Comment by vlovich123

> I’m saying send reinforced rockets through the orbits that absorb the collision instead of generating more dust. That should let you clear a path through all orbits that intersect your path.

No such material exists, nor can it be made from any matter that is based on electrons bound around a nucleus — the force of impact will break any such material.

> It’s hard to do and the 3d aspect of it might make it expensive but conceptually it could be a solution.

"expensive but conceptually it could be a solution" is also why we don't have an Orbital Ring instead of rockets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_ring

The cost requirement for getting something to space with enough momentum to do the cleanup, even if it was able to survive the impacts, would be comparable to the entire cost of getting the stuff constituting the mess into orbit in the first place: bad enough to be prohibitive even today with relatively little mess, much worse if there's an actual Kessler cascade.

> Or use super powerful lasers (potentially mounted on a satellite) to deorbit the dust

Could work for the bigger bits, but don't put the lasers on a satellite: 1) Power is short up there, as is cooling, much easier to put a bit laser on the ground and waste some energy going up through the atmosphere; 2) if you solve that constraint, you've now got an orbital laser that's an obvious and easy-to-hit target for all foreign powers to get upset about even if you didn't want to weaponise it.

For the smaller stuff, you can't see the dust to target it in the first place.

This doesn't work conceptually, but it's hard to explain without attaining a KSP baseline of understanding. https://xkcd.com/1356

"Clearing a path" is something you can do with a bulldozer through a traffic jam, but imagine clearing a path through a belt road by driving through the flow of moving traffic sideways at speed. Ultimately you can't hit every car in the outer lane with just one bulldozer, and the cars will close in and fill gaps because they're moving at slightly different speeds.

The easy elastic collisions you're imagining also just can't occur at these relative velocities. When something hits it looks more like an explosion than a "catch". If you shoot a local stone monument with high explosive artillery shells what happens? Does it reduce the number of things flying through the air or increase it?

It takes about 90 minutes to complete a low earth orbit. A rocket can't hover in place for 90 minutes at the same altitude, then increase its altitude by its height and repeat. It doesn't have enough fuel for that.