it’s true by mass, I’m less sure.

I won’t be alive in a hundred years’ time, to check on my bet that it’s 100% useless junk by then.

Fire your ashes into orbit? :)

Not sure my ashes will be sufficiently compos mentis to check anything :-(

Not sure my ashes will be sufficiently compos mentis to check anything :-(

Well most of us are shifting more to the compost mentis side I suppose.

Certainly saves a lot of fuel – and more importantly, produces less carbon dioxide than cremation. Methane? Pah. Short-term problem…