Is space debris the next sustainability issue?

Space debris is quite a niche issue. But maybe not for long.

The signal?

“NASA sued after space junk crashes into Florida home.” The headline is an interesting example of future issues at the intersection of technology and sustainability.

Few of us realise just how essential spacetech already is to every aspect of our modern daily life. Every time we use google maps to avoid traffic, every time we fly to a workshop, every time we check the weather to decide what to wear, we are using space.

The opportunities are enormous, but investment in the space sector is high-risk, capital intensive and a long-term commitment.

Hence, unlocking the sector’s future potential will require international cooperation and coordination across the public and private sectors to ensure that regulatory frameworks enable growth in a sustainable manner.

One coordination challenge is space debris.

🛰 This refers to defunct satellites and leftover parts from launch missions that are just floating around in space. It is also created when governments use missiles to practice blowing up their own satellites, as Russia did in November 2021 to test its Nudol anti-satellite weapon.

🛰Space junk or debris is an emerging ‘tragedy of the commons’, in economics parlance. As the resource belongs to all, i.e. the ‘commons’, it relies on self-policing. Individual private parties can act only in their own interest and may overuse and harm the space environment.

🛰Debris can orbit the Earth for hundreds of years, and poses a threat to other satellites in orbit, particularly those at geostationary orbits that monitor weather and support our communications.

🛰Today there are 10,000 active satellites, and growing, especially as our appetite for connectivity grows.

🛰It is not known today what a sustainable limit is in the total number of satellites in LEO, beyond which cascading collision effects could be catastrophic.

But though today it is a limited problem, it could become a bigger challenge, as more and more companies launch satellite constellations, increasing the risk of collision.