Automated Transfer Vehicles

On 02/03/2011, Joe Strout wrote:
> Nobody was suggesting keeping the trash. Victor was talking about the
> ATV, not the trash. The trash, he suggested, should be compacted into
> cubes and ejected into the atmosphere.

Unfortunately, that doesn't work.

The problem is that the trash isn't guaranteed to burn up!

The American military found this out the hard way. They reentered
spysats several times, until a farmer in the UK found some glass in
his field. Turned out that that was the main mirror that had survived
reentry. Embarrassing!

Further, there's a higher than a 1 in a million chance of it killing
somebody per reentry, which is the threshold where you start to care,
and if you keep chucking stuff out, sooner or later that *will*
happen... and it's traceable back to the ISS.

Not only that, not only can it kill people, but it can cause property
damage as well, and that will happen much more often, people are a
smaller target, but property is bigger.

The purpose of using the ATV as a trash truck is to dump it
specifically into an ocean, typically Pacific, Atlantic or Indian
ocean.

> Best,
> - Joe

--
-Ian Woollard