[ExI] pentagon wants orbiting solar power stations

[Amara Graps]

From: David Masten <dmasten at piratelabs.org>
>On Sat, 2007-10-13 at 00:07 -0700, Samantha Atkins wrote:
>>  Does anyone know what the danger is from geosynchronous "space junk"?
>>  I would expect most of the junk is in lower orbits but it seems like a
>>  good thing to know in planning such a large orbital project.

>Somewhere between minimal and none. Satellite operators pretty much own
>their 'slots' in practice so they keep their slots clean - retired
>satellites are put in a lower junkyard orbit.

And when the satellites are moved up or down from GEO, where do you you
think the debris particles go ? Nobody thinks very much about the sub-cm
stuff because there are few/no debris-dust detectors in GEO. But if anyone
cares to know, there is 4-5 times more debris particles in GEO than
natural micrometeorites, and the debris particles have surprisingly long
lifetimes. (> year for particles < 10^{-4} m [1])

>But this raises an interesting question - what slots are these space
>solar satellites going to occupy? Most of the useful slots (i.e. the
>ones visible from industrialized nations) are already filled.

Can the existing satellite operators can 'sell' their slot? As I
understand, those GEO slots are negotiated in international
governmental agreements,  not very different from the the
allocation of radio frequency slots on a local level. (Hopefully
people who know more can jump in.)

Amara
www.amara.com

Reference
[1] Bunte, Kalle, "Debris Cloud Evolution", Technical Note of
Work Package B410, ESA Contract: 16272/02/NL/EC, Processing,
Analysis and Interpretation of Data from Impact Detectors,
2004-01-30.