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TECHNOLOGY
Bloomberg Businessweek
May 14, 2018
2
Soviet Sputnik
satellites made it
into space in 1957
400
200
0
26
DATA:UNITED NATIONS OFFICE FOR OUTER SPACE AFFAIRS
In the race to commercialize space, one premise
is undisputed: It’s getting crowded up there. From
private enterprise to universities to the military,
everyone has an eye on the sky as it comes inan-
cially within reach. Yet it’s not clear how all these
new orbital gadgets will coexist, zipping around the
planet as fast as 17,500 mph, navigating a mineield
of debris from earlier space ventures.
Aerospace Corp., a federally funded research cen-
ter, has a suggestion: Stick a small, quarter-pound
GPS transponder on each craft for tracking, ID, and
oversight. Common in civil aviation and maritime
navigation, transponders have never made it widely
to low-Earth orbit. Satellite tracking consists mostly
of ground-based radar and telescopes.
Humankind has launched some 7,500 satel-
lites since the dawn of the Space Age, with more
than 1,500 still active. Companies including LeoSat
Enterprises, OneWeb, Planet Labs, and Elon Musk’s
SpaceX plan to put at least 20,000 more in orbit.
Defunct satellites often burn up in the atmos-
phere, while larger craft are sent to their doom in
a remote area of the South Paciic. Others are lown
farther into space, to an orbital graveyard. The irst
decades of spacefaring “relied upon the ‘big sky’
approach to avoiding orbital crashes,” says Andrew
Abraham, a senior researcher and engineer at
Aerospace. “The assumption was that the volume of
space is too large compared with the volume occu-
pied by man-made objects.” That approach, how-
ever, is becoming dated.
Spent satellites, or pieces of them, become hyper-
sonic space lotsam. One catastrophic incident,
such as the 2009 collision of a U.S. satellite with a
dead Russian craft, can mean disaster not only for
the company involved but also for other operators.
New debris increases uncertainty and requires quick
assessments to determine who needs to move out of
the way and how fast. The 2009 accident, coupled
with China’s deliberate destruction of a weather
satellite two years earlier, account for more than
one-third of all the space junk in low-Earth orbit,
according to a 2011 NASA study.
With each collision comes more debris—and
more risk for any multimillion-dollar orbiting
object. Today, satellite operators must manage
these potential disasters (known in the industry
as “conjunctions”) every month or two, but soon
they’ll become routine, Abraham says.
The U.S. Joint Space Operations Center, which
tracks about 22,000 objects in orbit, issued
1.2 million collision warnings in 2016, prompting
148 avoidance maneuvers. Usually the warnings
come about ive to seven days before a potential
collision, according to retired U.S. Navy Admiral
Cecil Haney, an Aerospace senior adviser
1957
2017
Orbital Obstacle Course
Objects launched into space, by year
○ As space gets more crowded, tiny transponders could help satellites avoid crashes
Air Tra cControl,
Without theAir
453
objects went up
in 2017, more than
double 2016’s total
Skylab space
station, 1973
Milestone launches ⊲
Voyager 1 space
probe, 1977
Hubble Space
Telescope, 1990
First module of the
International Space
Station, 1998