Sfdebris.net

Ars Technica wrote: On the morning of June 17, the Luxembourg-based satellite operator SES lost control of a large satellite in geostationary space, nearly 36,000km above the Earth's surface. Shortly after, the satellite operator began working with another company that specializes in space situational awareness to track the drifting machine, AMC-9. A few days ago that company, ExoAnalytic Solutions, saw the AMC-9 satellite begin to fragment.

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Kessler Syndrome has been a worry for decades, and Geostationary Orbit is highly susceptible to it.

well, that is somewhat disconcerting

Yup. And while there was an manga and anime about the idea of doing some kind of cleanup work, it would honestly be basically impossible, as any effort to collect debris moving at orbital velocity risks simply adding to the debris.

The film Gravity was based on the concept.

There was a Chinese missile test back a decade ago which I think actually contributed to the majority of the junk floating in space at the moment. The rest being explosive bolts or other assorted space refuse.

I had seen an interesting idea about a "space junk" shield for the ISS. A field of floating gel in it's orbital path which would either catch junk or slow material passing through it enough that it would not create a serious impact. Issue was that the material that works in concept in Earth conditions doesn't work in the vacuum of space or exposed to solar radiation.

ESA has a drawing-board plan to take out 8 tons of its own garbage - an intact derilict satellite - with basically nets and tugboats. Seems like it could work, but they're not exactly sure of the final approach yet.

Dealing with the little stuff? I think the "gel" shield concept has a certain degree of merit. Obviously a liquid-based gel would fail. Possibly an open-cell aerogel made from silicone or kapton, and certainly not a metal foam. Something that will tend to have less penetrating power than the shards of metal it should be collecting.

By now it really should be law that anything that goes up, must come down at the end of its services.

Part of me thinks what goes up should stay up, it cost a fortune and might be useful to someone in orbit in the future. Boost it into L4 or L5 and we could repurpose the materials someday. But I do recognize the hazard. Just seems like such a waste.

Hard to recycle a lot of the materials though.

Space isn't exactly flush with foundries or recycling centers. A lot of the weight up there is obsolete solar panels, batteries and computer hardware. The only things that are of real value with current technology are the antennas. DARPA had a plan to see if it was possible to recover antennas from defunct satellites to new launches as the mass saving on new launches would cover costs and antennas are a mature enough technology that a new launch would would not have a significantly improved version. I don't think anything ever came of that.

Technology isn't advanced enough to make use of anything else.

The kessler syndrome is a much more immediate problem to resolve.