Otis Twelve and Diver Dan Doomey made their mark on radio comedy in the early 80s with Space Commander Wack, a sci-fi parody and satire. Over the next two decades radio listeners in Omaha.

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Space is a mess — and getting messier. Remember the 2013 movie “Gravity”? Sandra Bullock plays an astronaut stranded in space after her ship is hit by flying remnants of a wrecked Russian satellite.Fictional, yes.

But the movie touches on a very realistic possibility. Tons of trash — also known as “orbital debris” — are floating in space, thanks to wrecked satellites, detached rocket engines and.With no cleanup crew, trash adds an extra threat to space missions by NASA and commercial players such as SpaceX. So cleaning up the debris has become a priority, and there are teams from Colorado and beyond working on technology such as a “space harpoon” to move junk out of the way and a “space fence” to identify objects the size of a marble — small fragments that aren’t as innocuous as they seem. Fight night champion cheats.

“Traveling at roughly 17,000 miles per hour, a marble can be very harmful to an asset (like a satellite),” said Bruce Schafhauser, the director of Lockheed Martin’s upcoming Space Fence, which can track marble-sized debris. “You’ve seen the movie ‘Gravity,’ right?”Lockheed Martin’s will scan a wide swath of space for out-of-control space junk. A robotic arm from Westminster’s Maxar Technologies and a space harpoon from Airbus in France aim to wrangle dead satellites out of the path of active space objects. Image courtesy of NASAThe Canadarm2 is currently operating on the International Space Station. It was developed by Canada’s MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates, which has since renamed itself Maxar Technologies and moved its headquarters to Westminster.

Maxar hopes to develop a robotic arm to assist with space debris cleanup.“The way space is used today is like if your car breaks down on the freeway, you leave it there. That’s not sustainable,” said Walter S. Scott, who founded of DigitalGlobe, now part of Maxar. “As more and more satellites get launched particularly in mega constellations, you’re spending all your time dodging (debris). Having a lot of traffic in space that doesn’t maneuver is an undue burden on the satellites that are capable of maneuvering.”There’s a renewed emphasis on space situational awareness, even before an. Department of Defense has, which includes funding the Space Fence for the U.S.

During a speech at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs last month, said he is sending a proposal to the president that will clean up “the tens of thousands of man-made objects orbiting around Earth.”National security is a big reason, said Lt. Col. Christina Hoggatt, who is with the Air Force Space Command public affairs office. “It’s more than just cataloging objects in space – it’s about maintaining custody of threats and supporting the command and control of our national security assets in space,” Hoggatt said in an email.There’s also the rise of the commercial space industry, which includes companies such as SpaceX, Orbital ATK and Blue Origin.“We’re in a sea change with the pace of space activity, and the new operators are going to make debris a big concern,” said Ted Muelhaupt, who manages the nonprofit Aerospace Corp.’s Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies. “If we don’t do traffic right, we’re going to have a really, really difficult debris problem.”Space-junk congestion was predicted in 1978 by NASA scientist Donald J. According to “,” as more objects populate Earth’s orbit, the chance of collisions rises.

A collision can start a domino effect, with dangerous debris clouds causing even more destruction.Enter, which Schafhauser said should be in full operation by the second quarter of 2019. The fence is a fan-shaped, Earth-based radar beam that shoots 22,000 miles into space. Orbiting objects that pass through the beam are identified and cataloged by computers on Earth.Lockheed houses the system in a massive facility near the equator in Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. A team of about 65 employees at Lockheed’s Colorado Springs-based iSpace helped design the user interface.

Image courtesy of Lockheed MartinLockheed Martin is putting finishing touches on the Space Fence, a ground-based system that shoots a radar fan 22,000 miles into space to detect orbiting space craft, satellites and debris. The system sits near the equator and is physically based at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Objects orbiting around earth would pass through the radar beam and after a couple of passes, Space Fence operators should be able to identify and track the debris. The system can warn satellite operators of oncoming space trash that could damage a satellite. Pictured is a rendering of the wide radar beam, which Lockheed Martin says is the width of the continental United States. The smaller green fan would be a second fence to be built in Australia.The fence can detect objects the size of a softball.

But if operators spot something new — including spacecraft launched by other countries — they can concentrate the radar’s energy to create a micro fence and detect objects the size of a marble. The fence, which on Feb. 15 tracked its first object, is running about 80 percent of capacity, said Schafhauser, who has visited the Kwajalein Atoll 14 times to oversee the project.The existing system has identified about 20,000 pieces of space debris, according to the U.S.

Space Surveillance Network, which tracks space junk in a. Schafhauser likened that system to a bunch of flashlights turned on in a dark attic, whereas the Space Fence turns on the attic light.With the ability to see more than 100,000 pieces of new debris, Space Fence will help satellite operators more effectively maneuver around objects if necessary.“Millions of dollars are spent each year burning fuel to move these satellites around,” Schafhauser said. “If there’s a close pass, you tend to move the satellite because you don’t want a collision because any collision in space leaves a legacy of debris out there.”But the fence isn’t a “silver bullet,” said Aerospace Corp.’s Muelhaupt. Satellites are in danger of getting hit daily, and operators are constantly studying whether to move their device out of the path of an uncommunicative piece of debris.“The smaller things that we’re not tracking now, we’re going to be adding a lot of stuff to the catalog. It’s going to raise a lot of alerts,” he said, adding that most of the estimated 7,800 payloads ever shot into space are still floating up there. “A good question is whether it’s going to improve safety or just raise awareness of what’s up there.”Tracking the smaller pieces could help satellite operators such as Maxar, whose DigitalGlobe division takes high-resolution photos of Earth. A few years ago, a small piece of debris hit the solar array on one of DigitalGlobe’s satellites.

Fortunately, it didn’t lose control. But the object hadn’t shown up on any radar, said Scott, who became Maxar’s chief technology officer after.“We actually knew we were hit because we have telemetry for the satellite that shows it got bumped,” Scott said.

“It didn’t affect the orbit of the satellite, but that begs the next question: Have we had to move our satellite out of the way for a piece of debris? Yes, it’s happened a number of times.”. Image courtesy of NASAMaxar Technologies, based in Westminster, is working on a robotic arm intended to fix broken satellites or grab them and move them out of an orbiting craft’s route.

The company, under its former name MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates, had earlier worked on the Canadarm that was used by the Space Shuttle Columbia.To take space debris to the next step, Maxar’s SSL Robotics team in Pasadena is working on a robotic arm that could refuel and repair satellites and do away with the notion that satellites are disposable.“Sometimes solar panels fail to deploy. They get stuck. You can’t go up and whack it with a hammer, but with a robotic arm, you could,” Scott said.Airbus is working on a space harpoon. Led by the University of Surrey Space Center, with funding from the European Space Agency, the features a net, harpoon and visual tracking system. That could be tested in space as soon as this summer, Airbus spokesman Jeremy Close said in an email.

Image courtesy of University of Surrey, AirbusRemoveDebris, a mission sponsored by the University of Surrey, Airbus and other European space organizations, includes a harpoon and net developed by Airbus that would capture small and large pieces of space trash. The small satellite would shoot out a net to capture smaller debris and then chase the net toward earth to burn up in the atmosphere. The RemoveDebris satellite was launched into space April 2 and the clean-up technology is currently on board the International Space Station waiting to be deployed, according to the University of Surrey.“Why a harpoon?

Space debris, or dead satellites, may be rotating around three axes, so they are difficult to grab hold of using a robot arm,” Close said. “So an option is using a harpoon to attach to the debris, then a small propulsion module will pull the debris back towards Earth so it burns up harmlessly in the atmosphere.”Several other projects are in the works worldwide, including Singapore-based to capture debris and force it down to Earth’s atmosphere, where the junk would burn up. Have proposed the with an enormous space claw to grab derelict satellites and deorbit the debris. There’s also a giant net to remove debris, although the European Space Agency seems to have switched the focus of its, not just remove them.“If things collide in space, remnants remain up there for eons,” said Lockheed Martin’s Schafhauser. “You don’t want to pollute space with a bunch of debris.”.