Confronting Space Debris – Strategies and Warnings from Comparable Examples Including Deepwater Horizon by Dave Baiocchi and William Welser IV; RAND Corporation; Santa Monica, California; $21.60 (paperback/special web discount); 2010.
This is an absorbing and thought-provoking look at the on-going and growing threat of orbital debris.
Space junk represents a human-caused issue, one that’s been created by the global cadre of spacefaring nations. How to deal with the problem will require international involvement.
The authors identified a set of comparable problems that share similarities with orbital debris and narrowed this set down to the following nine issues: acid rain, U.S. commercial airline security, asbestos, chlorofluorocarbons, hazardous waste, oil spills, radon, email spam, and U.S. border control.
As the title of this RAND monograph indicates, particular attention is paid to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. What lessons learned in dealing with oil spills and other problems, the authors suggest, can provide insight into approaches to tackling orbital debris.
RAND researchers, Baiocchi and Welser, have taken a novel approach in assessing the orbital debris dilemma – and emphasize that remedies must be designed and tested to work under the actual operating conditions.
Their research had three primary goals. The first was to determine whether analogous problems from outside the aerospace industry exist that are comparable to space debris. Then, assuming that such problems exist, the second goal was to develop a list of identifying characteristics along with an associated framework that could be used to describe all of these problems, including debris.
The final goal of the RAND research is — provided that the first two were possible — was to use this framework to draw comparisons between orbital debris and the analogous problems.
You’ll find this monograph of great value. It places in perspective the vexing nature of space clutter and possible next steps to attack trouble-making space trash.
Note: You can download this eBook for free!
For more information on this book, go to:
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG1042
By Leonard David