Space junk is falling from the sky. We are still not doing enough to stop it

Debris thought to be from a spacecraft launched from French Guiana was found by residents of Salinopolis, Brazil, on April 28, 2014. The piece of space wreckage bears the logo of the UK Space Agency and Arianespace, the European satellite launch company.

Image: TARSO SARRAF/AFP via Getty Images

Every once in a while, a piece of space junk hurtles through the atmosphere and crashes into Earth. Just last month, a 23-ton chunk of space debris fell – safely, thankfully – into the south-central Pacific Ocean. The debris came from the October 31 launch of China's Long March 5B rocket, which has been notorious for its uncontrolled returns to Earth. 

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You might not have heard very much about these crashes, but there's a good chance you will in the future. As the space economy takes off, our low-Earth orbit (LEO) highways are getting crowded. That raises the likelihood of collisions – and of crash landings on Earth. 

"Even though all of outer space might be infinite, where we put satellites are very specific regions," astrodynamicist Moriba Jah tells ZDNET. "They're becoming more congested."

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Jah is the chief scientist for Privateer, a recently launched company backed by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Privateer's mission is to bring more visibility to our space superhighways, where satellites zoom past one another at 17,000 miles per hour. The company wants to bring that visibility with proprietary knowledge graph technology, which allows it to create visualizations of all the satellites and debris in space. With its data engine, Privateer has created Wayfinder, an open-access tool that lets others in the space economy create the visualizations they need to occupy low-Earth orbit safely.

But Jah and others argue that the five-year rule doesn't go far enough. For one thing, international regulators need to make sure there are consequences for those who don't follow the rules. Dickinson noted that there are already satellites that have been floating in space for more than 25 years after being decommissioned – exceeding the current guidelines. 

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Space junk should be dealt with as quickly as possible, and there should be some form of accountability if it doesn't happen, Dickinson said. 

"If an operator says I'm going to do 'X,' and it doesn't happen, there's no real penalties at the moment," he explained. "If someone launches 1,000 spacecraft into LEO and they decommission 90% successfully but leave 10% behind, there's no real rules about what the penalty is." 

Furthermore, Dickinson added, regulators need to tackle the tough question of what to do if a satellite company goes bankrupt. 

"If you don't decommission... but you're adding more up there the whole time, all of these constellations, the amount of space fills up," he said. "And more, those end-of-life satellites are left as bits of junk. And because they're passive, they can't avoid a collision."

Meanwhile, satellite operators that have to get rid of their space junk often dispose of it through 'uncontrolled atmospheric re-entry' – in other words, letting it burn up in the sky as it falls back to Earth. Yet as the recent crash of China's Long March 5B rocket demonstrated, the larger a spacecraft is, the less likely it is to completely burn up. The spacecraft that do burn up in the atmosphere are leaving behind chemicals that could damage the Earth's ozone layer, researchers say.

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