What's So Special About Low-Earth Orbit?

Re:What's So Special About Low-Earth Orbit? by rtkwe on Tuesday September 15, 2015 @07:28PM (#10223761)

Yep there's still a good bit of atmospheric drag even at the ISS's altitude. Once you get beyond the atmosphere you get solar wind creating drag too. The ISS is periodically reboosted into a higher orbit by engines on one of the Russian modules.

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Re:What's So Special About Low-Earth Orbit? by DavidSJ on Tuesday September 15, 2015 @08:20PM (#10223944)

Also, small satellites have much higher surface area to mass ratios.

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Re:What's So Special About Low-Earth Orbit? by rtkwe on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @12:18AM (#10224654)

Yeah that's another big factor in how fast they decay. The fact that they deorbit easily is good though, if they stayed up for a long time it'd be harder for NASA to approve so many so easily because they'd become a threat to LEO operations. A lot of them are launched from the ISS.

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Re:What's So Special About Low-Earth Orbit? by dharma1 on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @07:10AM (#10225790)

How do the approvals work if you are not in the US?

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Re:What's So Special About Low-Earth Orbit? by rtkwe on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @09:32AM (#10226389)

The ESA and JAXA both seem to run approvals too. I'm not sure about their current plans/proposal request statuses the only ones a surface googling finds are several years old so they might be in between proposal cycles.

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