Once upon a time, we thought that our actions were too insignificant to impact something as large as the natural environment — that it wouldn’t be possible for fishermen to exhaust a fishery, that groundwater was so plentiful that conservation was unnecessary, and that the sky was big enough that the odds of two human-created objects colliding in space, much less threatening our ability to make use of orbits, was negligible. Today we know better. But the road from recognizing a resource as finite to managing it in a sustainable manner is long.
As researchers working on the topic of orbital capacity, we regularly engage with stakeholders: governmental representatives, satellite operators, and non-governmental organizations, among others. We recognize a growing awareness and concern that an increasingly congested Low Earth Orbit (LEO) environment could potentially exceed natural capacity, producing significant environmental harms. At the same time, we see a lack of clarity about how to translate this awareness into policy-level discussions and action on orbital use and coordination. In our view, successful orbital management will require explicitly integrating environmental modeling into decision-making on orbital use.
For roughly 20 years, the standard approach to managing the impact of human-made objects on the orbital debris environment has been largely rooted in per-satellite or per-mission requirements, indirectly informed by sporadic technical studies. This makes sense if your primary goal is to avoid grossly irresponsible behavior, and if the number of new spacecraft is predictable and well below the capacity of the system. However, in an era characterized by order of magnitude growth in the active satellite population, relying on fixed rules alone is no longer sufficient to ensure space sustainability. We need to also explicitly manage for capacity if we wish to ensure our use of LEO remains within the capacity of the natural…
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