SPACE reports that a large piece of debris was found on a mountainside in North Carolina last week, suspected to be left over from the reentry of SpaceX’s Crew-7 mission.
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Tag: Space Debris
Musk: SpaceX Could Use Starship to Collect Space Debris
The Hill reports that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk “says the private rocket company’s Starship rocket system could be used to collect space junk orbiting the Earth.” Musk tweeted Saturday that the Starship could fly “around space & chomp up debris with the moving fairing door.” According to SpaceX, “the Starship’s fairing door opens when it reaches a certain orbit to deploy a payload and closes before returning to Earth.” Last year, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell “told Time Magazine Starship could possibly store space junk in its cargo bay until returning to Earth.”
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ISS Adjusts Course to Avoid Russian Space Debris
CNN reports that NASA said the ISS fired its thrusters for five minutes and five seconds to avoid a Russian satellite destroyed by a missile strike in a weapons test last year. “Officials at NASA have previously warned about the risks of the proliferation of debris in space, caused by a dramatic increase in the number of satellites in orbit and several instances of governments intentionally destroying satellites and creating new plumes of junk.”
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FAA Proposes New Rule to Reduce Space Debris
UPI reports that SpaceX “launched 22 satellites for its Starlink ‘constellation’ into low-Earth orbit late Saturday night as the Federal Aviation Administration proposed a new rule to reduce space debris from commercial flights.” The FAA said in a statement that limiting debris will “reduce the potential for collisions with spacecraft and satellites to promote a sustainable space environment,” and added, “If left unchecked, the accumulation of orbital debris will increase the risk of collisions and clutter orbits used for human spaceflight and for satellites providing communications, weather and global positioning system services.” The proposed rule “would require companies like SpaceX to dispose of the upper stages of their rockets in one of five ways.” Companies would be “required to either conduct a controlled entry, move the upper stage to a less congested storage or graveyard orbit, send the upper stage on an Earth-escape orbit, remove the upper stage debris within five years in a process called active debris removal, or perform and uncontrolled atmospheric disposal.”
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Tech Briefs Reports on 7 Space Sustainability Startups
Tech Briefs reports, “Approximately 8,000 metric tons of space junk now in orbit includes nearly one million individual pieces of debris that are potentially lethal to satellites, space missions, commercial space services, and human lives. With companies like SpaceX, Amazon, and OneWeb launching mega constellations, this number will continue to increase over the coming years.”
Full Story (Tech Briefs)