Researchers are developing a real-life tractor beam, with the goal of pulling defunct satellites out of geostationary orbit to alleviate the space junk problem.
Yeah, we have hall effect thrusters, but it doesn’t really matter, the spacecraft still needs to push the mass of both spacecrafts a pretty significant distance and then return to the orbit of was at.
That’s just a lot of work.
I’ll admit, that using this for cleaning up geostationary orbit is more viable that leo, but it’s still questionable how long this will actually be useful.
Yeah, we have hall effect thrusters, but it doesn’t really matter, the spacecraft still needs to push the mass of both spacecrafts a pretty significant distance and then return to the orbit of was at.
That’s just a lot of work.
I’ll admit, that using this for cleaning up geostationary orbit is more viable that leo, but it’s still questionable how long this will actually be useful.