[ExI] Fwd: Space governance

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 1:33 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Behalf Of Anton Sherwood via extropy-chat
> > On 2020-9-27 00:43, John Grigg via extropy-chat wrote:
> >> What about space elevators?
> > One concern is that a climber spends days in the Van Allen Belts.
>
> Ja, but that isn't the real show stopper.  Even if some miracle material is
> found, such as carbon nanotubes and such, and even if we figure out how to
> deal with radiation... everything in orbit, every dead satellite, every
> piece of debris from anything at any time still on orbit, every fleck of
> paint and grain of space dust... crosses the equatorial plane twice every
> orbit.  The concentration of that stuff gets greater all the way down to
> about 400 km altitude, at which time it starts to decrease because of drag
> from traces of atmosphere.
>
> Somewhere around 400 km, the space debris erodes or saws our marvelous
> space
> cable right off.
>

Not to mention all those still-in-active-service but thrusterless
satellites.

Trying to remove it gets big guns from the US, Russia, and/or China pointed
your way, depending on whose "debris" you take down first.  (If you're
doing it without permission, but they won't give permission unless the
space elevator is for their use, which means not for use by whoever they
declare to be their enemies.)
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