Economic system to support Kessler Remediators, with maximum drama
After reading this question by Nick M (now closed) and exchanging some comments with him, I have some ideas related to the scenario. I realized that the comprehensive design covers several distinct topics and is not what the question asked, so I'm posting the questions I did answer, as new questions.
What would be a good economic framework to drive the motives of independent crews of Kessler Remediation and Salvage (KR&S) companies?
The KR&S companies clear debris from Earth orbit. They compete for profit and eek out a margin.
But rather than being an efficient well-planned system that fairly divides effort and profit among all involved, it should resemble a system that emerges organically out of a long history of contracts and cut-throat deals, from participants who act selfishly for their own short-term gains.
This can be used as a background for a role-playing game, a strategy game, (or a combined role-playing strategy game!), or a story that has a complex plot in the manner of an action/political thriller.
Besides the KR&S crews, note what other roles are available for players. Players can both cooperate and compete with players in different roles and others in the same role. In general, it should provide for maximum dramatic potential "” or stated less dramatically, provide for conflict, differing motives among the players, and the ability to act on these conflicting motives independently of what other players are doing.
The tech level is near-future, with realistic things extrapolated from today's designs. No 'magic' unobtainium!
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/83590. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
Every problem is also an opportunity. Getting resources into space is expensive. Mining asteroids is cheaper, but still not cheap since you have to get the resources from the asteroid belt, resources to the asteroid belt, and unlike what is depicted by Hollywood asteroids are actually very spread out, which means everything is really far away from everything else.
So while space junk is a danger, it is also a nearby resource which can be harvested and recycled.
Deorbiting junk is fairly simple, and I remember a proposal to pull junk out of orbit by using an electron gun to give items a charge, and then attracting or repulsing that to change the objects orbit.
Demand for resources would be pretty high once a couple fab units are put in orbit as a way to lower the cost of getting space craft into orbit by just building them there. These fab units would be able to process minerals from asteroids, but they would also be able to break down and recycled the processed minerals of space junk.
So KR&S companies would be started to electromagnetically lasso junk to be processed by the fab units to collect the salvage fees, and it's also possible that governments or companies might start a bounty program to encourage the capture of smaller objects that KR&S might not feel are worth the hassle of grabbing.
It is worth noting that NASA and the DoD cooperate and share responsibilities for characterizing the satellite (including orbital debris) environment. DoD's Space Surveillance Network tracks discrete objects as small as 2 inches (5 centimeters) in diameter in low Earth orbit and about 1 yard (1 meter) in geosynchronous orbit, and salvage companies would have access to this data.
This can be used as a way to provide extra bounties for high priority targets:
"There is a wrench on a collision course with this satellite, and will most likely destroy it. Let's put a $50,000 bonus on its capture so we don't lose our satellite!"
It can also be used as a double check to keep KR&S companies honest:
"We totally grabbed this bolt, which has a small item bonus. No of course we didn't break it off this other piece of salvage, who would do that?"
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