finally the “hand” of #StarCrash becomes a reality…
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Better him than the Charles Grey Blofeld. He was awful.
Does anyone know the logic behind the claw design?
I can see the value of having a good grip when you are within a gravity well, if you don’t have one you’ll end up dropping things; but in a situation where the amount of force involved is almost entirely dependent on how well your velocity matches the target it seems like a lot of additional weight and mechanical complexity when a flimsier structure and the patience to use a somewhat softer nudge are a viable alternative.
Does the claw match some more or less ubiquitous arrangement of handy load bearing grab locations used when stacking rocket components? Is the idea to have enough force available to be able to ‘squeeze’ things that lack good attachment points between the claws for a better friction fit?
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A claw doesn’t make sense to me. The Canadarm on the Space Shuttle used a different grapple that didnt rely on a claw.
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ClearSpace? How appropriate.
Set up a big net at Lagrange 1, fire all the junk at it. Set up telepresence robots there to break it down and open Joe’s Space Parts Shop and Diner.
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I’m genuinely curious about the efficacy of this. Everything I’ve read about the space junk problem says that it’s very much an “at scale” problem. Like, the solution has to involve dragnets, huge gravity tractors, automated lasers, or something else that can effectively de-orbit billions of tiny pieces of debris in a very large area. Like, the big stuff that you could grab with a claw doesn’t seem to be the problem, from what I’ve read. It’s like climate change, not a single polluting factory.
But, I’m sure the people that built this know what they’re doing and this has a use case that I don’t understand. 
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finally a use for von neumann robots! joe’s diners everywhere! ( hmmm… on second thought. don’t give musk any ideas… )
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im assuming @anon48584343 had the right idea. if you have a tool which can deorbit satellites, im sure there’s a whole bunch of spy satellites on a list somewhere. ( if that isn’t already happening covertly of course )
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hehe, as far as the claw goes, buy up a few thousand hobby rockets, do the math, attach and fire. Might take a while to get to lagrange, but who’s in a rush.
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The interpretation that seems to make the idea make the most sense is focusing on the fact that (while pretty rare compared to all the tiny shrapnel bits zipping around) a chunk large enough to collect and de-orbit with a claw arrangement like this one has the potential to become anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of the much less tractable small fragments if it does end up involved in a collision; so each one you safely dispatch is potentially a lot of less solvable problems headed off.
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