Satellite garbage in the sky

Sometimes we tend to forget that there are consequences for any progression and development we take. Sending satellites into spaces has provided unmeasurable benefits but we need to learn the consequences and the price that we will have to pay.

For a few months in the fall of 1957, citizens of Earth could look up and see the first artificial star. It shone as bright, but moved across the sky at a much faster clip. Lots of people thought they were seeing Sputnik—Russia’s antennaed, spherical satellite, and the first thing humans had flung into orbit. But it wasn’t: It was the body of the rocket that bore Sputnik to space—and Earth’s first piece of space junk.

Space junk is the colloquial name for orbital bits that do nothing useful: spent rockets, fragments splayed by collisions and degradation, old satellites no one cares about anymore. In total, they amount to millions of pieces of debris, many of which are large enough to seriously ding satellites and the International Space Station. And then there’s Kessler Syndrome: a space sickness in which low-Earth orbit is so overpopulated that collisions cascade into more collisions, which create more debris that causes more collisions that cascade into more collisions. And it’s about to get worse: Thousands and thousands of satellites are set to launch to low-Earth orbit before 2025.

An estimated 18 thousands objects in orbit are currently being monitored by radar stations. Only seven percent of these are operational satellites, the rest is space junk. And it’s expected to get worse with plans to send more than 10 thousands additional satellites into space over the next decade. This growing amount of space junk poses a real threat to operating satellites and space vehicles in general.

D-Orbit is a company based on the shores of Lake Como in northern Italy, which turned to the EU’s Horizon 2020 program for funding. Its first major project was to find ways of decommissioning satellites safely once their life has come to an end. The system is installed before the satellite is launched and is used either to bring it safely back into the atmosphere or to send it to a so-called ‘satellite graveyard’ a few hundreds kilometers away from the operational orbit. D-Orbit’s system also increases the satellites’ life-span as it isn’t necessary to spare fuel in order to decommission them. And the system can serve as an extra engine in case of emergency. According to Lorenzo Ferrario, D-Orbit’s Chief Technology Officer, “the next big step is called In Orbit Now (ION) – a satellite transport system that we’re focusing most of our efforts on. It is built on the experience of D-Sat.” There are a number of new solutions that can be found when it comes to reliability, cost-effectiveness and better integration to existing satellites, and once they have been tested in space, it will be even better. The European Space Agency and the European Union have earmarked funds for research and development and this is very important, especially to solve the problem posed by spatial debris, and this represents an opportunity for private companies.

Just how much bigger will the problem get? SpaceX alone plans to send up nearly 12,000 small internet-beaming objects over time. OneWeb has designs on some 700 similar satellites. Planet just launched around 100 that take pictures of the Earth’s entire landmass every day. And those are just the heaviest hitters. Little orbiters—especially the smallest types, CubeSats and NanoSats—are within reach of research scientists, government agency experiments, smaller companies, and even individual humans. Take the private Breakthrough Starshot project, which eventually plans to send diminutive spacecraft to Alpha Centauri star system (which is 40 trillions kilometers away from Earth). It just launched six “Sprites”: the world’s smallest satellites, measuring 3.5 centimeters on a side.