The race to clean up outer space

Earth's orbit has become so crowded with defunct satellites and debris that scientists worry about accidental collisions affecting new space missions. Governments and startups are now working on ways to try and fix this great mess.

 

The year was 1957. The Soviet Union had just launched the world’s first man-made satellite, Sputnik-1, in October, marking the beginning of the “space age”. Sputnik-1 ran out of battery power in roughly 21 days but kept orbiting Earth for three months. In January 1958, the sphere-shaped satellite finally fell back into Earth’s atmosphere, burning up during re-entry. But this isn’t the case with all man-made satellites and objects that have been put in space since then.

Sputnik-1 kicked off what has come to be known as the “space race”. Since 1957, countries around the world have launched over 6,000 rockets, which have placed around 10,680 satellites in orbit, according to the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Space Debris Office. Around 6,000 of these satellites are still in space, but only about 3,300 are functioning. The rest are stuck in orbit due to Earth’s gravitational pull as space debris, swirling around our planet at dangerous speeds.

Some of these stranded objects—which include abandoned launch vehicle stages, derelict spacecraft, rocket fragments and even specks of paint—can be as small as a marble but still cause massive damage to functioning satellites or manned spacecraft on impact. According to the US space agency Nasa, the average impact speed of orbital debris with another space object is 10km per second. This can reach about 15km/s—more than 10 times the speed of a bullet. If you have seen Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 movie Gravity, you know how lethal they can be.

Space debris poses a danger not only to exploration missions but also to newer activities such as private space tourism. In the near future, space travel will be open to individuals. Companies like Virgin Galactic hope to make space tourism affordable—but space junk presents a unique risk.

“It’s getting bigger and bigger. Current data says there are some 3,000 dead satellites and a little over 30,000 pieces of junk which are larger than 10cm in size. The number is critical,” says Jahnavi Phalkey, science and technology historian and director of Science Gallery Bengaluru. “It’s dangerous also to newer missions. The speed at which these things travel, it could damage a new satellite, a manned-space mission or the International Space Station (ISS), where you actually have people living,” she says on the phone.

There are very real fears that there may be so much space debris soon that it could inhibit new launches. In fact, the Kessler Syndrome, a term proposed by astrophysicist and former Nasa scientist Donald J. Kessler in 1978, describes a situation where the amount of man-made space debris reaches such a critical point that just one instance of collision between space debris could lead to a cascade of collisions—and ultimately, a runaway chain reaction. Think of it as a domino effect in space.

The ESA’s Annual Space Environment Report, released in September, notes that while the amount of mission-related objects, such as payloads and rockets, released into space since the 1960s is declining steadily, the number of pieces, the debris’ combined mass and area has only grown. This has resulted in “involuntary collisions” between operational payloads and space debris. After a point, even limiting the number of new space launches will not help. Collisions between existing debris will continue to produce more pieces of space junk. This is something space missions in certain Earth orbits already have to factor in daily, says Stijn Lemmens, a senior space debris mitigation analyst at ESA’s Space Debris Office in Darmstadt, Germany. “In particular in low Earth orbits, i.e. orbits with an altitude below 2,000km above Earth’s surface, missions need to be prepared to receive, and in some cases act when the risk of collision is too high.... For example, in ESA’s fleet this implies on average one collision avoidance manoeuvre per satellite per year, and a 24 hours by 7 days monitoring of the risk,” Lemmens explains on email. The ISS, for instance, has had to make 28 collision avoidance manoeuvres since 1999, data from Nasa’s Orbital Debris Program Office shows; this includes three such manoeuvres last year. It’s almost like avoiding a rogue vehicle on a highway that might hit you head on. The fact that these have to be done more frequently now only highlights how severe the problem has become. Space-faring nations around the world have begun to acknowledge the issue, while some startups and private companies are devising technologies to deal with space waste. A different kind of race is unfolding now: a race to clean up space.

ClearSpace SA, a Switzerland-based startup founded in 2018, is aiming to launch the world’s first active debris removal mission in collaboration with ESA by 2025. The mission, which actually hopes to remove a piece of space debris, will be the first of its kind. In India, a young Bengaluru-based space startup, Digantara Research and Technologies, is working on setting up orbit debris tracking and monitoring services. Japanese company Astroscale’s ELSA-d mission, all set to launch from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in March, hopes to demonstrate multiple ways of capturing and removing defunct objects from orbit. Another company from Japan, Sumitomo Forestry, working with researchers from Kyoto University, is hoping to develop and launch the world’s first wooden satellites, called LignoSat, by 2023 to cut down on space junk. They believe these satellites, made from wooden material that is highly resistant to temperature and harsh environments, will burn up during re-entry, without releasing harmful elements into the atmosphere. The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) has also firmed up its space situational awareness capabilities—knowing the exact location of your space assets, tracking and predicting any possible threats—in recent months, launching a dedicated centre and project to protect its space assets from debris.

ADVERTISEMENT

Collision course

One of the worst space collisions occurred in February 2009 when two communications satellites collided approximately 800km above Siberia. One of them was a decommissioned Russian communications satellite, Cosmos (Kosmos) 2251, the other a still-functioning US commercial communications satellite, Iridium 33. Their combined weight was around 1,560kg. The collision produced around 2,000 pieces of space debris.

While some of the trackable satellite fragments eventually re-entered Earth’s atmosphere and burnt up, this accidental hypervelocity, or high-speed collision of two orbiting satellites, became a prime example of the threat that space debris poses to functioning satellites and other spacecraft.

Anti-satellite (Asat) testing, which involves intercepting and destroying a satellite, as well as destruction of spacecraft that are no longer operational, has contributed to the problem. China’s 2007 Asat test on one of its own old weather satellites, the Fengyun-1C, created some 3,000 fragments of space debris. In March 2019, India conducted a similar Asat test demonstration, dubbed Mission Shakti, using a ballistic missile to destroy its Microsat-R satellite. The demonstration reportedly created more than 400 pieces of debris, most of which re-entered the atmosphere. India currently has 100 active and defunct spacecraft in orbit and 121 spent rocket bodies and catalogued debris, according to Nasa’s November 2020 Orbital Debris Quarterly News, which publishes the latest in orbital debris research, including data from the US Space Surveillance Network. Figures from 2019 indicate that India had 163 rocket bodies and pieces of debris in space.