Our wonderful co-worker Scott forwarded us this news story from MSNBC’s Cosmic Log: Japan’s space agency is reportedly teaming up with a fishing net manufacturer to catch and remove debris from Earth orbit, where it poses a threat to spacecraft, astronauts and satellites.
What can we say, except that once again The Next Continent by Issui Ogawa has proven prescient. If you’ve read the book, you know that our Japanese heroine heads up to space to clean up orbital debris in order to encourage traffic toward her lunar base. It’s a real issue too—the hypothetical scenario in which cascades of debris can end space exploration is called Kessler syndrome after the NASA scientist.
Japan’s contemplation of net-lattice technology is neat, but perhaps they should check out Ogawa’s novel and work on creating a “puffball”—a giant collapsible sphere that looks like steel wool that shreds or vaporizes the debris into which it comes in contact. It’s just a big net rolled up into a ball!
For that matter, maybe you should check out Ogawa’s novel, if you want to know what the future will bring. Right on moon water, right on Japan taking the initiative on space debris…what’s the next prediction that The Next Continent will get right?
