A little about me: I'm an older guy who grew up reading great science fiction by such masters as Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Clifford Simak, and Robert Heinlein. My favorite current authors are Neal Stephenson and Alastair Reynolds. I started writing a few years ago to try to create a book (and now series) that I think my younger self would have loved to read. Hopefully you will, too! And if you have any comments, I promise to always read your emails to me, and provide a response. I love hearing from my readers!
One of the most familiar technologies in popular space operas (e.g., Star Trek and Star Wars) is the tractor beam. The Death Star caught the Millennium Falcon in one, and the USS Enterprise used theirs many times (probably as many times as they were caught in one). But could it be real?
Dr. Hanspeter Schaub, an aerospace engineering professor at Colorado University, has seriously proposed a tractor beam device to clear the space junk out of Earth orbit. There is an ever-growing amount of space junk out there, to the point where safe orbits are starting to dwindle. In 2009, a comms satellite rammed into a defunct Russian military satellite, resulting in even more space junk as it disintegrated into more than 1,800 pieces of debris.
(The story reminded me of an episode of the old "Lost in Space" show from 1966 in which an alien race put the humans on trial for a variety of charges, including "Hazard to Navigation" for losing a space wrench while performing a spacewalk to repair the Jupiter 2 in the first episode - see this video starting at 21:00.)
The amount of space junk surrounding Earth has greatly increased from 1965 (left) to 2010 (right). Sizes exaggerated for visibility.
Back to the main topic: Dr. Schaub has developed a concept for a real-life tractor beam that would grab this space junk by aiming an electron gun at it to give the junk a negative charge, thus attracting it to the "servicer" craft which would be positively charged. Simple electromagnetic attraction. The servicer craft would go around collecting junk, then tow it all into a safe orbit, clearing space for other uses.
A big difference between this concept and the fictional tractor beam would be that due to the limited attraction power, it could take a month or so to clear one defunct satellite. It would still be an improvement over other methods that would require physical contact.
What's Rick Reading Now?
I finished reading The Mongoliad by Neal Stephenson and others a few months ago, and decided to go back to the story with Katabasis, aka Book 4 of the Foreworld Saga (The Mongoliad is Books 1-3). Not sure what the title means, but it picks up right where The Mongoliad ended. Neal wasn't part of the series after #3, but it reads the same, written by the other authors he collaborated with for The Mongoliad.
I featured this book a few months back, Return to the Galaxy, by BA Gillies, in which a human on present-day Earth is recruited by an advanced alien civilization to secretly prepare Earth to join them in a galactic war. I read it and found it lots of fun! Free to read if you have Amazon Prime (i.e., you don't need Kindle Unlimited). Check it out!
Happy Reading!
Rick A. Allen
The Star Riders series:
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A little about me: I'm an older guy who grew up reading great science fiction by such masters as Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Clifford Simak, and Robert Heinlein. My favorite current authors are Neal Stephenson and Alastair Reynolds. I started writing a few years ago to try to create a book (and now series) that I think my younger self would have loved to read. Hopefully you will, too! And if you have any comments, I promise to always read your emails to me, and provide a response. I love hearing from my readers!
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