This is a difference between popular science & academic writing that it took me until my 3rd year in astrophysics to really bottom out.

Today I find reading popular science magazines far less enjoyable & wish they were better written, but then I also recognise I'm no longer the target audience for the magazines that got me interested in astronomy in the first place.

Lmfao I don’t know how that even remotely would signal me as an incel, I thought your comment was cool and as a sci fi nerd I thought it was a fun idea. No need to be rude!

You know, in the before times you know what the other predator species called humans with bad eyesight, LUNCH!

It's to differentiate it from "soil," which is strictly biological in nature.

SMH. If that's your first thought, let's play find the incel.

Better hope that parachute works. Might make a good splash at terminal velocity. Keep it in orbit. Smelt when we build the infrastructure.

So sand and dust and other inorganic particulates.

Yeah; I guess it would be a real story if there was organic material.

I mean, id argue against it being an EXACT science 5k years; but ok.

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Definitely, however take some solace in that it seems as each year goes by, a higher percentage of people need glasses. So you can draw that backwards and infer that barely anyone needed glasses in the before times. Before the dark times. Before we started looking down instead of out.

Now I just need to build a proper ship to intercept these craft and take the booty for myself. Space Piracy!!

The only way this business model work is if Starship succeeds in lowering the cost of $/kg in orbit by one order of magnitude. The it will be cheap enough for governments to enforce a "pick your trash" rule on space launches.

What? From the article:

>This mission will see the ClearSpace use a spacecraft with four articulated arms to de-orbit part of a Vega rocket from low Earth orbit (LEO).

Assuming they're deorbiting the third stage, which has a dry mass of 1315 kg, they would be collecting about 1.315 metric tonnes of garbage.

Depends on how you define "dirt." Regolith strictly has nothing biological in it, which some definitions of "dirt," include.

I would hazard a guess that astronomy/astrology was a mother of scientific though.

Without glasses or contacts I can't even tell there are stars in the sky :(

Like concrete. Mix it in the right way and it may last for thousands of years.

Probably by just using the satellites onboard propulsion. Although given that this is just a test mission, just capturing the debris would be progress enough

I don’t have enough expertise to give you a definitive answer, but I think you don’t fully understand how Lagrange points work. Mind you, I’m not sure I understand how they work, either, so what I’m about to say may be worthless. So keep some salt handy.

A Lagrange point is a place relative to the orbit of the satellite object where the gravity of the satellite and its primary cancel out. Any third object that somehow wanders into one of these points tends to stay there because of the gravitational interaction between it, the satellite and the primary.

So there are Lagrange points relative to the Earth and the Sun where the gravity of both cancel out. The JWST is stationed at one of these points now. Saves JSWT a lot of fuel for station keeping.

There are Lagrange points relative to the Moon’s orbit where the gravity of the Earth and the Moon cancel out as well. We’ve placed nothing there yet but that could change one day.

The deal with Lagrange points is that any third object that somehow makes it’s way to the location of one of the Lagrange points tends to stay there. This happens with small objects such as spacecraft or asteroids floating around the solar system because they don’t have much mass relative to the Earth or the Moon to affect the location of the Lagrange Point.

Now let’s consider a planet.

Planets are much bigger objects. Everything in a planetary disk starts out orbiting the star. Objects collide with each other frequently. The thing is these objects are not initially in any Lagrange points. They approach and each attracts the other. The Lagrange points aren’t likely to be along the vector of approach and there’s a lot of force pulling them together. As they get nearer, the location of the Lagrange points change because of the large amounts of mass approaching each other. If they collide, after all, there would be a lot more mass where the original planet was, changing where the Lagrange points are; the same thing happens when the 2 planets are closing in on each other.

So planets, because they’re so big, will orbit each other or collide. I don’t see how they could be in each other’s Lagrange points.

Sure, you could also orbit a Jupiter.

The Lagrange point sets the mass of the third body to zero before solving the differential equation.

Regolith is just like sand and dust and dirt right?

Or it could be living off that heat!

It's about garbage collection. You seem to be keen to deorbit what they collect. Okay. How many metric tonnes of garbage are we collecting? Is there an estimate?

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