Vic Socotra

14 February 2009

Space Junk

(Noted Space Expert- a Master of Science)

There is so much going on these days that it is hard to focus on it. Airplanes are falling from the sky, we are mortgaging our grandchildren’s future and satellites are crashing into one another in the heavens.

Here on earth, things that seem to make sense actually don’t. For example, scientists have recently discovered that blowing your nose to clear the stuffiness may actually do no good. It might actually reverse the flow of mucus into the sinuses and thus slow down drainage.

I made a note of that, and scratched Kleenex-brand tissues from the shopping list. I want to go with the good science, after all. I was still sniffling when I read what is the big stimulus bill that is going to the President’s desk this weekend. There is a bunch of stuff in there, but alas, hard as I tried, I could find nothing for me.

There are a lot of provisions for handing out money, though. Most of it is of piss-ant size- $15 bucks a month added to unemployment insurance, stuff like that. The centerpiece of one of the bold initiatives is an oxymoron called “Making Work Pay.” That is an income tax credit that apparently will mostly be distributed through reduced paycheck withholdings, adding a whopping $8 or so a week to the pay envelope.

I’m underwhelmed, but officials brightly hope that the money will be spent, not saved. I’m sure the equivalent of a free lunch once a week is going to turn things right around.

There is also some other stuff that sounds really good but actually is sort of bad.

Stupid, in fact.

That moron Senator Chris Dodd buried a provision deep in the bill that imposes restrictions on executive bonuses at financial institutions that are taking money from the bail-out package. Bonuses and almost all other incentive compensation for the twenty-five most senior officers at each of the banks would be prohibited.

It is one of those grandstanding feel-good acts that Dodd specializes in. Everybody hates bankers these days, and stockbrokers and everyone else associated with the lunacy that broke the bank.

But of course the practical consequences of piling on the smart guys are the unintended ones.

The compensation system at the banks is driven mostly by the bonus system, bad as it is. Take the pay away, and the smart guys will go off and do something else. The ones that will be left will be the deer-in-the-headlights crowd. The President’s people told Chris that he had gone too far, and the law would cause a brain drain in the middle of the crisis. The ones who stayed would divest themselves of Federal money as quickly as possible, further reducing lending at the worst possible time.

I remember what former Vice President Cheney said to Senator Dodd one time on the Senate Floor- if you don’t recall what Mr. Chency told him to do to himself, I can remind you sometime. I’d like to say the same thing to both of those idiots.

Sometimes, even in crisis, you have to slow down for a second and think about what you are doing. I thought about that when I heard about the collision in space last week. Crashes in space don’t happen very often, since it is like the “big sky, little airplane” theory about mid-air collisions.

Having been around the business for a while, though, I realized things are getting sort of crowded up there.

Naturally, it didn’t start that way. As late as the year of my birth in the early 1950s there wasn’t anything in space at all except the stray meteor or a comet or two.

That is why Project West Ford seemed so brilliant.

During the Cold War, most international communications were conducted by undersea cable or bounced off the ionosphere, the uppermost part of the atmosphere “ionized” by solar radiation. It has practical importance for this discussion because, among other things, it permits radio waves to reflect back down to earth, propagating to distant places on the planet.

The laws of physics, which are not subject to debate in Congress, have their own imperative. When the sun goes down and there is no solar radiation, the ionosphere ceases to be highly charged. Radio waves no longer bounce back down from it, but head unimpeded straight out to space.

It was early in the Space Age, and TelStar, the first communications relay satellite (1962), was just becoming a reality. Tiny, underpowered, and in an elliptical orbit, it had some challenges. Reliable redundant communications were a must. Accordingly, some very bright people convinced the Air Force that they could create an artificial ionosphere.

In May 1963, a Delta missile was launched with a payload of 480 million tiny copper needles packed tightly together in blocks of naphthalene gel. Once on orbit, the gel evaporated in the vacuum, and the needles briefly created a ring encircling the entire globe. That was Project West Ford.

The project itself was a virtually unqualified success. The hundreds of millions of copper needles gradually spread throughout their entire orbit over a period of two months. The final donut-shaped cloud was about eight miles wide and eighteen miles thick. The cloud encircled the globe in an orbital plane oriented north-to-south at an altitude of about 220 miles.

Project West Ford engineers managed to send voice transmissions between Camp Parks, California, and Millstone Hill, Massachusetts. Initially, the data-rate on the bounce was pretty good-– about that of an early dial-up modem.

As the needles dispersed to their final cloud, spaced about 400 meters from one another- the data rate dropped off significantly. The experiment was terminated at that point, since scientists all over the world began to howl that the launch of follow-on clouds would hamper astronomy, among other things, and that space was being polluted.

No less a luminary than Adlai Stevenson, a known egg-head, swore that most of the cloud would naturally re-enter the earth’s atmosphere within three years. That proved to be mostly true, though as late at 2008, some of the needles were still up there.

It wasn’t the protests of the scientists that killed the project, though. By 1963, TelStar had proven that communications satellite technology was the way to go. The trick to it was placing the vehicles in high earth orbit- a band at an altitude of around 22,000 miles. At a position above the equator, the orbital period equals the period of the earth’s rotation, making is appear stationary with respect to a fixed point on the rotating Earth.

That is a primo altitude for exactly that reason, and the real estate is pretty valuable and increasingly crowded. Everyone would like 500 all-sports channels on satellite television and the ability to call someone up and talk about it.

The philosophical battle between high and low orbit has been going on for years. InMarSat, the oldest satellite telephone system (1979) predicated on a small number of large geo-synchronous satellites and Irridium, which operated about a hundred vehicles in low-earth orbit was exactly about that.

As it turns out, though, it is even easier to bolt cell towers to the top of buildings like Big Pink that it is to hurl them a few hundred miles into space, so except for extraordinary applications where cell towers cannot be built- like on the ocean- satellite cell phones were expensive, large and had lousy reception inside buildings.

That is how Motorola nearly went bankrupt the first time, and how the U.S. Government wound up being the largest user, an unintended consequence the taxpayers had not been counting on. It was an early bail out for someone’s great idea gone wrong.

That said, low earth orbit is marvelous for applications like imagery satellites, and is relatively easy to get to. It is also tempting to knock things down.

In January of 2007, the Chinese attacked a moribund Feng Yun 1C (FY-1C) weather satellite in polar orbit. It belonged to them, or had before it became another piece of space flotsam and jetsam. It was at an altitude of around 500 miles, headed south, when it was destroyed by a rocket launched from the Xichang Space Center.

It was a pretty cool demonstration of capability by a new space power, a club that now includes the usual suspects, plus India and Iran and even those crazy North Koreans.

The deal is that there were some unintended consequences with the Chinese demonstration. Like the creation of an orbiting debris field of hundreds of chucks of metal and plastic hurtling along at 17,000 miles an hour.

The muzzle velocity of an M-16 rifle is less than that, by the way. A lot less.
At last count, the people of the United States Space Surveillance Command estimated that there are about 10,000 object flying around up there. You will be comforted to know that all they can do is try to keep track of them. There is not much anyone can do about them once the junk is up there.

I should clarify that- when they finish counting the bits that came from the collision of the two satellites last week, it will be that many pieces at least four inches in radar cross section, since that is all they can reliably count.

That does not include the needles, by the way, which continue to fly in the crowded sky faster than a speeding bullet.

Close Window