In the last blog post, we explored outer space and the environmental pollution created through human activities. This post will look beyond the cause and effects of space debris and examine the ways in which federal agencies has implemented protocols and measures to reduce and mitigate the amount of space debris polluted in the Earth’s orbit.

Firstly, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has come up with a NASA Procedural Requirements document to define the roles and requirements needed for NASA and other relevant stakeholders to take steps to preserve the near-Earth space environment (NASA, 2017). The document outlines various guiding policies that ensure the limitation of the generation of orbital debris and the increased removal of existing debris. Furthermore, other federal organisations such as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) have a significant role to play in reducing orbital debris as well. For example. the FCC implements restrictions on radio frequencies that may be used during space operations as the radio frequencies may cause malfunctions to the satellites (Migaud, 2020).  Additionally, the FCC also mandates that the telecommunications satellites that are operating within the geosynchronous earth orbit (a region of orbital patterns greater than 35,800 km above the earth’s surface) must exit the orbit or move into a storage orbit when the satellite’s operations are completed (migaud, 2020).

However, Migaud (2020) finds that these policies suffer from compliance issues as some of the regulations within the policies issued are not mandatory provided that the compliance of these regulations would exceed the financial capabilities of the launching parties. On another note, Garber (2017) provides an alternative solution to mitigate orbital debris, suggesting the idea of economic incentives to mitigate and remediate the debris.

Upon evaluation, NASA’s current procedural requirements regarding the mitigation of space debris is extensive and provides a detailed outline of the regulations that need to be followed to ensure minimal space pollution. Garber (2017)’s suggestion on economic incentives that follows successful economically-incentivised models such as the United State’s Emission Trading programme has a promising outlook. However, the unfortunate reality of this suggests that the economy weighs more significantly for the people as compared to the environment. Therefore, I believe that until we find a way in which humankind can operate in society and the economy while co-existing harmoniously with the environment, economic incentives may become unsustainable in the long run.

References

Garber, S.J. (2017) Incentives for Keeping Space Clean: Orbital Debris and Mitigation Waivers.

When we think about environmental pollution, we often think about how our land, water and air have been polluted. However, there is little awareness and coverage of how much we have polluted in space.

Since 1957, with the launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, there has been a construction of of satellite infrastructure in the orbit, yielding a system of byproducts, otherwise known as space debris, or more informally as space junk (Rand, 2016). The space debris is mostly concentrated in the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) which is the region of space around Earth within an altitude of 160 to 2,000km where a large number of active satellites operate (Singh, 2020). Singh (2020) further argues that the high concentration of space debris in the LEO is dangerous as the debris could cause collisions, obliterating the existing spacecrafts in the orbit. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has estimated that there are about  21,000 pieces of space debris that are sized larger than a softball orbiting the Earth that could cause damage to spacecrafts (Singh, 2020). The large number of pieces of space debris in the orbit illustrate the severity of the problem that space pollution creates.

Furthermore, as atmospheric density decreases exponentially the higher the altitude, objects that are above 1000km would remain in the orbit for hundreds and thousands of years, a challenge that our future generations have to deal with (Crowther, 2002). As such, the question of inequitable environmental injustice remains, where we should question whether our decisions of space infrastructure construction has created environmentally pollutive impacts to communities that have no say in the matter.

References