Is there a way that, on an Earth-like planet (similar size, mass, composition, resources, moon, climate, star orbit, etc.) some natural process could create and continually renew a Kessler Syndrome that would render any mission to low earth orbit (or higher) impossible, and for it to replenish itself as debris starts to suffer orbital decay?
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asked Jul 6, 2016 at 14:56
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$\begingroup$ How about including a link and brief description of what you're talking about? $\endgroup$– JDługoszJul 6, 2016 at 15:25
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$\begingroup$ Or you could have googled it. Is using google really that hard? $\endgroup$– Jarred AllenJul 6, 2016 at 19:36
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$\begingroup$ We encourage a level of quality here: it's not like a common forum. We even go back and copy edit and improve old posts. No, it would not be hard, but you should have done it, newcomer. Having an in line synopsis would be best. $\endgroup$– JDługoszJul 6, 2016 at 19:49
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The natural process would be a series of nearby asteroid or moon collisions causing a large amount of orbital debris.
The obvious naturally occurring example is Saturn's rings.
All orbits would transit the ring of material across the equatorial plane, causing collisions, making successful spaceflight very difficult.
This could easily be stable for billions of years at higher orbits, with material in lower orbits being replenished by impacts in higher orbits.
The possible downside of this would be that a lot of that debris would then enter the atmosphere and cause a large number of significant impacts to the planet. If you wanted the planet to remain habitable you would need a source of very fine particles from the collisions with the main larger bodies remaining in stable orbits. Possibly with moons acting as ring shepherds keeping the particle cloud intact.
