Tag: space

• Post for August

  Europe burning

  Here I am at the keyboard at last, over half-way through August with no idea of what to write about, a good time to take a break from dwelling on the sullen pot-shots so many of the Eastern countries are taking at each other. It’s cloudy here in far-from-everywhere Tasmania, so no use peering up into the night sky for thousands of tiny twinkling bits of demolished satellites taking their death-plunge into the heavier atmosphere below.

  Suddenly, without asking, a map of Europe that looked like bottles of brown and black ink had been spilt over large parts of it appeared on screen, a fire danger map! Since most of the news I had heard about this disaster seemed to mainly be centered in and around France, I was greatly surprised to see that these aply named Extreme and Very Extreme condition areas dominate a large Part of central-eastern Europe, stretching from Germany and the Alpine region through Poland and into the Balkans, with additional pockets over Spain, Ireland, northern France and southern Sweden. Extreme conditions surround these areas, also covering parts of Spain. I was also surprised to see big, dark patches on Southern parts of Great Britain, and then it occurred to me that the British press is possibly more focused on the continuing saga of the Buckingham Palace crew.

  Looking back and learning

  Except for the wildfires, things are fairly quiet, so I’ve been going back over SOB trying to find ways to improve, after all, it hasn’t been a raging success in getting the message out to big numbers of people, and we won’t have much influence on our rather scary future unless this improves a lot, so I’ve tried to put myself into your position as a first time reader to try and work out how to improve. So what’s the verdict? Well, I can’t find too much wrong with the content, but no surprise there, It’s not fiction, it’s not mine, and I’ve checked the sources for reliability. In the few places where I’ve indulged in a bit of speculation, it’s based, as far as I can tell, on that increasingly rare commodity, common sense. Where I have probably scored an F for fail, however, is what comes across to me as a rather high-handed way I ask readers to pass the message on, “don’t send it to them, send it to them,” and so on. It’s a wonder you didn’t tell me to get lost (maybe you did!) This might have come about because I was writing, initially, at least, with young readers in mind, who, I thought, rightly or wrongly, needed a bit of guidance. So what’s to be done? I’m open to suggestions, and I’m not going to give up, but I am going to leave it to you, to do it your way. Start your own blog – but just do it, soon.

  That’s it for this month, I’m going to busy for a while, so unless something spectacular happens, remember me in September.

  sillyoldblogger.blog

  2026.08.19

• July Post

  The second half of the year seems to be getting off to a quiet start, which, while it is certainly better than “Living in interesting Times” as the saying goes, it also makes writing about interesting times a bit more challenging, giving writers the opportunity instead to hone their skills on topics less dire and deadly than usual. But it’s getting late, so I’ll keep you guessing what this might mean while I get some sleep…. Since the first May Post about the overcrowded communications satellite zone above us, there has been a bit of a surge in the media about this including talk of using large, rocket propelled nets to collect wayward satellites, for disposal, like a space-borne version of marine trawl fishing. Maybe, but rather a pity if this meant a significant number of satellites which could be renovated and re-used were sent into a death-dive into the atmosphere below. So, with an eye to economy, perhaps a few hundred or so orbital communications hubs could be established, each consisting of a cube-shaped control centre, which initially would be manned during the construction phase, and maybe later robotically operated. Each of these would support six long, four-sided tower-like structures, rather like todays hilltop radio towers, but because of the very small gravitational forces, much more lightly built, one attached to each face of the control centre might be capable of supporting the attachment of fifty of these captured and renovated, and new, radio relay modules on each of its four sides, that’s two hundred on each “tower” the whole assembly now becoming one relay satellite instead of 1,200 independently orbiting satellites, a significant reduction in the risk of collision. Expensive, yes, but unless risk reductions of this order and more are somehow achieved, I won’t be buying a ticket for a vacation on the Moon. ps Just had a last-minute check, about 4,500 satellites were launched into this zone last year!

  Just to close off this digression from our two main themes, how to remove or alleviate the threats to our existence of nuclear bombs and global warming, I would like to acknowledge the good work being done by a number of experts in orbital mechanics, a field of which I know little, and my musings are those of a amateur. With that in mind, I limit my earlier claim to the “Silly old Blogger Conjecture” to the feeling that the well-known relationship between the increase in surface area and volume as the size of the pieces of space junk in a runaway collision scenario might be of greater significance than has been recognised, to the extent that such an event might pose little or no threat to observers at ground level. If we keep throwing more satellites into this zone at the present rate, we’ll soon enough see! In addition to my own interest in this subject, I was partly motivated to publish it here as a clear example of how far we have to go in international and interpersonal relationships before we can make real progress towards a harmonious human race, one that would not spend billions of dollars on military or media communications at the expense of making this crowded shell around Earth increasingly hazardous for space vehicles, including manned ones, to cross.

  Looks like it’s life as usual at least until the end of the month, so let’s see it out with a nod to the unusual amount of internet traffic about pdf files:

  ” PDF files are the Computer equivalent of Esperanto”

  ‘Bye for now, Silly old Blogger

  2026.07.03

• Post for May

  The Merry, Merry, Month of May is here, the world still exists, and while idly scanning the screen, trying to sort fact from fiction, I became aware of something that might be of interest to you. It’s not such a terrifyingly life-threatening thing as the prospect of nuclear war, but it will, if it happens, be a big and costly event, and one which illustrates how far we have to go to achieve international co-operation. When Sputnik 1, the first man-made object to achieve orbit beeped its way around the planet Earth, it was so utterly alone, no-one imagined that one day, there would be so many satellites orbiting the sky above us as to be a hazard. They proved, however, to be ideal radio relay stations, so ideal as to be a threat to their own existence, here’s why:

  For technical reasons, the ideal height above Earth for many radio relay applications is in the band between 400 and 600 kilometers, to the extent that the threat of collisions is so large that tracking stations are being built to try and forecast the likelihood of a collision and notify the operators so they can modify the orbits of the at-risk satellites to avoid a collision. A head-on collision at a closing speed of about 16 kM/ second would create thousands of pieces of space junk, travelling in random directions, each piece being a threat not only to other satellites in orbit, but to any spacecraft passing though this 400 to 600 kilometer band. Worst of all, it has been calculated that the density of this mixed swarm of functional satellites and wreckage from previous collisions could reach a point where there will be a kind of chain reaction, creating a cloud of space junk of all sizes, and presenting an unacceptable risk to any spacecraft passing through this band. A possible solution might have been having far fewer, much larger craft, each carrying a large number of communication modules. With enough tracking stations this might have reduced the risk of collisions to acceptable levels. It might yet be possible, but it would be much harder to achieve now than if it had been done earlier. But that would have required international co-operation, wouldn’t it?
  The amazing thing about this is, we knew it was coming, and efforts have been made to control the numbers, but every country and large corporation has managed to find ways to launch these in significant numbers without restriction despite the introduction of many regulations and laws to keep the region of space around planet Earth an uncluttered and orderly place – so what happened? Could it be that the huge advantage of moving so much of our commercial and military communication into this relatively small band of space, despite knowing that there is a limit which we are fast approaching, won the day?- you bet it could.

  So the day might not be far off when the huge number of these high speed projectiles will overcome the capacity of the tracking systems and the ability to change the orbits of these missiles to prevent collisions, leading to a runaway increase until the Earth is surrounded by a shell of high speed bits space junk maybe smashed to the size of pebbles, heralding the end of our dreams of space travel and also a dramatic decrease in cellphone and television traffic, also military communications, until we find a way to clean up the mess. Sorry about your cellphones, kiddies.

  Actually, I’ve been thinking it over since I published this post, trying to imagine what such an event might look like. The first, inconsequential, collisions have occurred, for example, when the robotic arm of the International Space Station was punctured by a small object, which probably lost so much speed in the collision that it slowly descended to a lower orbit and burned up in the denser atmosphere there. The real danger, however could start in a collision between two larger satellites which would produce a shower of pieces of many sizes, some big enough to break up other sizeable objects, and so start the feared chain reaction, which might resemble a meteor shower like no other recorded in human history, one that would happen simultaneously all around Earth. This might not be as dangerous as it sounds, however, because the collisions would result in the pieces of space junk being rapidly reduced in size making them more easily slowed down and incinerated by atmospheric friction as they fall to lower orbits. I haven’t heard of this possibility, I’m just making it up as far as I know, so I will somewhat immodestly call it “The Silly Old Blogger Conjecture”

  Silly old blogger, imagine that!

  2026.05.20