The bright side of space junk
With more than 8,000 dead and alive satellites orbiting earth, it's good to hear that the first fines have been issued for extra-terrestrial littering.
Dish, the US TV giant, has been slapped with a $150,000 fine for abandoning its defunct satellite like an old sofa on a motorway. That might not be a big ticket for a TV netwok, but Dish's value dipped by $100 million on the news.
The decision by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) does more than penalise litterbugs. It sets a market price for space junk removal. Companies like Astroscale in Japan or ClearSpace in Switzerland have been pulling bits of metal back to Earth for a decade, and the FCC fine sets a clear price that these companies can charge for their services.
As of November 2022, there were reported to be over 25,000 artificial objects in orbit, of which 5,465 are operational satellites. However, these numbers only account for objects large enough to be tracked. Estimates indicate that there are millions of smaller debris particles, some of which can cause significant damage similar to sandblasting.
Below an altitude of 2,000 km, the density of debris exceeds that of meteoroids, and even the International Space Station (ISS), which orbits at around 300–400 km, has to be manoeuvred to avoid collisions with larger debris pieces.
The accumulation of space debris began as early as the late 1950s with the launch of Sputnik 1 and has since increased due to various activities, including anti-satellite tests and in-orbit explosions. Various techniques and studies have been developed to track and predict the paths of space debris, but its mitigation remains a significant challenge.