DDopson Ars Tribunus Militum
22y
2,038
Subscriptor

ROOT1803 said:
Serious question: With this much material floating around in orbit, would re-purposing it be something that is feasible? Or is it just irredeemably junk for the most part?
It's infeasible to recover and utilize.

This came up in a previous thread, where I said:
...
On orbit recycling aspirationally saves some launch mass, the cheaper half of the equation, but it forces you to engineer a vast array of complicated system elements for the recovery process and then use in-space manufacturing and assembly processes that will certainly never be cheaper than their terrestrial equivalents where we can walk over to the machine in our shirt-sleeves and clear out a broken milling bit, call the parts warehouse down the road, and have a replacement bit installed same afternoon. The economic network effects are very very difficult to overcome, far harder than any one of the individual engineering problems. //

HuntingManatees Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
11m
100

andygates said:
The problem is that the stuff isn't particularly special, it's just big empty beer cans. The cost is in getting it up there. And it'd be more straightforward (and less expensive) to bring it down than to tugboat the stuff to a space junkyard.

Actual orbital mechanics are left as an exercise for the Kerbals.

I actually spent an unhealthy amount of time in KSP trying to retrieve space junk using a series of giant folding claw mechanisms that would -- in theory -- latch onto dead satellites and then burn for reentry.

This resulted in two or three successful de-orbiting missions, but I gave up after I caught myself tasking my Kerbals with sending up fresh claw ships to retrieve previously-launched claw ships that had run out of fuel.