Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for April 07, 2012

Then it will all burn up re-entering earth. Sounds like a good plan to me.

They need giant space trash compactors like in Wall-E.

I hope space trash is all organic/biodegradable, else that’s destroying the ozone quite directly.

What difference does it make. That’s the one thing about space, there’s too much of it.

So that’s where my garbage can went.

The problem is, the Earth now actually has a garbage belt, mostly debris from old satellites and such. And it’s liable to crash into new ones.

Those aren’t Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill bottles are they? Dogsniff, a little help here. Did I just feel a Ripple in the Force?

JohnDiego, orange you glad he didn’t draw another banana?

Symbolic of the shuttle program itself. Scrap heap of history…But it’s about time that death trap was retired….the shuttle itself was the greatest of spacecraft. However, to save money, they went cheap on the launch system. The original plan called for a ship that could launch itself. Or at least special large rocket to launch it. But they decided it would be cheaper to strap it to a large bomb instead……..Penny wise and dollar stupid..And guess what, as of now the Russians have won the space race! WERE NUMBER TWO! WERE NUMBER TWO! China coming on strong. Everybody else may win everything, but by god we’ll pay less taxes. Of course we’ll probably have to pay financial tribute to whoever our future masters will be..but at least it won’t be taxes….We were a great civilization for a while there….Oh, well, .easy come, easy go…

Waste not, want not. The cost would be astronomical and the results chancy at best. Better to deal with it here and now.

There will no be any longer space junk. Only human originated orbital space refuse.This shall put an end to all prior labeling.

actually, the math is closer to something slightly larger than a grain of sand. one hit a cockpit window and left a 6" diameter/3" deep crater in it.

For some reason I keep picturing a giant space Hoover. Maybe an upright?

Is this going to be the new NASA Mission. Hummm the smell of garbage burning in the upper atmosphere that would be so special

Shoot it at the sun. ;-)

Five of those bananae are identical; one is different

We won’t need no stinking space ships if we’d just hurry up and invent a teleporter. Before the russians.

There are around 22,000 pieces of space junk being tracked as of 2011. If you want something to worry about before you go to sleep tonight, look up “Kessler Syndrome”.

So far to go to do the same old…

Keeps getting harder to get to the top of the pile…

You do realize of course that Ace Astronaut there is not throwing out space junk…he is throwing out NASA garbage from earth! Papers, etc. come from earth, not space. This is a very expensive garbage run. Maybe it’s Wikileak endangered documents or old politicians tax returns.

Why all the uproar? In space, no one can hear you scream.

Not an option. You’d only be able to do it a few times before the danger of the next ship (not to mention satellites) hitting the debris would be too big.

Hearkens back to 19Th century garbage scows in the Hudson River… Things haven’t changed much have they?

Roadrunner 75@Radish….I’ve often wondered the same thing. Why not get rid of our nuclear wastes by sending them to the ultimate nuclear event, the sun

What was the shuttle doing before?

Amazing what gets launched by hurricanes and tornadoes, even semi-trailers go up

I’m shocked! No “Red Dwarf” comments yet?

If they clean up all the debris, maybe we can find the golf ball that the astronaut hit on the moon. Of course if he was still up there, he could be the first person in space to have to take a provisional shot.

Sending nuclear waste into the sun has at least one drawback. Getting them there. Remember the Challenger? Instead of human bodies scatted over the Atlantic, it would be plutonium. One pound of plutonium could kill 2 million people by inhalation. This makes the toxicity of plutonium roughly equivalent with that of nerve gas.(from Bernard L. Cohen. “The Nuclear Energy Option, Chapter 13, Plutonium and Bombs”)

You seriously need to bone up on orbital mechanics.

As the aliens approach our superfund cleanup belt, they’re gonna say “Hey, wait. We should rethink this”. So think of it as shields up. I have my shield up :-) See profile image.

Quark was probably ahead of its time. “Star Trek” hadn’t yet penetrated deeply enough into the cultural fabric to allow a parody of it to be attractive to anything more than a niche audience, especially in the days of only three networks. If an identical show premiered today on SyFy or the Cartoon Network or something like that, it might do quite well.

“My daughter, pollinating with a Vegeton?!?”

I was despondent when “Quark” was cancelled. Being 14 already sucked.

To those of you who want to launch our nuclear waste into the sun, think again! (1) The cost merely to put a payload into low Earth orbit (that is, the altitude of the International Space Station) is around $10,000 per pound. Getting all the way out of the terrestrial gravity well would cost considerably more. (2) High level nuclear waste isn’t by the pound; it’s on the order of many tons per year worldwide. (3) The cost – not to mention the danger! of securing and transporting highly radioactive material safely from reactor sites to launch facilities would be prohibitive. (4) Launches are not 100% successful; a significant number of rockets explode on the pad or soon after. A single such accident would spread tons of lethal nuclear waste in the atmosphere, a civil and environmental catastrophe on a continental scale. There’s more, but this ought to be enough to convince you that solar disposal is out of the question.

It actually is Strawberry Hill. I don’t have the actual URL, but just for fun I typed in Boones Farm, and it actually has a fan club! It has pictures of a whole bunch of different flavors!

An exact, and potentially prescient point, made by the movie Wall-E!

Maybe this is how life got to Earth (panspermia theory). Another, light years away, civilization dumped their garbage in space. The garbage, mostly organic, drifted in space for billions of years till it neared early (4 billion B.C.) Earth and was pulled to the surface be gravity. Bacteria, and possibly other microbes, started to grow and flourish. Many millions of years later that bacteria, evolve into multicellular life forms and, ultimately, us!

“Quark” had 3 episodes parodying Star Trek, several charaters (Betty I & II, Ficus Pandorata) By this time the Star Trek con scene was big. Big enough to take over a DC Sheraton for 4 days.

Our legacy to future generations.

@JohnnyDiego

You’ve never heard of bananas preventing hangovers??

Ever watch the space news? Just last week they had to go hide in the escape vehicles because of inbound junk.

There is a real litter problem out there,

At the velocities these little bits of old exploding bolt come around (several times muzzle velocity of any guns we have), both the ‘bullet’ (whatever fragment) and ‘target’ (say, a station bulkhead) are mostly vaporized, and any remaining fragment passes right through. Kinetic energy equals 1/2 mass times the velocity squared. Shuttles finally started carrying a sorta patch kit, with some sticky goo and aluminum patches to slap over the hole — assuming it was small enough. (Used to work for JPL’s resident expert on orbital debris, scary stuff for anybody going to work EVA out in the Big Dark.)