This is how the laser plan would work.
A NASA team led by space scientist James Mason has proposed the (quite badass) idea of using a laser beam to burn a hole in the moon nudge space junk in order to change its orbit.
Why do they want to do that? Well, you see, according to the U.S. military there are over 9,700 pieces of debris and 1,500 old rocket bodies flying around in the LEO (Low Earth Orbit) at 17,000 miles per hour. When these pieces collide in space, more debris pieces are created. Many of them are small but due to the speed they’re traveling at they pose a serious threat to space travel and the launching of new satellites.
Throughout the years, many solutions to this problem have been proposed, but all of them were either hugely expensive or posed new threats by themselves. Which has led to a situation in which if nothing is done about space debris and we keep launching satellites, the LEO could potentially reach a “Kessler effect,” rendering all kinds of space exploration and satellite usage unfeasible for generations.
Using case studies designed to represent the properties (e.g. area and mass) of the current debris population, we show that one could significantly reduce the risk of more than half of all debris-debris collisions using only one such laser/telescope facility. We speculate on whether this could mitigate the debris fragmentation rate such that it falls below the natural debris re-entry rate due to atmospheric drag, and thus whether continuous long-term operation could entirely mitigate the Kessler syndrome in LEO, without need for relatively expensive active debris removal. – arXiv:1103.1690v1 [physics.space-ph]
FUCK YES LASER CANNONS!!!
