Space debris: too little, too late?

Space is big – ultimately infinite – but can we humans still fill it with junk? This month, Scientific American warned that, yes, we have this power, and we really need to do something about it or we’ll trap ourselves here on Earth beneath a cloud of orbiting debris, of little and not-so-little multi-Mach bullets whizzing around the planet and smashing up satellites and space stations, making more whiz-bullets with each collision until, well, there’s no getting through. Think trying to run across a busy freeway at night, dressed in black with your eyes closed.

SciAm’s solution is absolutely valid; we need to “reduce, reuse and recycle in space”. Learn to repair spacecraft in orbit and reuse their valuable materials. Refuel them rather than leave them in orbit. Build them to last longer, give them more fuel-efficient propulsion systems. Drag dead satellites and other chunks of debris out of orbit. We don’t have to worry about infinite space, just the big but finite part of it close to Earth . 

All great ideas. All needed, too. As a journalist covering spaceflight in the early 2010s, I listened to repeated calls for “clean space”, for serious efforts to, as ESA’s then-director general Jean-Jacques Dordain eloquently pleaded, leave space “as we found it” for our children.

A decade-plus later, sadly, meaningful grappling with clean space sounds rather like 1.5°, one-way plastics, biodiversity, traffic congestion, etc, etc, etc. What progress has been made – broad agreement that past-useful-life spacecraft should be designed to self-deorbit in 25 years – is well-meaning but overwhelmed by volume. The collective we are filling the collective commons at a rate that not so long ago would have been science fiction. For 2014, globally, there were barely 90 launch attempts. Last year more than 260, more than half by SpaceX alone. We’ve gone from having a recognised problem with a few thousand satellites in orbit to an assumption that, somehow, we’ll be ok with tens of thousands.

A few experiments to remove known debris or carry out in-orbit repairs or refueling are upcoming and welcome. But reality is cruel. The truth is, every launch leaves debris in space: rocket stages, nuts and bolts, flecks of unburned fuel. Pieces break off of satellites, like all those car parts you see by the roadside. Reusable rockets don’t solve the problem; SpaceX admirably recovers Falcon first stages, or boosters, but the second stages stay in space – getting them down would come with an immense fuel cost.

As for recycling spacecraft, upcycling their components, generally building a circular space economy, all good ideas. Maybe we should have a return deposit on spacecraft, like we used to pay, but don’t anymore, 5￠ on glass bottles.

Space, sadly, is following a well-worn path. Everybody recognises the problem as a problem that needs to be dealt with some time when it’s technically and economically advantageous. Meanwhile, we’ve got these rockets to launch and some plastic bottles to take to the recycling which, we know but don’t like to admit, probably end up in the sea. In space, everybody keeps pushing to launch while talking about…doing something about the junk problem.

And, it’s not just engineering and economics that prevent real action against space debris. Space has become a form of economic warfare. The USA – far and away the biggest user of space both economically and militarily – might be genuinely concerned about the debris problem. But what we’ve seen over the past decade or so is that Washington has no intention of slowing down. A skeptic might conclude that it is, effectively, the policy of the US to occupy as much orbital territory as possible before anybody else can take it.

Or, maybe that’s too cynical. In any case, regulatory reality is that permission for each launch is considered, individually and rightly so, on its safety merits. One day a launch might be disallowed for fear of collision in orbit.