A recording of my talk at the lecture cycle “Finding our Ways in Space and Time”, University of Potsdam, Winter Semester 2023/24
Hello everyone my name is Daniel lambar and I want to talk to you about space sustainability unfortunately I can’t be in potam today even though I would have really liked to um but I’m changing jobs right now and the order the organizers and I agreed that uh this would be a suitable uh
Substitute to record my lecture um and present it to you this way because space sustainability is an important topic it might not rank very high on the global agenda we are all very busy and very concerned with all the things that are happening down here for a while or at the
Moment um but space sustainability is a very important long-term issue that I think deserves more attention uh and this is what I what I want to talk about today and the title um of my my talk is PS and space you may uh If you’re sort of my
Generation uh remember uh these uh three people these are Dr Julius strange pork Captain link Hawk throb and first made Piggy on board the Starship swine track um and of course what I mean by that is they are us we are the pigs uh in space because we’re leaving trash everywhere we’re
Really soer like you would say in German even though I know that this is unfair um because I’ve been told that that pigs are actually very very cleanly animals um so this is in in a way a very unfair comparison now I want to sort of put my
Cards on the table here right right away um what I want to argue is that space is an environment much like we treat um our terrestrial environments on land the Seas the poles the atmosphere and we should by treating it as an environment We should strive to apply principles of Environmental
Protection uh to it now I know that this isn’t working all that well down here on Earth either we’re not treating the environments down here with the sort of care and protection that they deserve and need um but in space I think it’s even worse um we’re ignoring the issue entirely and
I think this will escalate into being a much bigger problem um for us uh and for our orbital environment now my first point would be to ask why why is that so why do we not treat space as an environment so please ignore the
Typo so if you look at at what un bodies like the committee on the peaceful uses of outer space um all the office of outer space Affairs um what they talk about um then sustainability is a pretty prominent um buzzword there but this is more often about resource use and access to access
To space but uh it’s very rarely framed in terms of environment protection and I have a few thoughts not answers uh why we do not treat space as an environment the first is that there is just very few people up there um apart from the International Space Station
Which has a kind of an uncertain future and even even if we could keep it around for longer it’s only holds a couple of of astronauts at the same time usually and there are just very very few people in space um and this sort of creates a a difficulty for us to to
Imagine space as a as an environment because environment in the way we understand it is is uh inevitably seen as an environment for humans now that’s not um a total barrier to such an understanding because the high seas um the deep sea B and Arctica all of these also have a very limited
Human presence and are also very in inhospitable and we have managed to come around to seeing these as environments so maybe this is not not a a a total barrier against a better understanding of space as environment maybe it’s about you know distance and the The Limited physical inter
Interaction between space um and the Earth’s surface now there’s there’s there are a few things going on there but it’s just something that is easy to relegate as being you know out there up there something that does not affect us and this relates to the second point we have problems of
Visualizing space I will show you a picture in a moment that really really heavily distorts how empty all this uh this environment is we really cannot grasp uh first of all the vastness of space and second The Emptiness uh of space so space is a very strange environment it’s it’s very very
Different from uh the environments that we are used to uh and that we we have a hard time relating to that now this is a bit shortsighted because um as any space agency will tell you space is absolutely crucial for our way of life um or has
Become crucial for our way of life uh many of them spend a lot of money in these kind of public Outreach activities producing videos like a day without satellites that tell us that a day without satellites would actually be quite um quite dramatic uh for a globalized capitalist uh
Humanity because our Positioning Systems our communication systems even systems of timing are very much dependent on constant synchronization via satellite and uh we would see several uh quite important systems uh critical infrastructures failing if so if our satellites were suddenly gone but we don’t have this kind of feeling of
Affectedness it’s it’s too easy for us to see space as this great out there um that has no bearing um on our day to-day life now third uh Point might be that we see sort of history repeating um we tend to treat space as this sort of uh emptiness this this empty space
And um we can see uh we can sort of compare it in this way with other empty spaces uh we’ve had in the past um so uh and Arctica and and the Arctic or the Deep seab bed or in more Imperial imperialist times uh you know large parts of Africa um and other
Continents and we sort of there there’s a repeating pattern for how we and in this case I’m really mean as westerners how we interact with these uh spaces um there’s this kind of Frontier thinking when and Frontier refers to this sort of Frederick Turner hypothesis of
Um sort of an empty space that is gradually uh tamed and exploited and brought under control um through the advance of white man in this case now what what we see in these empty spaces um as we progressively interact with them is um resource exploitation uh growing human presence
And in the end sort of an integration into uh State systems or Global Systems of governance and control now when I say uh that this is happening U I’m also offering sort of a cautionary tale because in all these other environments um such as the high
Seas we always tend to notice that maybe we should have been a bit more cautious maybe we should have uh apply the precautionary principle to Environmental Management um because all of a sudden uh the environment isn’t looking all that healthy anymore after a few Decades of of unbridled exploitation and sometimes it’s about
Not being able to assess the long-term impact of our activities think of microplastics uh in the oceans maybe a decade or two ago nobody was really thinking about that and now that we sort of better understand the properties of this environment and the properties of the problem suddenly noticing that we
Have pollution um polluted the oceans uh in a quite dangerous and Innovative matter that also harms our own well-being so these unknown unknowns are something we should be very cognizant of as we approach space we really don’t know what the sort of the second order effects the long-term
Effects of our activities there will be and that should make make us more cautious and that’s sort of the the fourth point I think we need a cultural shift we need to understand space as environment to to sort of move the consequences of our action uh into the center of our
Attention now I want to mainly talk about space debris today so um fragments uh in orbits but there are other sustainability issues that are also worth talking about which I won’t go into uh in this particular talk but it’s something to also keep in mind first of all it’s about the sustainability of
Production space activities are growing at a tremendous rate at the moment uh you can find these these figures anywhere about so the size of the space economy the number of rocket launches that are to be expected in the upcoming future and all all of this requires production um using some quite exotic
Materials um some energy intensive processes so there are um there are there are sustainability issues there we have seen some improvement though um because some parts including some very important parts like rocket bodies um are moving towards reusability um SpaceX was really a a Trailblazer in this regard creating uh heavy lift
Uh rockets that were able to be to be reduced whereas in the past everything was just single use so there’s that but you know with the with the growing number of of launches uh and the growing number of objects produced for space sustainability uh will becomeing a a more important
Issue secondly we have launch emissions so launching Rockets emit um hydrogen chlorides nitrogen oxide carbon dioxide uh aluminum oxides water vapor uh and other chemicals which do affect uh the ozone layer and there have been um estimates that this does affect um climate change or climate uh warming
Related uh processes in the upper atmosphere so there’s there’s something that it it does have an effect on on sort of the health of the atmosphere there now the impact or the size of the problem wasn’t as problematic as long as the number of launches weren’t that great
But we will see a larger number growing number of launches the next few years and that increases the impact um to to give you sort of an alarming number we now have out 10,000 or slightly above 10,000 working satellites in orbit if we just look at the filings uh with the international
Telecommunications Union which administers sort of radio wave uh spectrums and Broadband spectrums um about 1 million satellites are scheduled to be launched into orbit in in the future now these are just you know plans and filings and it’s unclear which proportion of these 1 million plus satellites will actually be
Launched so even even if it’s about 10% then we still looking we are still looking at a six fig um number of satellites which would be sort of a tenfold increase from what we have today this does not imply a 10-fold increase of launches thankfully because satellites are only getting smaller uh
We’re moving from these these older larger satellites towards swarms or constellations of smaller um uh satellite so the the number of launchers will grow but at a slightly this slightly lower uh proportion in the number of satellites themselves now not a particularly happy Outlook but we are going to see more launch
Emissions and finally we have we also have emissions upon re-entry so when uh rocket bodies that were used during launch um reent to the atmosphere to burn up or when old satellites are decommissioned and deorbited back into the atmosphere to burn up um they also produce emissions and this is a field
That hasn’t been um um researched all that well because it’s difficult to observe the the exact process that happens during re-entry when these parts you know burn up very high in the atmosphere at temperatures of more than thousand degrees um we do have the suspicion that this
Also affects the ozone layer and the health of the upper atmosphere um but again it’s it’s difficult to to observe directly and uh given present numbers of re-entering objects is probably not a huge problem but you know in the future if we see more re-entering objects this
Might become a problem so again with the unknown unknowns now we you have an environmental problem in space this looks really dramatic doesn’t it this is a still picture uh from an Isa animation from 2019 of of just debris objects um all debris objects of at least one millimeter uh length
Now I would suggest uh you also take a look at at this this website what’s in dospace it’s maintained by the space command of the German armed forces the Von Commando and I think that collects something like 25,000 or about 30,000 uh objects in space that are specifically
Tracked now I said we we have very hard time really visualizing uh the problem and and this uh picture is one way of dealing with that and because it’s misleading for two reasons or distorting for two reasons the first is that we don’t actually know where smaller objects are we can only
Really reliably track objects that are at least 10 cm long smaller objects down to a millimeter um can only be sort of estimated um through computer models um for instance if if we look at the patterns of impact on returning uh spaceships or on recovered satellites we
Can sort of estimate you know how many small scale impacts did this particular spacecraft experience in this particular orbit and then we can sort of estimate you know how many of these particles will likely be there so for the vast majority of objects we actually have no
Way of knowing where they are secondly objects here are shown uh in a great at a sort of at a great ratio of of of of magnitude so uh if these uh tiny dots were to scale um the the the objects they represent would be sort of a kilometer
Long each and that’s that’s just way off in reality sort of everything there would be empty uh we would have to zoom in very very very far to observe even a single uh piece of debris now what this picture does show is that there are sort of different um
Patterns in the debris so we have this very dense layer comparatively dense layer of debris right around the earth then we have a large ring of debris uh around the the outskirt and then there’s also uh sort of in the middle between the two there’s also a slightly more dense
Constellation of fragments and that’s that brings me to the three orbits we’re talking about you might have heard about these in previous lectures I will talk about them nonetheless and we will start from sort of the outermost which is the geostationary or geosynchronous orbit which is about 36,000 kilom above the
Earth Earth surface just for purposes of comparison the Moon is 384,000 kilometers away so about 10 times de or 11 times de so the advantage of of placing sadle ites in geostationary orbit or Geo as it’s called is that they have a very large field of vision they can sort of
Look at the entire half of the planet that’s facing towards them and even more importantly they stay stationary relative to a particular point on the Earth’s surface along the Equator so they can sort of continually observe the same place on Earth all the time that’s that’s hugely important for
Earth obs ation and also for communications the disadvantage is that you have longer sort of latencies for communications with these satellites especially if the signal has to be relayed across the satellites um so this is not something for high highspeed Communications and and there are also limited slots available where you can
Imp place these satellites and this is governed by the international telecommunications unit actually they sort of started doing that even from from the very early satellite era from the 60s and 70s um so there are about one 1,800 possible places for satellites to maintain a sufficient distance um for for safe
Operation the next orbit is Mo medium earth orbit which is which covers basically everything between the other two so an altitude of 2,000 to 30 5,000 kilometers this is a space that is sort of becoming more that’s coming into use more so mostly for communications satellites and also for
For positioning satellites especially in the uh in the altitudes of about 19 to 23,000 kilometers because it’s semisynchronous um these satellites orbit the earth uh in a 12-hour uh time frame so they’re very dependable and uh Positioning Systems like GPS Galileo Buu glas um tend to operate in these
Altitudes and finally we have Leo low earth orbit um which covers everything from about 400 to about 2,000 kilometers and this is the region of space that is Mo that we most use um with our satellites um the advantage there is that you have very low uh um transmission
Latencies so uh connections using satellites in Leo much faster than those in Geo it’s also they’re also much easier to reach require much less uh Fuel and for for satellite operators um Leo is very interesting because it’s completely unregulated so uh Beyond you know registering things with the launching State and with the
Itu um you can basically put your satellites where you want them so um contrast to Geo now the thing is objects here move very fast so we’re looking at orbital speeds of about 28,000 kilometers per hour that’s about 8 kilometers per second uh and that’s why um debris
Fragments or collisions are so dangerous because these objects carry tremendous kinetic energy in addition Leo is also subject to um what we might call orbital Decay so um the atmosphere sort of starts to Frizzle out once we go about 50 kilometers and about 100 kilometers is sort of the official end of the
Atmosphere but we do have sort of uh the occasional molecule that sprays a bit higher so everything that um that is flying at low enough altitude so a few hundred kilometers is continuously slowed down um by these these atmospheric molecules and as objects slow down they start to move back to Earth because
They’re captured by by gravity um they need to maintain orbital speed uh to to not get pulled closer to the Earth and and the closer you get to earth the stronger this this slowing down effect is let’s let’s take a closer look at Leo this is a kind of a big big infographic
Here and we’re not going to cover all this in detail what it shows is sort of the um the distribution of debris objects uh at different altitudes from the Earth’s surface to 2,000 kilomet and there are um three different uh categor of of things the uh
The orange U volume are those that are uh currently tracked um with a a size of of 10 cmets or more should be noted this is from 2019 probably using old data so we’re now tracking a larger number these days more 30 35,000 um then the light blue ones are
Those that are a bit smaller which are here called plant Tracking not exactly sure what this refers to and then another 400,000 at least 1 cm in size that are not tracked uh we can see that most of these um so these debris fragments cluster at altitudes above 600 kilom so
In the 600 to 1,200 kilomet band uh we see the largest number of uh of objects this is higher than the International Space Station um and many other uh many other space assets but it’s a very busy region of space uh nonetheless and the reason for that is
Um that these are objects that have accumulated there over time and have not been subject to to orbital Decay now here’s a second graph um from a different different paper that looks at um natural Decay time at different altitudes and the way to read it is uh
Let’s take the the blue bar so if you start an object at year zero at an altitude of 400 kilometers uh it will Decay sort of within a year uh moving to the to the yellow bar starting at an altitude of 450 kilometers this will decay in about
Three years and burn up in the atmosphere at 500 kilom uh we are looking at uh maybe 6 to seven years plus a few uncertainties either way uh at 550 kilom we’re looking at about 20 years plus minus a few and at 600 kilomet we’re looking at you know a
Much much larger time frame so anything uh that is below 600 kilom is subject to this kind of cleanup effect um in sort of over shorter or longer time frames everything that is at 600 or above uh only gets cleaned up very very slowly now just a quick statistical
Overview this these are Isa figures from from earlier this year um and they count a total number of rocket launchers uh since 1957 uh of 6,38 80 these have placed more than 50,000 satellites into orbit about 10,000 of them are still in Space the rest have deorbited or broken up um and
Of those 10,000 in orbit about 700 7,700 are still functioning uh space surveillance networks track about 33,500 debris objects that are those with about 10 cm or more along one axis about 640 events have been recorded where space objects have broken up or exploded or collided and all of this amounts
To to a weight of 10,800 tons uh of space of man-made space objects now there are estimates um beyond what is tracked by space surveillance networks um so there are a few thousand space objects greater than 10 cm that are not track giving us a total estimate of
36,000 in the range between 1 cm and 10 cmet is estimate about a million debris objects and in the millimeter range we’re looking at 130 million debris objects now as I said earlier um this is this is just a snapshot as I said earlier we are seeing a more intensive
Use of space we are seeing more launches or will see more launches in the future we are seeing a trend towards more space objects and we are seeing a trend towards more debris now let’s go through these uh in turn so the first is um more
Launches the black bar uh here shows the number of launches per year along the leftand Y AIS so these have grown slowly over time from about an average of 60 to to 80 um and since 2018 we’ve seen a more substantial jump into the range of 100
To 140 that’s still not a huge progression uh but it is expected to grow by a larger frequency in the upcoming years the growth in the blue figure is much more obvious these are the numbers of launched satellites per year these were measured along the right hand Y axis
These were sort of below 200 for most years up until about 2016 and since then we’ve seen a veritable explosion 2021 was above 1,600 so we see more stars and we see more satellites that are being put on each uh rocket launch because sort of two things
Come two two two Trends come together here the first is the miniaturization of satellites uh over the past decade we’ve seen the emergence of of smaller satellite Concepts uh sort of emerging like Cube sets or Nano SATs uh which are much smaller than the older generation satellites which tended
To have sort of the size of a washing machine or even a small car uh so the miniaturization is one thing the other is the emerg of constellations swarms of satellites to to to induce redundancies you will have noticed these if you’re looking at the
Night sky and see sort of this trail of about a dozen uh satellites following the same orbit um these are typically staring um constellations um so if if they lose a satellite you malfunction it’s not a big deal because the others can sort of cover for it and and and add their B
Bandwidth to the overall constellation this brings us to the second trend more objects here are um again Isa statistics for the number of new payloads um into low earth orbit um so this is not a total number so this is what gets added to Leo every
Year uh it’s important to not to note that um this we see a clear Trend here but this does not apply to Geo uh the number of new objects in the geost stationary orbit rarely rarely exceeds like 30 or 35 a year and we don’t see
Any growth uh there since the 1980s so this this grow growth is sort of contained to Leo so what we see here is sort of a massive growth first in 2013 again in 2017 and then since since 2020 and sort of by the the colored sections of the bars you see that most
Of the growth is due to few commercial actors in particular starlink um as of now starlink has something like 4,000 or probably by now more than 4,000 satellites in orbit and it’s currently planning about total of about 12,000 um but again more is in the works
I did give you this figure of about a million and Starling and other commercial actors will be responsible for like 99% of those we also see a certain growth of of civil um uh uh civil satellites we can’t really extract that from this particular figure but there is a growth of you know
Satellites being launched by you know universities or uh associations or even private uh persons or hobbyists now as I said the number of planned launches or number of planned payloads in the future are gigantic um as I said just a minute ago we have about 7,700 functioning satellites in
Orbit right now and this number is scheduled to increase by several factors by by fivefold tfold um over the up coming decade the third trend is more debris again here’s some some Isa data from their environmental sort of a space environmental report which is very um very handy and updated every
Year now um these are broken down by types so they they might sort of be uh due to to Rockets or payloads um most of these are inactive satellites um this is the sort of the dark blue payload uh part of the bar or a payload fragmentation debris so a satellite breaking
Apart or rocket fragmentation debris these are also so uh some of the most impactful forms of debris plus sort of the unidentified ones where we’re not exactly sure uh where they come from now how does how how do we even get debris it might be because uh old satellites
Stop working um because they run out of fuel or because there’s electrical problems or some kind of mechanical damage um you can’t reach the satellite anymore and suddenly have an debris object now they may be the byproduct of starts rocket bodies used to be such a
Big factor in in creating debris as I said we’re moving towards a future where these rocket parts are becoming more reusable so let’s hope that not we don’t see an addition of further rocket bodies to this count then you might have collisions uh with existing debris or with other satellites
Um you can see a few years where the number of of the brief fragments jumps um quite harshly one in 2007 one in 2009 the 2009 jump is due to a collision between two satellites an aridium satellite and a cosmos satellite February 2009 which created about 2,000 debris
Fragments uh at an altitude of 800 kilometers so far outside the range where we would see uh a cleanup effect the another big Source uh here and this is responsible for the 2 2007 jump and also for another one in 2019 and 2021 are anti-satellite weapon tests in 2007 the Chinese military
Tested an anti-satellite Weapon by blowing up a a Chinese satellite at an again at an altitude of about 800 kilom uh creating something like 3,000 debris fragments most of which are still still up there there were further tests by India in 2019 and by Russia in 2021 these were at lower altitudes um
Somewhere between 250 and 400 kilometers um there are still fragments from these tests around because some of them have been were sort of vaulted into higher altitudes through the through the Collision um uh but due to the lower altitude um most of the fragments there have decayed there is growing International
Condemnation of these kinds of debris creating anti-satellite weapons tests so let’s hope that these were the last ones but you know I’m not can’t be sure about these okay so I said we we will see more space activity in the future uh more launches more objects more
Debris now the risk that arises there from uh sort of the Cascade effects of collision so one Collision creates debris objects which then initiate another collision with another space object creating even more fragments which create even more collisions the end result if such a collision Cascade were to take off would
Be to make specific orbital bands specific altitudes permanently unusable because there are simply too many fragments flying around there for the safe operation of a space object and sort of the the pop culture reference here is is the movie Gravity from 2013 where this is a major uh a central element of the
Plot uh but among scientists this is known as as the Kesler syndrome after Donald Kesler um who was sort of the first to describe um this this possibility in a 1978 paper and I want to to point highlight this the the year of publication this is a problem that has
Been known for 45 years now and we have seen very little action to counteract it I I think that’s that’s really a failing okay so it’s it’s impossible slash uh next to impossible to estimate how and when such Cascades will occur uh we can just say at a very very simple level
Um the more objects you have in a particular orbital band the higher the risk that such a Cascade will at some point emerge emerge we can’t we can’t make any firm predictions about when and where the carrying capacity of an orbit will be exceeded um this is you know
Sort of a space of considerable uncertainty um if we had a better understanding if we were able to track smaller debris fragments uh we might be able to to formulate models which approximate this with more certainty but as of now we don’t okay so sort of an interim
Conclusion here we are putting more satellites uh into low earth orbit and massively accelerating frequency it’s unclear how many satellites orbits can carry without the risk exceeding the our level of Tolerance the sort of set of rules and guidelines for the the launch and the operation of satellites are very
Thin and from this from these sort of elements I conclude that this well this won’t work Forever at some point uh things are going to go bad so my proposal or my my sort of Next Step would be to argue that we need two things for more sustainable use of the
Orbit and in particular low earth orbit we need to remove um existing debris and we need to avoid creating further debris first of all second of all we need sort of rules of the road to um use orbital bands safely uh efficiently and sustainably right so what we’re looking
At here are sort of huge technical challenges these are also economic legal and political challenges and and this is why I as a political scientist became interested in them so this needs sort of an interdisciplinary way of of thinking about the problem interdisciplinary approach to governing
It now let’s introduce a few terms here first of all debris removal um how do we get rid of the of the crap that’s already up there the first would be deorbiting um this is sort of an emerging global standard how to deal with satellites um after end of
Mission um again there are Isa figures uh collected over the years um how well this how sort of how how good the compliance with this emerging norms and it it says about 80 80% of Rocket bodies are are deorbited after use so you use a rocket body to put the payload up
Into uh into the orbit and uh 80% of these Rockets are then uh deorbited sort of put back into the atmosphere where they burn up or sort of crack crash into the oceans or something like that which has an environmental impact itself but no we’re not going to
Talk about this today 10 years ago the figure was only 40% so 80% today 40% 10 years ago that’s some improvement for satellites uh we’re looking at a deorbiting rate of about 50% so every other satellite is actively deorbited so basically they use the last drop of of
Fuel um to put it sort of in a downward trajectory closer to Earth where it will EV eventually enter gravitational pool slow down by the atmosphere and then burn up and the upper atmosphere 10 years ago the figure for satellites was less than 20% but 20% 10 years ago 50%
Today again some improvement but you know not total compliance because this isn’t good enough we have to say Isa says we need a removal rate at the orbiting rate of about 90% or at least 90% to prevent the growth rate of space objects uh from from spiraling out of
Control so from from uh unsustainable grow so this is one thing getting rid of what’s of what’s there um by sort of making space objects come back into the atmosphere where they can burn up now the orbiting works for for objects where you still have some measure of control you can tell a
Functioning satellite okay decrease your altitude to 300 kilometers um so that you can eventually burn up the problem is that this of course does not work with nonfunctioning space objects um so non-functioning satellites or debris fragments you can’t you can’t order them around now how do you how do
You get rid of those you need for that you need active debris removal you need to put something up there collects the trash uh and and either puts it into the uh into the atmosphere to burn up or return it to Earth in some fashion now this is a very tricky
Engineering challenge and we are very far from A system that can be used at scale the past five years or so have been have seen a lot of attention uh to ADR and and many proposals and pilot projects have been uh have been sort of put into practice there and some of them
Have worked some haven’t um but we are really not seeing any kind of active debris removal at scale it’s really not around the Horizon at the moment the problem of course is that you know this is expensive this costs money who is supposed to pay for all this stuff can
You even pick up debris that is not sort of owned by your nation there are loads of unresolved questions there so active debris removal can only ever be a part of a sustainable management of the orbits it I would not bet on you know uh uh it becoming sort of this
Large scale solution to the overall problem the other part of the solution besides debr removal is debris mitigation so basically preventing new orbit orbital debris uh from being created and this is sort of the more important liver we have over the long term currently the 2 7u and space degree
Mitigation guidelines are sort of the the global consensus how this should be done and its main uh uh its main um thrust is to um uh is to uh ask satellite operators to deorbit um their assets at end of life or end of mission or put them in a graveyard orbit from
Geosynchronous orbit uh further out where they can’t can’t interfere with future operations uh and this includes a few other measures as well such as pacification which means to um make sure that the satellite has has no further energy stored in its battery or no further fuel uh to prevent you know sort
Of unscheduled um explosions or breakup events uh it also mandates collision avoidance and and you know basically doing everything you can to avoid the creation of further objects now these are um smart proposals but they’re non-binding um they need to be implemented in in National Space laws and
Regulations uh they’re also quite short so this is not a comprehensive rulebook we do see some more recent movement in debris mitigation um for instance the world economic Forum put together an industry Consortium which includes several famous names but notably not the very big ones like SpaceX or
Amazon um but they suggest um sort of shortening the the the time frame in which uh satellites have to be disposed of post end of mission from 25 years to 5 years which is also the sort of where the the FCC is going the Federal Communications Commission in the United
States states which oversees um basically all us space flights Isa um has put out the zero zero debris Charter involving several EU aerospace companies like Talis or the airus where they commit to you know a more sustainable uh uh way of of space flight now there’s one third thing that it’s
Doesn’t quite uh fit into either of these categories which is on orbit servicing uh which is also sort of an emergent idea U that basically ask well how how about about if we extend the um the mission period for existing assets by sort of refueling them
Um this is not a Magic Bullet it will be very difficult to do that it will be even more difficult to do that at scale and also you know how valuable is it to to sort of refuel a 10-year old satellite uh with sort of 10year old uh 10-year-old instruments you’re
Probably better off deorbiting it and putting a new one up in space okay now how do we uh how do we get this to work better so everywhere where there’s traffic we have traffic rules or rules of the road we have these uh on on the
Roads we have these in the water we have these in airspace but we don’t seem to have these in outer space now the problem or one of the problems is that we’re not exactly sure what’s happening up there so space situational awareness is uh a huge technical challenge because we have a
Hard time sort of continuously monitoring particular uh orbits and also there are different systems for doing that and every country is sort of running their own secondly we are lacking rules for collision avoidance uh what happens is that one of these space situational awareness systems or space surveillance
Networks will pick up a potential Collision between two space objects and will give sort of a a POS a probability that this will happen something like one and a, or one and 500 that a collision will happen at point x in the future and this can be estimated maybe about a week
Or two in advance with considerable uncertainty and and as the as the potential Collision date grows closer you can improve the probability or improve your the Precision uh of the estimate but what happens what happens then um there are there is no established International protocol or no protocol among space
Operators um what to do then or even how to communicate in these in these circumstances um on the right here we have a bunch of uh bars again from the is space environment report uh looking at different orbits and what sort of the reasons or what what the what the
Occasion for um collision avoidance Maneuvers were so in lower orbits this is the the leftmost bar is 350 kilometers most of them will be because of constellations or small satellites which are the dark gray parts of the bar at 500 kilometers the picture is much more mixed uh 550 mostly smaller
Satellites again but once once we move to 700 800 kilomet most of the um Collision warnings will be due to debris which are the blue kind the blue parts of the bar now not every warning will need an avoidance Maneuvers but a growing number of these will require uh will require this we’re
Still at at a uh at a period where Collision where avoidance Maneuvers are rare I think the ISS does something like one or two every year um so that’s that doesn’t seem like a lot it’s probably going to grow now in in sort of the best possible future we
Could um automate these avoidance Maneuvers at least partly because if you have some some kind of shared network estimating a a collision probability that is below the risk threshold uh then you could sort of algorithmically decide the optimum avoidance maneuver and Implement these with or without a human in input
But you know we’re still a few steps away from that because right now we don’t have a set of rules for that and this is sort of the the political science question here where do these rules Come From Now internation inter International Space law basically consists of only
Five treaties so there’s not a lot there um the outer space treaty the rescue agreement the space liability convention and the res registration convention there’s also the moon treaty but that’s not inforced because too few countries have ratified this so all in all this is a very thin institutional framework are
For for space governance and was also made for a very different time especially a time before we have large private uh companies engaging in in space activities now legal Scholars sometimes tell me that you can sort of apply bodies of Rules from other kind other fields of international law such as
International environmental law to space um but this doesn’t seem seem to be happening in practice so I would like to see some more of that so I’m guessing we are better off looking for stronger international standards and soft law and the the aforementioned space debr mitigation guideline might be a good example of
That they started back in 1994 and 995 in the scientific and Technical subcommittee of the UN Committee of the peaceful users of for the peaceful us users of outer space which sort of developed the first work plan in this direction uh it put out a technical report in
1999 in 2003 the inter agency space debris Coordination Committee which is sort of a joint Forum of of different space agencies I put out a set of proposals which sort of represented the consensus among space fairing Nations which were then fed into another un cop war subcommittee and this sort of
Developed uh the the space sub mitigation guidelines largely out of the iadc proposals which were also later endorsed by the UN General Assembly now the thing is this project this process took 13 years and it only led to an output of non-binding guidelines but on the plus side these
Are widely accepted and they sort of represented the best possible consensus at the time so maybe this is the best we can get in terms of shared rules uh there are also sort of norms and practices beyond the level or beneath the level of of formalized Standards uh such as the non-binding or
Voluntary uh uh commitment against uh debris creating anti-satellite weapon tests which Germany among other countries has agreed to and we also see that um companies sometimes publicly agree to conform to sustainability standards you know without being forced to now when we are looking at debris mitigation and Space Traffic
Management we are often hear that we need new institutions or that we need no new organizations or or reinterpretation of V institutions and I’m I’m not really optimistic that we’re going to get that uh in the current climate of world politics these kinds of global cooperation achievements seem to be Out
Of Reach um we have a degree of great power uh conflict that we haven’t had for a few decades now now we did have that during the Cold War when most of these institutions were created but for reasons I can’t can’t really go into now the situation today is less amenable uh
To to sort of big treaty making but I think there’s more to be gained in in the the less formalized areas of of governance in international standards in soft law and in shared norms and practices so we shouldn’t look for sort of the the big uh the big fundamental reform that
Creates this new updated system of of space governance but more incremental improvements within uh the existing framework that seems to be more realistic and for that I think we need to look to polycentric uh governance this is based on on Elena ostrom’s theory of the governance of the
Commons um which is comes from political economy um the the tragedy of the commons um where sort of economists always say well if if you have a common it will be overused and this can only be prevented by either privatizing the comment or by putting it under some kind of uh Central central
Government and Ostrom and her colleagues argued that this kind of tragedy only really applies in unregulated Commons but effective management is possible through Cooperative institutions and this is the notion of polycentricity in governance it is um based on polycentric systems which are networks of independent nodes
Um all of which have some kind of degree of decision-making power but they that that need to coordinate with other nodes and governs is sort of the byproduct of sort of what happens uh when when when these nodes start interact interacting um notably this does not
Imply that these nodes are all sort of uh are all the same um there are some there’s some degree of hierarchy in polycentricity as well now I’m not going to discuss this in any great uh theoretical detail uh except to make the point that space governance uh is not polycentric so far
But I think this would be useful because polycentric governance can use S of distributed knowledge it can mobilize stakeholders and it seems to be more politically possible than you know this big institutional reform that that other people want to look at now more specifically how might this
Look like here are a few proposals the first would be to develop shared situational uh awareness among different actors right now every actor every country basically runs their own space situational awareness system they share some of the data not all of it so sort of agreeing on what’s Happening is already kind of
Difficult um this would also include space weather so and tying this into sort of space research uh and cooperating on Space research uh would be very useful for that and and this also involves sharing data um there is some data sharing going on but there is a certain degree of secrecy
Um especially when it comes to things like you know military Assets in space that prevents sort of sharing the full set of of uh data on on Space objects we might also think about you know strengthening existing governance mechanisms and for that I would like to see strengthening of the registration
System uh we do have an existing convention that says all space objects should be registered with the UN but this often happens um only belatedly or not at all again with military assets often so many actors are sort of running their own semi uh complete uh registration systems but you know a
Shared system would be a really great asset for everyone to work with now I would like to see protocols for data exchange so just agreeing on the let’s say data formats how data about space debris can be exchanged you know offering apis for for accessing each other’s data sets agreeing on you
Know what what are risk estimates that we want to work with um these would be super useful and this would also entail you know coming up with procedures for collision avoidance I’m reminded of an anecdote I I heard not too long ago when I was talking to um someone who had been
Working at a a European satellite operator um for a long time and he recalled about a decade ago so maybe 2013 or so um when one of their satellite lights had sort of been they had been cooperate cooperating with NASA on something and they had been added to the NASA collision avoidance systems
Without Really realizing it and suddenly uh an email popped in that said uh look there’s a there’s a there’s a potential Collision coming up for this particular asset which which you are operating and everyone was really confused and overwhelmed uh what to do about this because they did not have St they did
Not have procedures for how to do it and then they spent a long time sort of calculating uh the kind of avoidance maneuver that’s necessary and then doing that that and the latest spoke to NASA uh their counterpart there informed them well this was actually only a warning
This this was not an implication that you would actually need to avoid it um so this kind of communication mishap uh was kind was quite you know normal 10 years ago even five years ago there was this an in 2019 where an I think an Isa satellite
Was uh set to to have a a collision with a starling satellite H and back then you know everything was sort of conducted via VIA bilateral emails so the the ISA operators uh sent an email to Starling saying hey look we doe a collision um
How how do you want to do the the avoidance and nobody resp responded from there because uh starlink wasn’t really set up for that at the mo at that time so Isa had to to conduct the um the avoidance maneuver unilaterally now things have evolved quite a bit since then um since 20121
Staling and Issa and staling and other operators have sort of an informal protocol for collision avoidance where staling has sort of said in a blanket statement our satellites will avoid if a collision of risk X is detected so this is a very simple protocol it’s also very straightforward
The problem is how can you how can you scale that up so what happens if in cases of you know staring a starling satellite meeting a satellite from an operator that Starling does not have an agreement with or if we have an Isa and a jxa satellite can can they find some
Kind of procedure so it it feels like there’s a there’s a procedure there that only needs to be you know put into words or put into practice uh and and you know a bunch of criteria that we need to work out how such uh avoidance uh can be done um
Efficiently because we’re going to need that more in the future now these points so far I think all um will all could all be implemented simply due to the added value that they prise it will they will make space safer for everyone they require minimal investment um so I’m thinking it should
Be easy should be easy to to get satellite operator space agencies to sign up for for ideas along these lines now it will be more difficult when it comes to space debris because this is about costs and how to distribute these costs and and share them so um stronger
Commitment to debris mitigation would be wonderful but how do we get states to commit to that when they see it as you know just you know some cost that inhibits the growth of their domestic space economy um should will we see a race to the top here or a race to the
Bottom how do we create incentives for debris removal I mentioned active debris removal is quite pricey uh who will bear the costs of these so this is less easy to answer from a polycentric perspective I would suggest we try to strengthen anti-debris norms we try to create sort of an
Environmental Consciousness which I’m trying to do here incidentally um that we create an opening for an independent situational awareness um in space to to be able to name and shame rule Breakers um that we need to encourage participation and deliberation um from all stakeholders uh operators States even civil
Society and in the long term we need to find ways of orbital recycling but you know a technical challenge we still very far away all right so when we started I said that we need to move to or it would be great if we could have
This cultural shift in the way we see space and see it more as an environment and not just as this this thing out there that doesn’t concern us and uh I was looking for you know represent ations how such a future might look like and maybe this this is an indication of the
Problem that I didn’t really find any sort of positive vision of sustainable space at least not in pop culture so if we look at movies or or books or games um they often problematize how we engage with space and how we treat it unsustainably uh one example of fut drama which sort of
Satirizes um sort of the shortsightedness of of humanity that where where the the the point of of this particular episode is that New York new New York just you know shoots its trash into space where it won’t bother anyone anymore forever um until of course the trash ball comes back to
Earth but you know there are very few positive examples for for Environmental Protection in space um here’s a Korean South Korean movie from 2021 that engages with the topic but it’s also another dystopia where Earth has become an inhab uninhabitable where orbital debris is being harvested to to recycle
Raw materials from that so I would like to have a more accessible Utopia a more iconic vision of a sustainable uh way of managing the orbits and if you come up with anything please contact me I would love to hear from you um thanks for listening I hope this uh this was
Interesting and useful to you uh and helps you think about um space uh in more sustainable terms thank you