James' World 2

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Space should not be a garbage dump. Nevertheless, we have treated the sky as a wrecker’s yard for more than half a century, and the amount of space junk orbiting Earth has skyrocketed in recent years. Now filled with the decaying hulks of defunct rockets and satellites, our polluted orbital environment is becoming more crowded by the day, threatening the growing space economy. It’s time for nations—and the billionaires commoditizing space—to clean up Earth’s near orbit.

The U.S. Air Force tracks more than 25,000 pieces of space junk larger than 10 centimeters—about the size of a bagel—weighing together some 9,000 metric tons. This dangerous trash zips around Earth at speeds of roughly 10 kilometers per ­second, or more than 22,000 miles per hour. Collisions between millimeter-­scale objects too small to track and working satellites are now routine, as are near-miss disasters. One example is a NASA research satellite that almost hit a defunct Russian satellite in February. Orbital debris collisions cost satellite operators an estimated $86 million to $103 million in losses a year, a figure that will grow as each operator and each collision generate more debris.

The threat isn’t just in space. In March, part of a pallet from a discarded International Space Station battery fell to Earth, smashing through the roof of a Florida home. In 2020 an Ivory Coast village recovered a 12-­meter-­long pipe from space, courtesy of a Chinese rocket that cast off its empty core after launch. And a 2022 Nature Astronomy study puts the odds of space junk killing someone on the ground at 10 percent every decade. Needlessly.

Under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, nations are supposed to be responsible for damages caused by space junk, even if it was originally launched by a private firm. That puts taxpayers, not space-­explor­ing billionaires, on the hook for damages from orbital debris if its origin can be proved and the company shown negligent—a tough proposition for untraceable paint chips. No surprise, this hasn’t worked. The problem is, after decades of discussion, there is still no international treaty that limits space junk or sets standards for negligence. We need one that outlines responsibilities and imposes fines on the companies whose spacecraft debris causes harm.

As long as doing the right thing is voluntary, it may not happen, concluded a 2018 Air Force Association report. The limited action since then tells us the world is way overdue for an agreement on mandatory standards. Few countries or companies currently design rockets for their complete life cycle. They must be forced to store enough fuel and retain the capability for spacecraft to steer safely out of space when their useful life is over. Painful financial and regulatory penalties should afflict spacefaring industries and nations that fail to play by the new rules.

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Martin Gee

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