New Zealand Prepares First Satellite Launch

[C C]

. . . Payload was 13 little cubesats. Ten were part of NASA's Elana 19 package, consisting of small R&D satellites from universities and places like that, with the remaining three from the Aerospace Corporation and DARPA.

Radar has catalogued 15 objects in that orbit. The other two are probably parts of the rocket that carried and ejected the little satellites. [...] Jonathan McDowell identifies ten of the 13 cubesats here [...] One of them was actually built by K-12 students at a STEM charter school in northern Idaho. It's called the DaVinci Project. [...]

The burgeoning onslaught of all these mini-sats has to make one wonder initially about the space junk problem.

Do Small Satellites Make For More Space Junk?: . . . The Earth is already surrounded by space junk. Isn't launching 100-plus nanosatellites a bit like throwing crumbs on the living room floor? Luckily, many satellites are able to do something crumbs aren't. They clean themselves up. Small satellites launched into orbit 650 kilometers or less above the surface of the Earth soon fall back down toward Earth. They plunge through the Earth's atmosphere and, because they're small, they burn up before reaching the ground. In addition, few spacecraft orbit below 650 kilometers in altitude, so there's not as much for small satellites to hit. [...] Problems arise when people send smaller satellites into higher orbit....

The Space Junk Problem Is About to Get a Whole Lot Gnarlier: . . . Little orbiters—especially the smallest types, CubeSats and NanoSats—are within reach of research scientists, government agency experiments, smaller companies, and even individual humans. Take the private Breakthrough Starshot project, which eventually plans to send diminutive spacecraft to Alpha Centauri star system (really). It just launched six "Sprites": the world's smallest satellites, measuring 3.5 centimeters on a side.

All of those satellite operators are in charge of making sure what they sent up comes back down, in a timely way. Bigsat operators can just use the last of their fuel to plunge their darlings toward the ocean. But many smallsats, especially the smallest kinds, don’t have propulsion systems. To naturally “de-orbit” fast, they have to be in an orbit that naturally decays quickly—an ellipse in which atmospheric drag drags them back to Earth fast. Some smallsat operators are planning to put propulsion systems aboard. Great! But that poses another problem: explosions....

~

[Yazata]

The burgeoning onslaught of all these mini-sats has to make one wonder initially about the space junk problem.

Speaking of space junk, the Orbcomm OG-1 communications satellite suddenly exploded into 34 pieces on Dec 22.

The U.S. Air Force's Space Command says that there's no evidence of a collision, but the most obvious explanation for what could burst a satellite into lots of fragments might be exactly that. (Satellites are going 18,000 mph, much faster than a bullet. Hit something with that kind of relative velocity, and...)

Other possibilities: Did this satellite have propellant or pressurized gasses on board that were capable of exploding? Did some insidious country try out an asat weapon? (Which would probably involve a collision, except not accidental.)

https://twitter.com/18SPCS/status/1080161833837780998

It's not the first time it's happened either. In February 2018:

https://twitter.com/18SPCS/status/963629809921351680

and in May

https://twitter.com/18SPCS/status/999028332229312513

So apparently satellites and spent rocket stages and other stuff in orbit does explode, and more often than people think. Even if the explosions aren't the result of space junk, they seem to be a source of more of it.

[C C]

. . . So apparently satellites and spent rocket stages and other stuff in orbit does explode, and more often than people think. Even if the explosions aren't the result of space junk, they seem to be a source of more of it.

Lots of wild proposals about how to clean-up space debris, some of them even superficially tested in this decade.

The history of both "sober" and screwball space-opera seems largely disinterested in our local variety junk harvesting. Having leaped over the latter to the "glamour" of interstellar garbage scows and scrapyards. The short-lived, parody TV show "Quark" premiered over 41 years ago.

~