"it seems to be a genuine concern for these believers"
Believers are genuinely concerned about a lot of things.
Most of it doesn't exist though, and so doesn't affect the rest of us.
2852 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jan 2012
Actually, I believe that ablating part of a chunk of debris with a laser would impart some delta-v to the chunk in question. Vaporising or blowing up a chunk of debris would be an unfeasible solution. But providing enough thrust with laser to either knock it out of orbit, or knock it off course enough to miss the station is entirely doable. You use the laser to provide power, and the debris itself is it's own reaction mass.
I think that there are rocket engines based on the idea of firing a powerful laser from a distance to ablate material from the back of a space ship in order to provide it with thrust.
I contend that the only way to effectively deal with space debris is with a giant frickin laser.
That way, the first bit of space debris to cross the ISS path could be blasted to smithereens and made an example of to others.
I would also accept a swarm of micro satellites as a solution for the job.
They are probably the ones that move my tools when I can't find them, and responsible for moving my coffee table in the dark to that I bang my shins on it.
From the tone of the article I reckon that Professor Stephan Lewandowsky believes that climate skeptics kick puppies and make potholes too.