The numbers for ion don’t seem crazy. To get the impulse to catch a 1,000 ton object every 2 weeks you would need 10,000 Starlink thrusters massing 21 tons, plus 42 MW of power, which is 14 hectares of solar panels at an average of 300 W/m^2. That’s only a couple dozen times the ISS.
The numbers for ion don’t seem crazy. To get the impulse to catch a 1,000 ton object every 2 weeks you would need 10,000 Starlink thrusters massing 21 tons, plus 42 MW of power, which is 14 hectares of solar panels at an average of 300 W/m^2. That’s only a couple dozen times the ISS.