Space and Junk

I'll take the pressure off. Okay, space junk. It's debris in space. It's stuff that's defunct, it's no longer working. It is stuff that is accumulated in orbit around Earth that we can no longer control or use in any meaningful way. That now is kind of a an issue. That's what I was going to say, I was be it can be any number of things. I mean a lot lots of different things. Are we we we've put a lot of junk in space. Yeah, And just to be clear, we're pretty much going by the NASA approach

to to defining this. They call it orbital debris usually and they define it as man made objects. So this does not include things that would occur out there due to like asteroids or meteoroids, none of that. We're talking specifically about man made objects or really pieces of man made objects that are in orbit around the Earth. And uh,

there's a lot of different types of it. I mean, you're talking about everything from defunct spacecraft that were left up there, spacecraft being anything like staticraft well some cases. In some cases we're talking about like whole space if you'd call a satellite spacecraft because it is capable of

moving through space. And yes, you know what's funny is uh the idea that after a spaceship they stop using it, it doesn't just fall now it's days in orbit for depending on how high altitude it is, it may stay there for a couple of years or more than a century. But we'll get into that. So yeah, yeah, it all

depends on the the altitude of the orbit. So first of all, we're talking about things like defunct satellites, upper stages of launch vehicles, which early in the early days of space of the space uh A race, those launch vehicles would separate in uh an orbit. It wouldn't you know the more of these days, they usually fall off into the ocean before they hit orbit. Yeah, they they usually are at an altitude where their their orbit degrades

so rapidly as to be practically non existent. So yeah, they and their designed so that they will fall back to Earth into an ocean, which is you know, that's pretty much where you're going to hit statistics three times on a four because of because of how much ocean is covering the Earth, but also carriers for payloads, So just think of that as like a cargo truck, like the truck part and that's kind of left up there. The debris created as a result of different collisions and explosions.

Some of those collisions were on purpose, some of them were accidental. I'll talk about the on purpose ones in a minute. Solid rocket motor effluence. So solid rockets use solid rocket fuel and sometimes they don't burn it all up, and sometimes bits of that solid rocket fuel will end up being exposed to space and become this space debris that's flying around. Um debris that was intentionally released during

spacecraft launch or vehicle release. So this might be something that when you're blowing the seal between one part of a spacecraft and launch vehicle ends up being ejected out into space as well. Even tiny specks of paint are considered space debris. So paint can chip off due to collisions, whether something is getting hit by tiny little particles, or even thermal stress. So if it's undergoing lots of different heating and cooling, sometimes paint chips off, and that ain't

can represent space debris. I've also heard that there's stuff such as discarded astronaut gloves, spatula's cameras, and crystals of human p depending upon depending upon your crystals, yeah, depending upon your your belief in various conspiracy theories. There might be some cosmonauts floating around up there too. I'm sure there are just a few chainsaws, you know. I'll never forget when leather Face went to space. None of those say that someone will make that, like made Jason in space,

and they made the leprechn in space. I'm waiting for you don't remember that. Yeah, Canada had the rocket chainsaw program where they spent several decades just rocketing chainsaws and powered by maple syrup or powered by rockets by chainsaw magic chainsall magic, all right, Joe's a little loopie, guys, So let's talk about some of the more interesting stories.

I think of the events that have led to large amounts of space debris being spread over the Earth, right because we I mean a lot of this stuff is accidental, but we in the past have created space debris almost on purpose. Yeah. It wasn't necessarily because we wanted to well, definitely wasn't that we wanted to make things more difficult. We just wanted to try, and we just wanted to blow stuff up. It's yeah, I guess it's kind of

like littering. It's easy. It wasn't easy. It was rocket science actually, So in the nineteen sixties and seventies there was this little thing going on full speed. By then it had been in development for years. It's called the Cold War. Do you guys remember that? Actually I do remember that, you guys wouldn't. And so I saw some James Bond movies and the third Rambo movie. I think I got it. Okay, all right, you've got a good grounding. So the Cold War between the United States and the

Soviet Union, the former Soviet Union. Uh, that was what a lot of the space race was about, was who can who can dominate space? First, it was really who can launch things powerful enough to get into space? And therefore probably also at your nation, well, especially the early days where the launching of satellites really meant, hey, look

how far we can shoot this thing. We could probably hit you as well, because if you look at those early satellites like Sputnik, the original Sputnik, uh, the technical sophistication of that was that it could go beep frequently, that was it. Well, but it could go beep frequently and and and loud enough for various people with ham radios to pick it, and therefore you know, it was proven right. It was one of those things that scared

people because it said, oh, look how far they can shoot. Well, the space debried kind of comes out of that same thought process. The idea was to develop missile systems that had anti satellite capability so that you could shoot down your enemy satellites because that was another fear was that if they can put something up there, they can spy on us. And if they're going to spy on us, and that's bad, we need a way of taking care

of that and wiping out those spy satellites. And so there were tests both in the United States and the uss A are where they would launch these anti satellite missiles that would collide with satellites and then blow up and then cause a lot of space debris, both from the missile and from the satellite that was the target practice. Yeah. Uh that, by the way, not not. We didn't just leave that off in the sixties and seventies. By we

I'm talking about humans in general, not the three of us. No, not the three We have never as to my knowledge, none of us, and I'm gonna even include Noel. I'm gonna be generous and include Noel or Producer in this. None of us, to my knowledge, has ever shot an anti satellite missile at a satellite and cause more space to b I can neither confirm nor deny. Moving on

before we put on more lists. In nine the US changed its official policy to minimize the creation of new orbital debris, saying that this is that was That was after we kind of realized that that this was becoming an issue. The fact that it wasn't just like, oh, it's harmless. Space is really big, most of it will

fall down anyway, it's to it's fine. Yeah, yeah, this was when they they realized that, no, we're starting to clutter up some very valuable regions of space, not the not what I think most people would call the most valuable. We'll get into that the most valuable space real estate around the Earth is is relatively safe from space debris, which is a good thing. But on June third, there

was an explosion of Pegasus. Hydrazine auxiliary propulsion system exploded, and at that time it became the worst space debris incident in history because the altitude and orbit of that particular satellite, it presented a potential threat to both the Hubble Space Telescope and two Space Shuttle crews, which prompted NASA to really study the effects of space debris on

potential operations with greater urgency. Specifically, they wanted to look at how could this affects, say an astronaut it's on a space walk, and how do we mitigate this, How do we plan so that we minimize any threat that these astronauts would undergo in this kind of situation. Um And then before two thousand seven, according to NASA, the principal source of debris was from explosions of old launch vehicle upper stages. Left in orbit with stored energy sources

such as residual propellants and high pressure fluids. But on January eleven seven, China caught up with the US and the USSR by firing a missile at the thing Young one Sea weather satellite. So this was another test of an anti satellite missile system. I remember when this happened. I remember hearing about in the news, um and uh, Well, from their perspective, it worked. They they the missile collia

with the satellite and went boom. But it also means that it created what Encyclopedia Britannica calls the worst space debris event at that time that has since been surpassed. You'll be happy to know, I'm sure, um, but it created more than three thousand fragments and the mass of the particles was spread out over the course of two years to create a cloud of debris that encircles the Earth. So you can actually look at some great images online

that will show you the specific pathway. It's like, it's like, imagine one line of orbit around the Earth just cluttered with debris, and that's just from this one satellite. Now imagine that with lots of other degrees so that you have all these other rings encircling the Earth at different

points some in some cases they criss cross with each other. Uh, and you can start to see the problem that if you want to put anything within these orbits, this this range of altitude, you're going to encounter big clouds of space debris, or potentially you'll encounter them. Keeping in mind, even at that altitude, space is big there. It's not like you're guaranteed to get hit, but you are certainly

um more prone to getting hit by space debris. And if you're hit by space debris, here's the really bad news. You create more space debris, all right. And and and also I mean that space debris, even if it's a it's a fleck of painter crystal of p that crystal is moving at thousands of pometer. It's an hour which we're going to get into in a moment um. I think there were a couple more notes on the Yeah. Two thousand nine, Yeah, we're not done with the happy

stories yet. Two thousand nine that's when an American and a Russian communication satellite collided. Uh. The Russian satellite was defunct. The American one at that time was not It was afterwards UM, and that ended up being a massive collision that now, according to NASA, the results of that collision account for one third of all cataloged space debris, so not necessarily all space debris ever, but all the stuff that NASA has cataloged, one third of it comes from

this collision. On January teen, a piece from that fing Young one Sea satellite that the Chinese shot with the missile. One piece of that collided with a Russian b l I T s Blitz satellite, which was this really cool kind of it's think of a sphere, a mirrored sphere in space, and it changed the orbit and spin period, actually broke it into at least two pieces. And the purpose of that satellite was to test a retro reflector design and act as a laser ranging device, and now

it it don't work no more. So that's just an overview of some of the events that have created this massive cloud of space debris UM, which kind of guess leads to the question of how massive are we talking about? And and it's it's bad news if you're if you're looking at objects that are larger than ten centimeters. NASA says they're about twenty one thousand pieces out there. That sounds like a whole lot. But then again, the Earth

is pretty big. Yeah. Yeah, of course, if you if you were to look at objects between one to ten centimeters, so ten centimeters are are larger, that's twenty one pieces. If you look between one and ten centimeters, you're talking more about half a million, five hundred thousand pieces flying around. Uh. If you go down to less than one centimeter, then you're getting into huge numbers. Uh. And even the tiniest

particles are problem now. Granted, a lot of the spacecraft, in fact, the spacecraft that is being designed today has shielding as part of the spacecraft for just for these kind of um, these possible collisions, So most of them have shielding that will protect them from collisions of things up to about three or four centimeters in size. But that's where we get into some of the problems with you know, even if it's small, it's still a huge issue, right.

I mean, first of all, I want to say that I think it's amazing that NASA can apparently identify and track objects as small as three millimeters from ground radar stations in space. That's idea. I had no idea until I started researching this. I mean, that's an incredible level of precision, you know, considering that I can't find my keys in my own room. That's I'm going to go ahead and say that I can't find when I'm wearing them. Okay, So you mentioned earlier about how even a little paint

chip to cause a problem. Well that's kind of hard to imagine because these things are built really strong, and if you just stand next to them throwing a paint chip at them, or even i'd say like a baseball or something, it doesn't seem like you can do very much damage. Yeah, well you can see that. Here's where, um some Newtonian physics comes in. Um let's let's talk about momentum for a second. Well, actually, I think what

we want to talk about it's similar, is kinetic energy. Sure, kinetic energy is uh the four seat you get when it's the the ability of something moving do work. Um So, the kinetic energy of an object, say, flying through space, is one half mass times velocity square. Alright, no velocity is speed plus a direction. Yeah okay, so uh m okay, well the you know, a paint chip, what's the mass there?

It's gonna be really small. But when you look at the speed, so speeds, we're talking about debris traveling at around seven or eight kilometers every second. And and furthermore, when if you know, for example, they're traveling in opposite directions like that, um that two thousand nine American and

Russian communications satellite collision happened at some kilometers per hour. Yeah, so at that speed, when you get when you get a lot of speed, it doesn't know the mass of the object is I mean, obviously it's important because it's going to be a factor in that equation, But even a small particle has the potential to do huge amounts of catastrophic damage. So yeah, you're talking. When you're talking at those speeds, there's no such thing as oh, well

that's that's that's tiny. Well, I mean yeah, I mean if you extract, if you go beyond Newtonian physics and get close to relativistic speeds where you're talking about a paint chip going near the speed of light, that paint chip turns into a nuclear bomb. Yeah. And while well that paint chip might not do any damage against say, spacecraft, because of spacecraft has some uh some shielding on it

that will protect against those small particle collisions. If it's an incredibly unlucky astronaut on a spacewalk, it has the potential of doing at least some damage to the space suit, which could be catastrophic for the astronaut inside. Uh So, Yeah, it's moving around these incredible speeds, and when you've got that that level of momentum in the equation, you have

to be cognizant of it um. As for where all this stuff is, most of it is in uh an altitude that's within two thousand kilometers of the Earth's surface, which sounds, you know, pretty pretty big. In fact, a lot of it um is between seven fifty and eight d kilometers above the surface of the Earth, and debris below six entred kilometers altitude will end up falling to the Earth within a few years. You remember when I

said it might take more than a century. Well above a thousand kilometers, that's where you're running into it, where the it's going to take at least a century, possibly more, for the orbit to decay enough for that object to start to fall to the Earth. Keeping in mind in orbit is essentially just a sustained fall. Anyway, you're falling at a speed turning motion. Yeah. Yeah, you're falling towards the Earth at the same you know, at a rate

that's comparable to the rotation of the Earth. So and you're falling at an angle where it's like you're just in constant freefall. Um. So that's that's a real problem for any spacecraft that needs to be in that in that range. Not all spacecraft do need to be in that range. Things that are in geostationary orbit are much higher up because that's something like thirty five point seven and in that range there's really not that much space debris.

And most operators who have some sort of spacecraft up in that range, you know, we're talking about like telecommunication satellites, that sort of stuff that needs to be in geostationary orbit. That's where we've got this uh satellite that's above a kind of a fixed point along the equator of the Earth. Um. It's very valuable real estate, like they consider it a

natural resource. That's very important. So operators who are working on spacecraft that is about to go to the end of its life, you know, at the end of its life, instead of just leaving it there, they will usually boost it out of that orbit, you know, which takes a lot of energy, but it does mean that you free up that space for something else to take up because there's only a limited number of spaces in that in

that orbit that you can use. So this way you end up conserving that by allowing someone else to take the space that that satellite used to be in. But which is why that's one good thing. Like if we were to talk about a massive problem with space debris, we probably wouldn't see a huge impact on things like weather satellites and communication satellites because they tend to be at altitudes higher than where a lot of the space

debris is. So that's some good news, but there are a lot of other satellites that would be affected, not to mention any kind of operations for things like the Hubble Space telescope, other space these telescopes. Also just getting things into space would eventually start becoming a problem. Sure getting past this kind of you know, field of junk. I think of that not entirely scientifically accurate scene in Wally where they're trying to escape the Earth they have

to like bust through. I think it's fair to say that's not entirely scientifically accurate. But yes, so you know the but it is true that real estate up there is limited. Yeah, I mean, and you you could run out of space in space, and long before you ran out of space, you'd probably run out of space that it was safe to use simultaneously or even just like you were saying, Lauren, or just just flying to get like even if you're going beyond that point, you still

have to get through that section. Uh. And yeah, as I said these, the amount of space debris increases over time even if you don't shoot anything else up there, because anything that's up there now, eventually it's going to collide with something else. It's really just a matter of time, assuming that you don't have it, uh come back down to Earth. Eventually it's going to collide with something, which

means that it creates more space debris. So uh, even if we halted all space operations right now and never send anything else up we would see space debris increase over time, at least until a dozen years century or so. You know, once you get through a century, then you'd probably end up having significantly um. Now. Uh. The reason why I thought it would be interesting to talk about this right now is because you know, a few weeks back a movie called Gravity came out and I went

and saw this movie. Have either of you seen it? Nope, No, I really wanted to. It's it's it's a fantastic film. It's um I've got problems with it there. There are some problems with its physics. But it's a fun, highly stressful film. So if you don't deal with stress very well, then I don't necessarily say that you should go out and see it. Uh. I certainly wanted to see it because I yearn for films that get the h I

say this like I've been to space. I haven't been to space, but I say get the terror of space right, at least as I would imagine it. I mean, just knowing what you know about how empty and huge and all inspiring and inspiring and horrifying at the same time. Space is. So many movies make it so mundane. Space is a sound stage spaces Space is just the bit you go through to get from point A to point B,

and and not really anything to consider beyond that. But if you were to think of it in the terms of you, you are in a self contained environment within the space suit that you cannot get out of because if you did, you would die as space, as we

have said many times, is trying to kill you. Um and you were to become separated from your spacecraft with no actual means of propelling yourself back toward it, that I can't you know, you would just imagine you would have a rapidly escalating panic attack, leading possibly to despair if you didn't pass out from the stress of it all. And that's kind of what they are depicting in the

film Gravity and and Gravity. You've got a ludicrously underprepared astronaut who is working on the Hubble space telescope when there is a catastrophic impact with space debris caused by Russians firing a missile at a satellite. So this is not an unprecedented event, as we've talked about in this

very podcast. Um So, the space debris becomes a hazard and ends up separating this astronaut from her spacecraft, and the rest of the film is pretty much her attempts at surviving in the least survivable environment we can think of, short of being suddenly finding yourself like either in a molten core of the Earth or underneath the you know, in the Mary honest trench or something, but it's it's pretty in hospital a bowl, so uh, it's you know, I thought it was interesting to bring up because a

lot of the stuff they bring up really does play into this, that that terror you're talking about. Even if everything's going right, I would imagine that a lot of astronauts feel a small sense of I'm a little I'm a little I'm a little scared. You know. Well, it's so easy to forget that we live on a ball of iron hurtling around a fire so big that you cannot imagine it. Yeah, yeah, I often forget that, you know, watching my TV. Um. So let's talk about some of

the approaches to fixing this problem. So, first of all, we've talked a little bit about improving the mean the script problems and no, no, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I mean the space junk problem is script problems and gravity are beyond our help because the movie has already come out. Although I did enjoy gravity, but I have some knits

to pick, but that's a different podcast. So telling you about space, John can how to to solve that one is to try and minimize producing more space jung by better designing our space vehicles, so creating that kind of shielding, being able to decommission the spacecraft at the end of their useful lives by bringing them back to the Earth safely,

uh that kind of thing. But even if we did all that and everything was working great, the stuff that's already up there is already causing damage and is just going to continue to do so and continue to cause headaches for anyone who's trying to plan out a space exploration uh mission. So some of the solutions involved some pretty interesting approaches, mostly um, grabbing stuff and then hauling it down or pushing it down to the Earth. And

there are a couple of different approaches. I saw one that involved harpoons, where we would send up a essentially a little spacecraft, a satellite essentially that would have power and would be able to harpoon space debris. And then yeah, yeah, they have one, and that would aim at the ocean and maybe even hit a white whale on the way down.

But the idea would be that it would it would uh you know, pierce whatever the debris is and then tow it back down into the Earth's atmosphere and where it would be destroyed essentially from the massive pressure and heat. Then there's the clean Space one that was the Swiss one, right with with the Claw game. Yeah yeah, So so if you've ever seen the Claw game, you know, or toy story you know what I'm talking about, the Claw game that you would see in fair grounds or claw

reaches out. You use it to pick up a toy hopefully rigged cheater machine. Someone someone has from children, someone has never someone has never won a toy from the

Claw game. Um uh yes. So anyway, if you imagine one of those claws mounted on kind of a cube that has a thruster on the back of it, that's more or less what the clean one looks like, the clean Space one rather, And the idea is to launch this in and the test is to try and retrieve a cube sat, a little cube satellite that the Swiss launched in either two thousand nine or two thousand ten,

because there's actually two potential targets. Those are those little um ten cimeter per side, what's at like three three and a half free point four inches to a side. You have really small satellites, so this thing is not big and the things that's collecting are not big. But as we've already established. It doesn't matter if it's big in space. If it's moving fast enough, it can it

has the potential to cause damage. So the clean space one has this claw that would come out of the front of it and grap grasp this tiny little satellite and then it would direct itself back towards Earth for destruction. UM. So it's you know, it's a one way trip for this, uh for clean space one. And UH that's also interesting. I'm curious to see if that works out. But my favorite uses something that we talked about on the podcast before.

In a way, although this is I argue the the naming of this, but it kind of involves tractor beams. I think that people just like saying the word tractor beams. Yeah, I think that's why belved Yes, and uh an electrostatic beam and electron being electron beam exactly. So you know, when things accumulate excess electrons, they build up an electrostatic charge. This is the sort of stuff that happens when you rub your feet against the carpet and you build up

that electrostatic charge. And I think that's a really negative attitude. Oh, let's not go down this road, Joe. You will not like where it leads anyways. But charges can be positive or negative. They can be and so with this negative charge, like if you're talking about the kind of charge you build up when you shuffle your feet against the carpet and use app somebody, that's that's pretty that's not a

significant charge. But the idea here is that we would have a satellite that would be able to project an electron beam at space debris until it developed enough of an electrostatic charge so that if you were to send a positively charged probe flying by it, the opposite charges would attract one another. Positive attracts negative and vice versa. So if relevant, I never said it wasn't relevant. I said you didn't want to see where that road land.

So the Lauren can back me up on this. So the positively charged probe flies by the negatively charged debris and those those opposite charges attract one another. The probe is powered, so it could pull Yeah and um, And I think the idea on this one is to actually tow them into a higher orbits and then fling them away from Earth rather than pulling them down right. Yeah, that this would be the The idea would be to to try and move these out of the danger zone

of Earth orbits entirely. Um, you're having a little Archer moment anyway. The the the problem here is that it would be a very slow process. It would take months of time to move a single piece of space debris, and you couldn't turn the electron beam off because if you did, the space debris would start to accumulate other ions, positively charged ions, and it would very quickly become a neutral. Yeah. Eventually the charge would just become neutral exactly, So you're

you're positively charged. Probe would just be flying off without it because there would be nothing to attract the two anymore. UM relationships just die. The device, by the way, is being called the glider, which is written a lot like GLaDOS um, which I kind of appreciate, which which stands for UM. The geosyncrotis large debris re orbiter. Yeah. So, and that's another thing is that this particular approach would be designed for uh, specific types of space debris, wouldn't

work on everything. So this you know, we're probably gonna need a multi tiered approach to addressing space debris in a way that uh that actually reduces space to brief faster than the generation of space debris just from these collisions that are happening. So it's it's a big challenge.

It's a huge challenge, and NASA, like I said, is mostly focused on man amizing the generation of space debris and then looking at what what options are realistic and which ones are likely to have the best return so that we can reduce this issue effectively. So and it's going to be really important I think for the for

the future. I was reading a couple of articles that we're looking forward to when we have um you know, research or other settlements on the Moon or on Mars where they do not have um the kind of atmospheres that will burn up debris as it falls, and they might not well, I mean in the case of the Moon anyway, they don't have stable g syncretis orbits that you can use uh to to keep satellites that we're going to need up there for for technology, topmnication for

multiple reasons. But yeah, and so how would you know what the moon weather is otherwise if you don't have a climate a light up there, And so dealing with all of that is going to be very important when we start moving out into those territories. I have a

question that you might not know the answer to. I wonder if it's reasonable to think that space debris could become a problem beyond Earth orbit, like at other high and beyond say the Moon orbit, but at other um just static points in the Solar System, say like the Lagrange points. Think if we're going to start forming bands of artificial asteroids in in places around the Solar System, for example, that would or um uh, you know, artificial comments for lack of a better word, that are just

going to be zipping around. It's certainly possible, especially when you're talking about extending space travel to two places like Mars. I could you know, hopefully we will learn our lesson and make sure that whatever approach we use with Mars will minimize the chance for space debris. Uh, there are

you know, there's certain realities we have to face. For one, accidents happen, so sometimes we're going to see a malfunction that's going to cause space debris, or there could be a collision that we did not anticipate that could cause it. So I expect that it will always be an issue. Thetion is how do we deal with it? And can we do it? In such a way where we are

reducing the impact as much as possible. No pun intended with impact, but the you know, that is the that's the key, because I don't think there's any way to

eliminate it. It's just how can you mitigate it as much as possible so that space travel is a possibility, that space exploration is still a viable, uh pursuit, and not something where you know, sure we could launch this multibillion dollar telescope into low Earth orbit and yeah, sure we'd be able to see further than we've ever seen before, but there's a chance that it could get destroyed within its first six months of operation due to space debris. So no one's going to fund it. I mean that

would be a tragedy. Sure, yeah, yeah, well, I mean yeah, And it's not that I mean sophisticated enough equipment has the capacity to maneuver around like like I know that they can maneuver the I S S if they see something kind of exactly. They say that about once a year they have to maneuver the I S S. The

they'll track space debris. The I S S is not in an orbit that is particularly endangered by space debris, but they say that if they track an object that looks like it's going to come within a few kilometers of the the I S S, they'll then project the chance of it hitting. Right. I think that if it's specifically like there's a greater than one in ten thousand

chance of it impacting. And if they say, if they say the chances of impact are greater than one in two tho, let's go ahead and use the propulsion system on the I S S to maneuver it to a safe distance. And they say it happens not frequently, but about once a year if you average it out, so it's not like, you know, the time of year again, that space debris coming back around. So yeah, that's that's kind of um, the rundown on space junk and how it is a real problem. It's not just you know,

oh yeah, I've heard about that. That's annoying. If you ever look at NASA's illustrations of space junk and you look, you know, I just look like there's a cloud of debris just completely enveloping the Earth. It's kind of terrifying look at it like that. Though about half of that stuff is just cartridges of the et game for the are twins exactly, they launched it into low Earth orbit as opposed to burying it in a desert. Well, you're going to run out of desert eventually. They made that

many of them. But we're gonna go ahead and humor you. So let's wrap this up, all right. So that's kind of our discussion about space junk how it is something to be concerned about in the long term for for human exploration. I have every confidence that they are very smart people looking at ways to solve this, and uh, I'm optimistic that we're going to find some ways to do this that will make sense from from a scientific

and financial perspective. Um. I, like I said, I don't think we're ever gonna completely eliminate space debris, but I have a feeling that given enough time, we're going to get a handle on it. It's just a question of how long is that I'm going to be Um, I think we should prioritize it personally because I lacked space. So, guys, that wraps up our discussion. You should definitely go to

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