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Comment by nba456_

4 hours ago

And who does the tax get paid to? Some mythical Global Government that will totally work this time?

The Dutch figured out how to do collective dike maintenance a millennium ago without inventing mythical super government. Collective rules worked just fine.

I encourage you to reflect on this bias. I suspect you're taking the American state as a template, and extrapolating its incompetence. The history is filled with different ideas - some of them far older than America itself.

Hell, I'd call America a place so naturally rich, it's practically the case study how much dysfunction can be papered over with money instead of statecraft.

  • And how did the Dutch collect the toll and who received the tax benefits for it?

    I’m interested in understanding your comparison here and how it would be applicable to space and how you envision it working based on your comparison.

My new startup, SPECTRE.

It's a new SaaS play - Satellites As A Service. That is, your satellite gets to stay in orbit as long as you pay me.

Otherwise my satellite killer eats them.

Any company removing space debris from orbit. Like a carbon capture price to offset your launch.

  • What you're describing is a global government, otherwise that can't be enforced.

    • Not at all, it can be handled via international treaty. Frequency allocations for civilian satellites are already handled this way, a UN body (the ITU Radiocommunication bureau in Geneva) acts as a neutral party that handles satellite spectrum coordination between UN member states.

      The ITU has no enforcement power, but fundamentally that doesn't really matter much, since enforcement is handled by the member states. Are there attempts by various member states to skirt around the rules or favour their own national interests? Of course, and sometimes these are successful - but nobody just outright ignores the rules, because they know it very quickly leads to a tragedy of the commons.

      Administering an orbital LVT is exactly the kind of thing that could slot cleanly into an expanded ITU mandate. Where the money goes would be up for debate, but I think the cleanest solution would be ITU rebates most of it back to the government of the country that applied for the orbital slot provided that they demonstrate it's going into a space sustainability fund.

      Is it perfect? No, but it's based on a rickety-but-mostly-works international model and it doesn't require global government conspiracy theories to come to fruition.

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  • In low earth orbit, space debris removes itself after a few years

    • Eh... no, not really. At low altitudes (<500 km), sure, but much above 600 km you are starting to look at decades for a passive deorbit depending on solar cycle and ballistic coefficient.