When blackened tanks from a Hawthorne-made SpaceX Falcon 9 second-stage rocket accidentally rained down onto an Indonesian island last year, the nation got a palpable encounter with a problem known as “space junk.”
Luckily, the rocket-propellant tanks that survived the white-hot burn of the Earth’s outer atmosphere didn’t hit any people or animals, even though one landed on a farm.
But the incident highlighted an increasingly worrying issue in the aerospace community: There is no global agreement to prevent and clean up debris left behind in orbit.
The Aerospace Corp., a nonprofit research-and-development firm in El Segundo, urged White House officials to seek an international data-sharing agreement to monitor orbiting human trash, during a Thursday Capitol Hill briefing the firm led on the matter in Washington, D.C.
“As Congress grapples with a thorny issue like this, having access to unbiased objective research is going to be important,” said Jamie Morin, executive director of Aerospace Corp.’s Center for Space Policy and Strategy.
“There’s a major transition going on in the space economy. We have a whole host of new players coming in — new countries, new companies, and completely new business models, some of which are going to dramatically increase the number of objects in orbit.”
Among other new players, Long Beach-based Virgin Orbit is gearing up for regular space tourism trips outside Earth’s atmosphere, and several companies are planning extensive modern 5G communications satellite networks.
SpaceX recently trademarked the name Starlink for its planned network of more than 11,000 communications satellites — though it’s still awaiting approval from the Federal Communications Commission.
International support
Japanese, British and Australian officials joined Aerospace Corp. executives at the Capitol Hill briefing in support of a U.S.-led effort for a more structured space code of conduct, and an international database of space operations to keep track of everything.
“Data sharing is absolutely pivotal,” said Neville Clayton of the British Embassy. “We need to look at strategic views.”
Michiru Nishida of the Japanese Embassy said the country’s relations with the U.S. have increased substantially in recent years on space-related issues, and he hopes that will continue under the current administration.
“The international community cannot stay silent on this issue,” Nishida said. “The two-way Space Situational Awareness sharing between the U.S. and Japan is a unique relationship and we’ve really made tremendous progress over the last decade.”
Jan Drobik, a minister of the Australian Embassy, echoed the need for international cooperation.
“The issue for Australia is that we’re so reliant on space communications,” Drobik said. “We can’t do it alone. Australia is a country that doesn’t have a strong space industry compared to Japan, the UK and Canada. We enter multiple MOUs with NATO countries.”
He added that the nation got personal experience with space junk when the 170,000-pound U.S. space laboratory Skylab 1 accidentally fell from the sky and dropped debris across Western Australia on July 11, 1979.
While most space junk doesn’t make it back through the Earth’s atmosphere as Skylab 1 or the Falcon 9 tanks did in September 2016, orbiting debris is a daily threat to hard-working defense, science and communications satellites.
Human missions to the International Space Station are largely protected because they’re beneath the regions of outer space most cluttered with exploded satellites and discarded rocket equipment zipping around Earth at 17,000 mph.
Exploding junk
Aerospace Corp. catalogs and tracks space junk that’s larger than 5 centimeters, in partnership with the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee and U.S. military.
But there are believed to be millions of smaller, untracked floating debris that pack the punch of a gunshot or an anvil.
“Just recently, we had to change the scheme for how we number debris in orbit because we’re running out of numbers,” said Ted Muelhaupt, associate principal director of Aerospace Corp.’s Systems Analysis and Simulation Subdivision. “To date, we’ve launched roughly 7,800 missions. About 4,500 of those are still in orbit and only about 1,800 of those are still active. The rest that are still in orbit are debris.”
Those numbers are small compared to the amount of debris created from collisions in space, he said. There are millions of pieces of tiny but dangerous orbiting junk.
“Satellites can take a lot of hits,” Muelhaupt said. “But 3 millimeters is the maximum size we can shield against.”
Anything larger than that will likely “kill” the equipment, he said.
The company works with the U.S. military’s orbital debris tracking network, and predicts potential collisions.
But a robust tracking system needs global buy-in to prevent events such as China’s 2007 test of an anti-satellite weapon that left behind a huge debris field, firm leaders said.
“I think we have a mutual interest in preventing the growth of space debris but, in the near term, I don’t think the prospects for a code of conduct are particularly positive,” said Frank Rose, Aerospace Corp.’s chief of government relations. “I would encourage the new administration to (continue) bilateral work we’ve done with China” during former President Barack Obama’s tenure.
Cluttered skies
Iridium is in the process of replacing dozens of its 20-year-old satellites with modern versions. It’s carefully decommissioning and deorbiting its old satellites to ensure they are burned up in the atmosphere rather than leaving them to become space junk.
Iridium lost one of its satellites in 2009, when an abandoned, defunct Russian satellite hit it, breaking it into more than 2,000 pieces.
Since then, the U.S. military’s Joint Space Operations Center has included the company’s equipment in daily screenings for potential space collisions.
But the number of objects in space are poised to proliferate like never before, Aerospace Corp. officials said.
“There’s going to be an increase in how much collision avoidance you’re going to have to do because there’s more stuff up there,” said Marlon Sorge, senior project engineer for Aerospace Corp.’s space innovation directorate. “When you get new systems that are more sensitive, this becomes a bigger problem.”
In July, the White House approved a network of 720 modern communications satellites built by OneWeb.
There are about 20 other similar proposals for new satellite constellations promising to deliver 5G data speeds with new technology that prevents latency.
Just beneath OneWeb’s orbiting network, SpaceX proposed more than 11,000 communications satellites, and The Boeing Co. applied for licenses to launch more than 1,000.
Long Beach-based Virgin Orbit promises to begin twice-monthly space-tourism trips just outside Earth’s atmosphere in 2020, though it’s still testing its flight equipment.
“There’s a step change that’s about to happen in space,” Muelhaupt said. “It isn’t just a matter of commercial space getting more active. Things are about to change completely now.”
SpaceX’s satellite network will rely on autonomous maneuvering technologies to avoid collisions — a new kind of challenge for space-debris tracking.
“It complicates life for everyone else because we’re relying on the U.S. Space Surveillance Network to externally track (debris), and they’re (going to be) continuously maneuvering,” Muelhaupt said. “So what we’re going to see here is space-traffic management. We’ve got a very complicated future in front of us avoiding collisions in the first place and managing the traffic and sharing the information.”