Confronting Space Debris: Strategies and Warnings from Comparable Examples Including Deepwater Horizon by Dave Baiocchi & William Welser IV

Author:Dave Baiocchi & William Welser IV [Baiocchi, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8330-5190-5
Publisher: RAND Corporation
Published: 2010-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 8.1

Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: Timeline of Remediation Attempts and Estimate of Amount Spilled

Remediation Lessons Learned from the Deepwater Horizon Spill

The events associated with the DH highlight a number of lessons that are applicable to the orbital debris problem:

Simply having a remedy available (or even several) is not sufficient: They must be tested and proven to work in the expected operating conditions. This is perhaps the biggest lesson of the DH oil spill. The timeline illustrated in Figure 8.1 shows ten discrete attempts to reduce the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, but none were able to affect the spill rate during the first 40 days of the spill. The reason these approaches failed was not because they represented new technology. In fact, a containment dome and the top kill method were also used unsuccessfully in the 1979 Bay of Campeche oil spill off the coast of Mexico (Browne, 1979). Instead, these approaches failed because none of them had been tested to ensure they would work at a depth of 5,000 feet (Wethe, 2010). This concept is applicable to orbital debris because, as we mentioned above, the two environments are very similar. Any future debris removal strategy must be tested to ensure that it will work in the operating environment.

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