Have you seen Wall-E?

We brought our 4 year old to see it the first weekend and it was ok, not great... probably because of the live-action stuff getting in the way of the suspension of disbelief; But anyway...

There's that part where Wall-E is leaving Earth and he has to break through the space junk (shouldn't be a spoiler since it's flashed in the trailers), at that point I noticed a fair number of laughs and snickers and - this is why I really remember it - there was a guy a couple rows down who said to his kids "ha ha, look we even filled up space with garbage!"

Now, I had just finished reading a bunch of NASA white papers and zealot books about the Space Elevator and so I'd had on my mind the little caveats of that grand plan... and the one that had caught me the most was the bulletpoint of 'Before any lift or drop of an Elevator ribbon could start we'd have to do an "International Effort" to clean up the current working satelilte orbit ranges and have "All nations" agree to keep the area clean'. 

The next logical requirement of that is to figure out how to get our - and all of the "Internationally Committed" friend's - satellite needs accomplished in an environment where a delicate cable system was going to be extending up to some Asteroid-sized counterweight and/or up to a quarter of the distance between Earth and the Moon.

Back to Wall-E and the laughs of how "over the top" the movie really didn't go for audience laughs...

Wall-E's image was not really much different from a look at what we already actually have floating above right now.

Over at AI Solutions, they make a software system used by satellite and launch organizations to plan and track their payloads.  It is a cool program, because those n-object gravity calculations are intense.  Newton himself said that while plotting a two object gravitational system was simple, going from two to three 'made his head hurt'.  Even just calculating three objects gets you into what is often called "ugly math" and is a matter of brute forcing loops of equations against literally moving targets and pretty much hoping for the best and having to limit your forecasting and continuously re-plotting based on actual object locations over time.  Chaos Theory is a direct result of the efforts of trying to nicely plot out these Cellestial Mechanics n-object trajectories. 

In other words... it ain't easy (I've tried it and I can be quite determined ).  And so the "off the shelf" breakthrough of the FreeFlyer program from AISolutions appears very impressive.

Now, take a look at just how impressive... on the AISolutions site they have a couple of videos... one of them shows a rendering of the Aqua satellite in relation to the13,000 tracked objects from US Strategic Command’s (USSTRATCOM) Space Object Catalogue.   As they say, the objects in white are operational spacecraft and the objects in red are space debris (natural and manmade junk, such as old rocket fairings, dead stages, full dead sats and pieces resulting from collisions of paint chips with spacecraft, and on and on).

Getting that amazing video takes a bit of a download and because I wanted to be able to give you a fast taste I converted it into a streaming file.  There is a caveat to this...  to encode it for fast streaming a lot of the resolution gets lost and that means that the full render on their site will show you thousands more objects,

So even if you do see the video in this post, you should click to the AISolutions page and get the full version at full resolution because what you're seeing in my stream version is only about what we saw in Wall-E... while what you see in the AISolutions FreeFlyer full glory is more likely to make you re-think some of the true costs of that cool Space Elevator.