Collisions, colonisation, and a fight to control space junk

A new arms race in satellite internet is crowding out Low Earth Orbit. What will we do with all space junk that’s building up?

At a star-gazing party in San Jose, I looked up and spotted a star in the sky . Excited, I pointed it out to a friend, only to get a shrug back. It wasn’t a planet; it was a satellite. I spotted another. Satellite again.

In just five years, from 2020, there have been 11,951 launches to space, most of them to LEO – the space in the 500-1000 kilometre altitude above Earth. (Shutterstock)

Not surprising. A little research back home made me realise that Low Earth Orbit (LEO) has filled up with so many satellites recently that even astronomers are confusing them with asteroids. In just five years, from 2020, there have been 11,951 launches to space, most of them to LEO – the space in the 500-1000 kilometre altitude above Earth. It’s this altitude that houses satellites used for remote sensing, weather forecasting, spying, and satellite internet. It’s also the altitude best suited for housing astronauts. The International Space Station is here, and it is the location for everyone’s recent favourite – space tourism.

LEO is the most coveted real estate in space

When it comes to orbits around Earth, LEO is the new gold rush. The space industry has grown more in the last 63 months than in the previous 63 years when the first rocket was launched to space in 1957, according to data from Pixalytics.com. There are 14,904 satellites in space and about 20,895 total objects that have been launched to space since 1957 – 56% percent were sent in the last 66 months, most of them to LEO!

It’s not weather data or spying but satellite internet that’s driving this boom. The US holds the first mover advantage. SpaceX’s Starlink internet network has more than 7,600 satellites in LEO thanks to its technology which can successfully reuse launch vehicles . The company now routinely reuses Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, allowing it to launch dozens of satellites each year. They plan to have 40,000 satellites up in space by 2030.

Sending up satellites has also become cheaper. Today, a satellite costs about $50,000-$1,00,000 apiece and companies such as SpaceX launch 100 satellites together – called megaconstellations. At 550km altitude, AST Spacemobile’s megaconstellation BlueBird is so bright that it outshines everything else in the sky, except for the Moon, Venus, Jupiter and a few other stars, blinding astronomers and binocular-carrying observers .

Such megaconstellations are also being built by other American companies such as Amazon Kuiper, Canada’s Telesat, EU’s OneWeb, Chinese Qianfan and GuoWang. Then there’s space ambitions from other countries, including India and Russia.

As for space stations, LEO is the best altitude to house humans in space. NASA has just released a draft of its announcement on the second phase of its Commercial LEO Development Program which covers certification of commercial space stations to “enable the development of multiple commercial space station destinations, advancing them to the stage of an on-orbit low Earth orbit crewed demonstration flight as soon as possible”.

This is because the International Space Station retires in 2030 and we need new space stations in LEO. Axiom Space, another US private company, has plans to open up a commercial space station in LEO by 2027. Blue Origin, another American company, announced a mixed-use space business park called Orbital Reef that will offer services such as space habituation, tourism, transportation, logistics, operations and support research, industry and commerce.

Then there’s Starlab, which already has a mockup of its space station in NASA in Houston and expects to start hosting folks in space in 2028. It comes with a large robotic arm for servicing cargo and payloads.

In a podcast earlier this month, NASA’s acting administrator Sean Duffy compared space economy to the early days of the iPhone. “No one could have envisioned years ago how the iPhone would change our lives; likewise, 15 or 20 years ago, no one could foresee the kind of space economy we have today,” he said, adding that space economy could unleash new markets and applications still beyond imagination. Private space stations, reusable rockets and microgravity manufacturing are just some of the foundational breakthroughs that brought in mobile and satellite internet.

With such frenzy in owning commercial space, when do you think LEO will get filled up? Right now, instead of carving up LEO by country, the UN’s International Telecommunication Union assigns orbital slots and frequency bands on a first-come, first-served basis. LEO can hold only about 60,000-100,000 satellites in total, making it urgent for all countries to compete in flinging satellites to colonise near space. Experts estimate that within the next couple of decades, we’ll be dealing with a lot of objects in LEO and a lot more debris.

Climate pitfall of all that space junk

In our desire to shoot up more and more satellites into the skies, we’re all in a relentless race to own the empty spaces around our planet. And it’s already showing up as a potential headache. Estimates say about 30% of satellites in space have gone defunct, run out of fuel, or are at the end of their life. That means that there are about 4,000 useless metal objects orbiting our planet. Experts estimate about 120 million pieces of debris (between 1mm to 1 cm) including fragments from collisions, failed and successful past launches.

Satellite internet companies don’t want their internet routers to be orbiting for decades. They plan to replace them with newer technology, sending old satellites back to the Earth’s atmosphere to burn up. According to another study, the amount of debris vaporising in Earth’s atmosphere has doubled in the last five years. Most of this metallic ash remains suspended in the thin mid-atmospheric air for decades. Scientists suspect the alumina that burns might cause ozone depletion and alter the temperature of higher atmospheric layers.

These satellites also create exhaust when performing de-orbiting burns interact with the ionosphere, giving the night sky a bright red glow, which the more imaginative could mistake for an alien attack.

Before we fill up our skies with space pigeons, perhaps it’s time we take a step back and reconsider if we’re junking up our planet’s space, the same way we did its oceans and land. Maybe the new age space companies can learn from Vanguard 1, the oldest surviving satellite which has been running on solar cells since 1958 and is expected to keep orbiting for another 240 years.

(Shweta Taneja is an author and journalist based in the Bay Area.The views expressed are personal)