efaardvark

Long terms this is really another reason to get some industry going in space.  The biggest problem right now is the cost of getting stuff from the Earth's surface to orbit.  The.  Absolute.  Biggest.  The problem has been known about since even before Apollo, and NASA has talked about doing something about it for decades, but what they've come up with have been pork projects like the space shuttle that are really not useful for anything but getting money spent in certain Congressional districts.  Fortunately we now have people like Musk and Bezos with personal fortunes able to address the issue.

If we could get something like a lunar mining/manufacturing/industrial process going then getting heavier vehicles into orbit would be so much easier in the long run.  Thicker skins, less fragile components, extra redundancy, and more maneuverability due to bigger fuel margins would in turn all go a long way towards both strengthening satellites against damage and enabling the Toy Box option to clean up old debris before it causes problems.

It is kind of like in the game Kerbal Space Program.  (Bear with me here.)  At the beginning of the game you're just so happy that you can get something into orbit that you don't even care where the spent boosters wind up.  Over time though the old bits start to clutter up the displays in the tracking station, and even once you get better at putting stuff in orbit it still takes a lot of skill and massive rockets to do anything useful, especially when you want to send stuff to other planets. 

Now, KSP has a "cheat" where you can just delete stuff from orbit from within the tracking station.  Unfortunately that's not an option in real life.  I've tried doing it the hard way, by launching new rockets with missions to physically go collect and de-orbit the clutter, but that takes a lot of fuel and rockets.  It is very expensive, which matters a lot in the career game.

Pro game tip... build a mining base on Minmus.  Minmus is a small moon of Kerbin, the planet you start on.  The moon has such low gravity that even the weakest, cheapest rocket engines can lift massive amounts of, well, mass.  Most of a rocket's launch weight is fuel.  It is actually far cheaper to manufacture fuel on Minmus, launch it into Minmus orbit, and transfer it to Kerbin orbit than to launch the same amount of fuel from Kerbin itself.  If you can plan on refueling in Kerbin low orbit then the rockets you launch from Kerbin don't have to carry nearly so much fuel along with them and can be much smaller/lighter in the first place.  If you have a way to refuel in space then you can also build more flexible, capable, and durable space ships and reuse them on multiple missions, instead of doing expensive one-shot missions that leave a lot of old, useless hardware laying around cluttering up the place when you're done.

True, it takes a bit of work to get that first mining base going.  You need to get the mining hardware to Minmus after all, and you need to do it without having the benefit of being able to refuel initially.  It isn't easy either.  I've crashed plenty of times just trying to get the equipment into orbit, or doing the transfer to Minmus orbit.  Or landing!

Ok, about landing.  Minmus is like the Moon.  It has no atmosphere.  Atmospheres are like extra fuel.  If you have an atmosphere then you can target your orbit to enter the upper levels of the atmosphere and slow down without using fuel.  If you do it just right then you can slow down enough that you can get rid of all that orbital velocity without using a drop of fuel and wind up coming straight down instead of continuing back off into space. 

That would be kind of a Bad Thing too, except for parachutes.  Having an atmosphere means not only not having to use fuel to come down from orbit, but you also don't have to use fuel to slow down enough to land safely.  Just pop the parachute and drift down.

Minmus.. isn't like that.  You can put the low point of your orbit 1 foot off the surface and you won't slow down a bit.  You'll just fly by the ground at hundreds of meters per second and continue back up into orbit.  (Pretty thrilling, actually, considering things like mountains.)  If you use a little more fuel to cause your orbit to "intersect" the surface then that's called an "impact" because you'll still be going at orbital velocities of hundreds of meter per second.

Worse, even if you expend the large amounts of fuel necessary to kill all your orbital velocity and drop like a rock straight down.  You'll still need to expend even more fuel to slow down and land gently.  Parachutes don't help at all if there's no air to inflate them.

I can't tell you how many times I've crashed trying to land heavy mining equipment on Minmus.  (Or the Mün, which another moon of Kerbin that is easier to get to in terms of orbit, but has a higher gravity, is even harder to land on, and is ultimately less efficient in terms of getting fuel to orbit.)  But if you can do the landing, get the mining equipment set up, and start manufacturing fuel on Minmus then everything for the rest of the game becomes SO much easier.  Even building a reusable/refuelable spacecraft with a grapple to go and grab all those old booster stages and put them on new trajectories that reenter Kerbin's atmosphere and burn up are cheap enough to be feasible within the financial constraints of a career game.

Man, you really know how to make something sound tempting. I mean I've seen some of your screenshots in the gaming section but never knew the game was so advanced/realistic in a way. I wish I had the time to actually game, but when I get to your age the latest I hope I'll have a steady job and enough stuff figured out that I can indulge myself in gaming again.

On the cleaning up space debris issue, I think it's kinda weird that you might have to rely on people with their personal fortune, when (at least in my book) it should be part of governments' jobs (either national or through international treaties). But I'm not complaining about SpaceX, more about the lack of ambition from the official side.

It should be part of government's jobs, but nobody is doing anything anymore for the country's sake.  They're all doing it for themselves.  If you're a Congresscritter then the money you bring in to your district is almost directly tied to whether you get reelected.  Either it puts "federal money" (someone else's taxes) into your local economy and makes you popular with your voters, or else it channels money to certain special interests whose lobbyists in turn channel a certain fraction of it into your campaign funds.

It is all short-term too.  Elections typically happen ever two or 4 years.  Anything beyond that is hard to justify, especially since even if it works out then by that time you may have been replaced by your opponent.  Who then of course will claim credit for the resulting benefits.

The only way to do this sort of long-term stuff is to have your own resources and spend them as you see fit.  That or have a command economy at your fingers, which amounts to the same thing. 

Of course, the guy at the top has to know how to spend the money and get things done.  Musk clearly has what it takes, and has hired some of the best people in the world.  Bezos hasn't even got to orbit yet, but he has far, far, more money to spend, and has the right ideas and has also hired top talent.  And he did create Amazon after all, so he personally knows at least a thing or two about technology.

On the "command economy" side,  Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping, the Chinese leadership are all quite well educated, with the first two even having engineering degrees (electrical and hydraulic, respectively), and all are proponents of the Chinese "Scientific Outlook on Development".  China is already ahead of the US in many ways.  They're already the most influential economic power in the world, with most of the world's manufacturing under their control, including key industrial resources like rare-earth minerals.  They've got the biggest solar power station in the world, the biggest hydro power station, and they're going ahead full speed with "modern" clean nuclear ideas like molten salt breeder reactors.  (Which they got from us btw.)  They're even putting SpaceX under pressure by duplicating their reusable booster concepts.  The rover they landed on the lunar far side last year shows that they have the technical chops for space and they have credible plans to put a manned base on the moon by the 2030s.  Couple their manufacturing and industrial power with extremely cheap, virtually unlimited electrical power and they'll be unstoppable, not only in space but wherever else they decide to exert their influence.

Our government .. has Trump.  And Pelosi, and Schumer, and Hillary, and McConnell, and etc.  Career lawyers and politicians all.  Not a single science or engineering degree in the bunch.