On Tue, 10 Jul 2001 16:05:44 Phillip H. Zakas wrote:
you know one of the things i'd like to do is go into the waste removal business in orbit. lots of junk up there...would like to launch a satellite with a long finger attached to it and poke stuff out of orbit. the "nudge". who'd pay? it would be quite an unfornate event if a satellite were mistaken as a piece of debris...or if debris suddenly appeared in a launch window ;)
phillip
There is lots of junk up there. Schemes to de-orbit satellites at the end of their useful life have been put forward but they always fail on the liability issue. Apparently if a satellite falls out of orbit it is an "act of god" and the owner/insurer is not responsible for damages, but if the satellite is deliberately de-orbitted the owner/insurer is on the hook. No one, partiucularly the insurance companies wants to try it. This despite a high degree of confidence in being able to bring a satellite down in a hopefully empty patch of ocean. Insurance companies are very risk averse. Jim Join 18 million Eudora users by signing up for a free Eudora Web-Mail account at http://www.eudoramail.com
On Tuesday, July 10, 2001, at 09:44 PM, Jim Windle wrote:
There is lots of junk up there. Schemes to de-orbit satellites at the end of their useful life have been put forward but they always fail on the liability issue. Apparently if a satellite falls out of orbit it is an "act of god" and the owner/insurer is not responsible for damages, but if the satellite is deliberately de-orbitted the owner/insurer is on the hook. No one, partiucularly the insurance companies wants to try it.
Five dozen Iridium satellites were on the verge of being de-orbited when a buyer could not be found. (Was this just jive? Possibly, but plans were underway and retro-rocket firing sequences were ready to go. Had the U.S.G. not arranged a deal to keep the system in operation for military/embassy/spook purposes, I expect the de-orbiting would have happened.) The "act of God" argument is a weak one, anyway. Had Motorola and the other Iridium partners simply said "We'll trust in God and just let them fall where they may," I expect they would have been hit with lawsuits as bits of wreckage made it to the ground. A controlled de-orbiting over the Pacific was seen by them as the wiser choice. --TIm May
There is lots of junk up there. Schemes to de-orbit satellites at the end of their useful life have been put forward but they always fail on the
At 12:44 AM 7/11/01 -0400, Jim Windle wrote: liability issue. Apparently if a satellite falls out of orbit it is an "act of god" and the owner/insurer is not responsible for damages, but if the satellite is deliberately de-orbitted the owner/insurer is on the hook. No one, More importantly: you can't get sued if your space debris trashes someone else's mission. So why bother?
More importantly: you can't get sued if your space debris trashes someone else's mission.
A piece of law that will have to be re-assessed if there ever are any space colonists, or serious productive industry in LEO. You really wouldn't want to live somewhere where anyone who "accidentally" evacuates all the air from your house has no legal liability. Ken
participants (4)
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David Honig -
Jim Windle -
Ken Brown -
Tim May