Believe it or not, Earth isn’t the only place struggling with pollution and an excess of junk. The space around our planet has quite the garbage problem too, and what makes it worse is every day that junk is orbiting around our planet more junk is created through space junk impacts. While it may take awhile, the space junk problem could become so bad that Earth’s orbit would be unsafe to traverse. This calls for a spacefaring garbage truck, and design student Vaughan Ling has designed just that.
While entirely conceptual at this point, Ling has definitely done his research. His design for a space-age garbage truck calls for highly efficient VASIMR plasma rockets, solar sails, deployable balloons, aerogel nets, and earth-based lasers to get the clean-up job done. Not only does it seem like a pretty reasonable design, this thing looks awesome! I couldn’t imagine an orbital garbage ship looking any cooler! Mad props to Ling for bringing this idea to the forefront!
The space junk collector would not only collect the space junk, but it could send rare earth metals used in satellites and such back to earth for recycling. That’s just the kind of thought we need when designing something like this, one that will help provide a sustainable future for generations to come. Another cool aspect of this junk ship is that it uses technologies we already have access to for the most part and, the fact that we will someday see things like this is just exciting -- at least for geeks like me!
What do you think of Vaughan Ling’s space junk collector? Will we be seeing something like it floating in low-orbit anytime soon? Or will it still be a long time before something this useful circles around?
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