Last month, a mysterious metal object washed up on a remote beach in western Australia. A few days later, the Australian Space Agency announced that it was probably the charred remains of an Indian space launch vehicle — a suspicion subsequently confirmed by the Indians.
Welcome to the age of raining space debris.
The number of satellites launched into orbit each year is growing almost exponentially. Last year, researchers at the University of British Columbia estimated that if this pattern continues, there’s a 1-in-10 chance in the next 10 years that debris from space activities — often scalding-hot metal shards — will fall from the sky and kill someone. They also found that populations in the Global South are at greater risk than their northern neighbors, even though they are responsible for only a fraction of orbital space launches.
Space operators can control how some large objects return to Earth. But this requires extra fuel reserves and adaptive control technologies, which translate into higher costs. As a result, many countries and companies prefer to let debris fall where it may. In effect, this merely transfers the expense to other people who live where the objects land.
For decades, the United States has required that launches from U.S. spaceports fly over unpopulated areas vacated of all private and commercial ships and aircraft. Other major space superpowers with poorer records on space debris — China and Russia — should follow suit. China, in particular, regularly endangers populated areas with rocket bodies from its mainland spaceports; a new instance was reported earlier this month.
Space-faring powers and private companies should also invest in technologies to better track and model space objects’ descent to the earth and share observational data with one another as objects fall. And countries should work together to write and carry out new rules on space behavior. More importantly, they need to enforce rules that already exist.
One goal for these efforts is clear: Countries and companies that litter the globe with debris — not the people and places it lands on — should pay the price.
About the author: Thomas G. Roberts is a graduate research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Astrodynamics, Space Robotics and Controls Laboratory and an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Aerospace Security Project.
