Everyone has heard about the problems with space debris, but few are aware of what will happen when we have human space tourism and orbiting hotels. As an example, let's review a story about a cook on a future hotel/space station. It appears that this future space hotel was designed such that all guests have rooms with Earth views.
All hotel service personnel have quarters on the deep-space-facing part of the structure. In particular, the kitchen, storage and trash/garbage facilities are all in the back of the hotel. The captain has given strict orders to all staff that nothing is to be released to open space.
Resupply ships periodically replace fresh food and other consumables, and pick up the disposables. Unfortunately, the supply ship was a week late and all storage facilities were overflowing.
The head cook was desperate to make room for more trash. So, he thought no one would ever know if he were to release some of the excess garbage through the rear airlock.
So, during one work period, when most of the crew members were asleep, he loaded the airlock with as much garbage as he could and released the many bright orange storage bags into the vacuum of space. The cook then relaxed thinking his storage problems were over.
Unfortunately, the cook did not understand orbital mechanics. Had he taken one of the Launchspace Orbital Mechanics short courses, he would have known that any objects released from a satellite go into orbit with the satellite. The cook assumed that by using air pressure in the airlock, the garbage would be forced away from the station.
In fact, he was correct in that the initial motion of the bags was to move away. But, as the station went around the Earth, so did the garbage. Exactly one orbit later, all those orange bags came back to the hotel. However, the equations of motion tell us that these bags all hit the front of the station, in effect polluting the view of Earth with floating "space fill."
The moral of this story, if there is one, is to know your orbit mechanics before you starting trashing space.
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