Space is the next frontier for environmentalism

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Moriba Jah, Contributor

This year marks 60 years since the United States started sending satellites into space, and during that span, we have led extraordinary scientific discovery across our solar system. But our space exploration has taken a toll on one particular thing: the orbital environment.

There is a lot of debris orbiting Earth. And if we don't do anything about it, we will see an increase in collisions to the detriment of space operations, space commerce and space exploration.

The U.S. Strategic Command currently tracks and maintains knowledge of approximately 23,000 things in orbit, so-called resident space objects. These objects range from the size of a softball to the size of a school bus and are everything from bolts and pieces of exploded satellites to large rockets. Unfortunately, these are only the ones we can track. The number of objects that are thought to exist is closer to 500,000, with sizes that go down to a millimeter. Think of a speck of paint. However, even something this small can produce significant damage if it collides with something else at a very high speed.

The Federal Aviation Administration regulates things that go up and come down, but not what stays in orbit. So, there are few (if any) rules in space. No real estate deeds as it were. Any domain that has experienced significant geographical sparsity and is mostly unregulated has been subject to lawlessness. This means countries can behave in almost any way in space without consequences, which is not a recipe for a long-term sustainable and safe space environment.

Couple that with a space renaissance, given the large amount of wealth to be made from space services, capabilities and activities. For example, great entrepreneurs such as Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin and Amazon) and Elon Musk (SpaceX and Tesla) are only a few leading the way in making access to space much cheaper than before. India also is contributing. Last February, India broke the record for launching the largest number of satellites at once: 104. All of this will continue.

Without something like environmental protection in space and some global governance for developing norms of good stewardship of space activities, we risk seeing whole regions of space become hard, if not impossible, to use freely and cheaply. We should take a page from our early mining days and how that activity, unregulated, was to the detriment of the environment, including the loss of human lives.

Further, the space community does not openly share information on where all objects are located for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that the organization providing everyone with a free service of collision warnings is the U.S. Strategic Command. Gen. John Hyten, the agency's commander, has underscored the desire to see the Department of Defense leave the business of space traffic cop  to some other entity (for example, the FAA).

To deal with this space trash issue, we should create a public-private partnership composed of government, industry, academia and international partners to focus on space traffic management. Moreover, lawmakers would be wise to create a NASA Space Situational Awareness Institute, administered by NASA and composed of academic and research institutions such as the University of Texas at Austin, to be the scientific and technical frontier for civil and commercial space activities. Business leaders should be allowed to participate in this institute, having first access to results so that they may incorporate them into their own business models.

A lot has happened since that late evening when the U.S. launched its first satellite, Explorer 1, into orbit 60 years ago. We must be intent to preserve our freedom and ability to use space for the next 60 years and beyond.

Moriba Jah is an associate professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin. He wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News. Email: moriba@utexas.edu

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