Staying Ahead

APOGEE STAFF

Early on November 15, 2021, the seven crew members of the International Space Station (ISS) were awakened by NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Flight controllers radioed to warn about a field of satellite debris nearing the station and they wanted the members to review their safe haven procedures.

The crew sealed the hatches to the radial modules that extend from the station’s long axis — including NASA’s Tranquility module, the European Space Agency’s Columbus module, Japan’s Kibo module and the United States’ Quest airlock — then hunkered down inside their Soyuz and Dragon crew capsules until the all-clear. The sheltering lasted about two hours as the ISS passed “through or near the cloud every 90 minutes,” NASA said.

The event triggered condemnations across the scientific community, along with a swift rebuke from NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, who assailed a destructive Russian anti-satellite (ASAT) test a day earlier for creating the debris field.

Russia’s military acknowledged the test, saying its forces destroyed a Soviet-era ELINT (electronic and signals intelligence) satellite launched in 1982, but it insisted that the resulting debris “did not and will not pose any threat to orbital stations, satellites and space activity.”

U.S. officials thought otherwise. “With its long and storied history in human spaceflight, it is unthinkable that Russia would endanger not only the American and international partner astronauts on the ISS, but also their own cosmonauts,” Nelson said. “Their actions are reckless and dangerous, threatening, as well, the Chinese space station and the taikonauts on board.

“All nations have a responsibility to prevent the purposeful creation of space debris from ASATs and to foster a safe, sustainable space environment,” he said.

At the very least, the ASAT test worsened an already surging space debris problem that goes back decades. U.S. Space Command (USSPACECOM) is tracking the congestion and working with governments and private industry to reduce the hazard, but they face an intractable problem. A December 2023 report from the European Space Agency (ESA) estimates about 11,500 metric tons of space junk now hurtle through orbit — everything from discarded rocket boosters to derelict satellites to tens of thousands of fragments created by satellite-destroying missile tests. Among the most recent contributors: the 2023 breakup of a mysterious Russian satellite dubbed KOSMOS 2499. In a January 4, 2023, tweet, the 18th Space Defense Squadron, an arm of the U.S. Space Force, reported the breakup generated about 85 pieces of debris at an altitude of 1,169 kilometers.

The report estimates that at last count, in December 2023, about 35,150 trackable objects greater than 10 centimeters (slightly bigger than a softball) orbit the planet. About half that amount occupy low-Earth orbit (LEO), the area from about 1,000 kilometers to 2,000 kilometers above Earth. The agency also estimates that more than a million untrackable objects (from 1 centimeter to 10 centimeters), as well as tens of millions of minuscule particles (1 millimeter to 1 centimeter), also travel through LEO.

All nations have a responsibility to prevent the purposeful creation of space debris from ASATs and to foster a safe, sustainable space environment.
~ Bill Nelson, NASA administrator

It isn’t only the large chunks of metal circling the planet that worry scientists. With objects traveling more than 25,000 kilometers per hour, a collision involving even the tiniest object, such as a paint chip, can seriously damage a satellite subsystem. A slightly larger object like a screw can blow through a fuselage, endangering manned spacecraft.

“Any of these debris have the potential for seriously disrupting or terminating the mission of operational spacecraft in low-Earth orbit,” Nicholas Johnson, chief scientist at NASA’s Orbital Debris Program at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas told The Watch magazine, a publication of U.S. Northern Command.

During a November 2021 news briefing following the Russian ASAT test, State Department spokesman Ned Price said the ELINT satellite’s destruction contributed 1,500 trackable fragments to LEO, as well as “hundreds of thousands of pieces of smaller orbital debris that now threaten the interests of all nations.”

Coming on the heels of three non-contact ASAT tests by the Kremlin a year earlier, Russia stands as one of the world’s most prolific nations when it comes to ASAT testing. However, it isn’t the sole contributor of space junk, which has existed since Sputnik. Several other events have added to the problem:

• In 2007, a derelict weather satellite destroyed by the People’s Republic of China spawned a field of 3,300 large fragments and another 200,000 1-centimeter pieces. This event was perhaps the largest single contributor of space junk.
• Two years later, a defunct 950-kilogram Russian satellite, Cosmos-2251, collided with a functioning U.S. Iridium commercial satellite, creating 2,000 pieces of space junk and another 100,000 smaller shards. Those two incidents alone increased the volume of debris in low-Earth orbit by 60%, with more than a third of the particles expected to remain in orbit for more than 20 more years, NASA said.
• In March 2019, India surprised the international community with a televised address to announce its military had blown up a Microsat-R satellite launched into low orbit a few weeks earlier.

The U.S. had been periodically developing ASATs almost since the beginning of the space age. The U.S. recently banned testing of destructive ASATs, however, and this ban has been adopted by 155 nations.

 Given the millions of fragments whizzing around the planet, along with the brisk pace of satellite launches by SpaceX, OneWeb and other companies, the inevitability of a space junk collision seems a given.

Only a few years ago, 1,500 active satellites circled the globe. Now, there are close to 9,000, according to the European Space Agency. Of those, 104 are registered by nation or organization by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs. But those numbers are misleading because they’re constantly growing and pale in comparison to what’s coming due to rapidly expanding commercial satellite constellations like SpaceX’s Starlink. That one constellation alone accounts for more than half of all active satellites in LEO, including more than 5,289 small, mass-produced satellites as of January 2024, says astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In fact, according to Aerospace consultant Euroconsult, based on current and projected levels of satellite activity in commercial and government/military sectors, the number of satellites launched into LEO will grow about 360% by 2031, or by roughly 17,040 satellites — representing about 1,700 new satellites a year.

“The satellite market has entered a new era in which the yearly satellite demand will range from 1,200 to 2,100 satellites, dwarfing all reference points of the previous years,” a December 2021 Euroconsult report said. “From 2021 to 2030, constellations will account for 80 percent of the demand in number of satellites.”

Since that report, the estimates have grown. Analyzing projections from SpaceX, OneWeb, Amazon Kuiper and other sources, including public and private and entities, experts from the University of Plymouth, the University of Texas at Austin, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Spaceport Cornwall and the Zoological Society of London as many as 60,000 satellites will orbit the planet by 2030, up from the current 9,000 spacecraft.

Apart from the obvious commercial and economic benefits tied to navigation and communications, satellites confer vital technological and tactical advantages to military forces, enhancing precision targeting, drone operations, battlefield communications, advanced meteorological information and real-time situational awareness on the ground and beyond. The world’s increasing reliance on satellites for commercial and defensive purposes reinforces the need for cooperation and to build partnerships, experts say.

Yet the increasing level of space junk is leading to tens of thousands of near collisions, or conjunctions, yearly between active satellites and space debris or other objects — and the problem is only getting worse.

In 2019, the Air Force issued 8,696 notices to satellite owner/operators of near collisions involving satellites, also known as “Near Earth Emergency Reportable Conjunction Data Messages” (CDMs). According to the 18th Space Defense Squadron, the Space Force’s space domain awareness unit, that number grew to 18,454 and 129,035 CDMs in 2020 and 2021, respectively, and during the first four months of 2022, it eclipsed both years combined with 168,144 near-collision messages, or roughly 1,400 CDMs a day.

Determined to rein in the debris problem and avoid a communications catastrophe, USSPACECOM, NASA, the ESA and individual nations are studying a range of strategies, from improved tracking and alert systems to innovative debris-removal technologies that can, possibly, tether, net, scoop up using a bag, or even harpoon the space junk to lower it to a 200-kilometer orbit so it falls into the atmosphere and burns up.

In a November 2021 video, then-U.S. Space Force Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. David Thompson warned that continuing high levels of space debris “threaten the long-term sustainability of the space domain,” and that it was time for the government and private industry to work together.

This “demands action and provides an opportunity for partnership in the search for innovative solutions to recycle, reuse or remove these objects,” he said.

The video, posted to the Space Force’s SpaceWERX website (its technology branch), asked U.S.-based aerospace companies to partner with USSPACECOM to reduce debris levels. The effort, called Orbital Prime by SpaceWERX, seeks to create a partnership between the U.S. military and the specialized private-sector market known as OSAM, or On-orbit Servicing, Assembly and Manufacturing.

The program’s long-term goal is to host one or more on-orbit demonstrations within two to four years. To get there, SpaceWERX has selected several small businesses under the Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) initiative to spur competition and create a range of debris-removing options. To compete for the contracts, businesses must partner with academic and nonprofit research institutions.

Companies identified for the Phase 1 contracts were eligible for up to $250,000, with the potential for Phase 2 awards of  $1.5 million. From there, qualifiers can pursue broader “strategic financing” of $30 million, which includes matching private funds. Orbital Prime winners can also gain access to testing ranges as well as mentoring to determine the U.S. Department of Defense mission that best fits their proposed capability. Including the private sector funding, the entire project could be worth a potential $100 million.

“The Orbital Prime effort is intended to accelerate and unlock the market for In-orbit Servicing Assembly and Manufacturing with the first use case being to demonstrate active debris remediation,” Gabe Mounce, deputy director of SpaceWERX, told Apogee.

SpaceWERX has selected 125 companies under Orbital Prime’s first phase, during which companies research their ideas, develop early designs and record their progress. Later, the companies will compete for $1.5 million to further develop their projects.

“Considering the growing congestion in low-Earth orbit, (U.S. Space Force) leadership are looking to this program as an important exploration of the market potential for debris remediation, which heavily depends on the technology and business maturity of the industry base in this area,” Mounce said. “With that in mind, this large bevy of initial STTR selections is our first big signal to the public and private sector of our intent to work with them to tackle the debris problem in concert with other elements of the U.S. government working this issue.”

Other nations hoping to reduce the space debris threat are initiating similar partnerships with private industry. The ESA has announced plans for a $100 million debris-removal mission by 2026 with Swiss-based startup ClearSpace. The company wants to deploy a four-armed robot called ClearSpace-1 to grab a Vega Secondary Payload Adapter left behind by ESA’s Vega launcher in 2013.

“Think of all of the orbital captures that have occurred up until this point and they have all taken place with cooperative, fully controlled target objects,” then-ESA Director General Jan Wörner said in an agency news release in January 2020. “With space debris, by definition no such control is possible; instead, the objects are adrift, often tumbling randomly.”

The abandoned Vega payload adapter, about 800 kilometers above Earth, weighs about 100 kilograms. The company hopes to leverage this new technology to capture larger chunks of debris as well.

“This first capture and disposal of an uncooperative space object represents an extremely challenging achievement,” Wörner said. “With overall satellite numbers set to grow rapidly in the coming decade, regular removals are becoming essential to keep debris levels under control, to prevent a cascade of collisions that threaten to make the debris problem much worse.”

The project has recently become complicated by the presence of new objects found floating near the payload adapter. Space tracking systems detected the objects, likely the result of a “hypervelocity impact of a small, untracked object” that crashed into the adapter, ESA officials said in an August 2023 statement. Evaluations had been underway since the collision to determine next steps. The removal mission anticipated a fully intact target.

Also taking up the debris-removal challenge, the United Kingdom’s Space Agency announced a $1.3 million feasibility study to remove two spacecraft from LEO by 2026. The agency selected two research consortiums led by ClearSpace and Japan-based Astroscale to identify two defunct satellites to de-orbit from among 14 altogether. All 14 potential targets are either licensed by the U.K., owned by British entities or registered by the U.K. with the United Nations.

“Growing reliance on satellites for a range of everyday utilities from SatNav to meteorology is making the space-tech sector increasingly valuable to the U.K. economy,” U.K. Science Minister George Freeman said in October 2021, announcing the effort. “Our National Space Strategy sets out our vision for a thriving U.K. space sector that pushes the boundaries of innovation including a specific commitment to lead in clearing space debris.”

New Zealand likewise is turning to the private sector. Officials there signed an agreement in 2021 with Japan’s Astroscale to study debris removal. Chief among the options was a single-servicing spacecraft to remove up to three objects in one mission.

In addition, Astroscale and the Japanese space agency JAXA are collaborating to launch a mission to examine an upper rocket stage left behind from a Japanese launch so it can eventually be deorbited.

All of this comes as the U.S. and its partners step up efforts to halt anti-satellite testing globally. In one of the strongest messages yet against ASAT tests, in December 2022, the United Nations General Assembly approved a resolution calling for a halt to one type of anti-satellite testing. A total of 155 nations backed the measure. Nine nations — including Iran, the People’s Republic of China and Russia — voted against it and another nine abstained from voting. The non-binding resolution calls for stopping destructive direct-ascent ASAT weapons, which create debris fields like the one that threatened the ISS in November 2021.  Also, in September 2022, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted a five-year rule for non-functioning satellites. Under the rule, satellite owners are instructed to deorbit their satellites within five years of ending their mission. While not expected to make a massive dent in the fleet of derelict satellites, the measure will help curb some debris. Previous guidelines recommended that satellites be deorbited after 25 years post-mission.

“Twenty-five years is a long time,” FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement. “There is no reason to wait that long anymore. Our space economy is moving fast. For it to continue to grow, we need to do more to clean up after ourselves so space innovation can continue to expand.”

Along with these and other efforts, USSPACECOM plays a central role in managing the congestion that governments and private industry hope to mitigate. The command relies upon the Space Surveillance Network — composed of ground-based radars, optical telescopes and satellites and overseen by U.S. Space Force — to identify, track and gather information about space objects.

Through space situational awareness (SSA) agreements with allies and commercial satellite owners and operators, USSPACECOM shares this knowledge and other data, including conjunction assessments, launches, deorbits and reentry assistance. U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) has served as the nation’s representative signing SSA agreements since 2011. USSPACECOM assumed management of the agreements after the command was stood up in August 2019.

USSTRATCOM and USSPACECOM have signed SSA agreements with more than 150 entities, including 31 nations. One of the most recent was with the Uruguayan Air Force in April 2024. The agreement with South Korean strengthened the nation’s space situational awareness for military purposes. Also part of the deal, the two nations began sharing space-based intelligence, conducting joint space operations and supporting the development of space experts through training. USSTRATCOM has been monitoring space junk since 1957 when the Soviets launched Sputnik I.

The U.S. Space Force currently tracks about 47,000 objects in space, of which about 9,000 are active satellites. “Conservative estimates say there are at least 10 times as many smaller objects in orbit that we cannot reliably track, and yet those smaller bits of debris pose as much or greater risk to our satellites as the larger pieces,” Thompson said. “It is imperative for the long-term safety, security and sustainability of the space domain that we find innovative solutions to these challenges.”