this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
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That's a fair point. The alternative is taking things up to a "graveyard orbit" somewhere between LEO and GSO, to a particularly unpopular altitude, where nobody's fighting for real estate. Satellites can sit there indefinitely, you could even clump them up in a big ball, the tiny pull of gravity they have is actually enough to keep them bunched together.
The only problem with that plan is that it takes a lot of energy to raise an orbit that much, I'm not sure how to make that feasible.
Lowering the orbit takes energy, too, unless you're relying solely on atmospheric drag.
Sure, but you can safely deorbit something from Leo with like 100 m/s of Delta v, you just need to dip into the atmosphere and then drag does the rest. Getting something to a sufficiently high graveyard orbit is more like 2000 Dv split between two burns. You'd need to stay with the trash for half an orbit and then do the second half of your burn, and then presumably you'd need to travel back to your original point, costing another 2000 Dv.
All together, going up could take 40x more propellant than going down.