The scientist Robert L. Forward discussed possible ways to handle this in his novel Rocheworld. The fiction part wasn't about the light sail, more the general AI, life extension tech, and the aliens.
GreyEyedGhost
joined 1 year ago
This is about rocket launches, not satellites.
...SpaceX is part of the program to get back to the moon.
*Probably typed on a smartphone, one of the most technology-dense products ever created by humanity, currently used by over half of humanity.
Tell that to a bronze age engineer, and they will probably respond that those two are closer to each other than they are to his best efforts. And he would probably be right.
Or an r in wash. Warsh, or Warshington.
It's generally only l before m, and b after m. So no l sound in salmon or calm, but there is in solve. Oddly, there's no l sound in salve. Likewise, there is no trailing b sound in bomb, dumb, or lamb. Of course, it's important to remember this is English, where the exceptions outnumber the rules, which is expected when you mash three languages together with a sprinkling of the rest of the languages.
If you think Pu~238~ with its half-life of 90 years is scary, check out Fe~60~ with its half-life of 2.6 million years. That must be super scary!
/s
I'm aware that everything with a higher atomic weight than iron wants to be iron.
While I get that it's not a small feat, and an unusual finale for space flight, this isn't much higher than some skydiving packages you can book today. Still pretty ballsy for back then.
If every Starlink satellite shattered into the most dangerously-sized pieces simultaneously, it would only affect our access to space for 5 to 10 years. It would perhaps be bad enough to put manned missions on the back burner during that time period, and would certainly cause major issues for terrestrial astronomy, but it wouldn't cause much harm to the space program overall. If they were in a higher orbit, it would definitely be a concern.
Like most questions that devolve to, "What would the world be like if people stopped doing bad things and just ?" pretty great. (The wish in this case is help each other with raising children.) Now if only we could get people to stop doing bad things.