Content area
Full Text
We are all dependent on space resources in one way or another. That dependency has been increasing for over half a century, even though the extent of our reliance has only become apparent to the general population in the new millennium. The 2015 Space Report, published by the Space Foundation, reported that from 2005 through 2014, the global space economy nearly doubled, generating $330 billion in 2014.1
We rely on satellites for national security and everyday conveniences. A loss of communication, television, meteorological, remote sensing, GPS, or reconnaissance satellites would have profound consequences because there is virtually no facet of modern life that is not enabled by some satellite in space, which makes their vulnerability to damage or destruction by space debris a serious threat.
This article describes the phenomenon of space debris and the challenges involved in its removal or mitigation. Next, the article examines the framework of international space law pertaining to space debris and posits that interpretation of existing space treaty law may provide a legally valid and pragmatic means of addressing the problem of debris removal and the disconnect that generally exists between the responsibility for placing items in space versus removing them.
What Qualifies as Space Debris?
Since AT&T and Intelsat placed the first commercial satellites in orbit in the early 1960s, the world has launched about 6,600 satellites. Most of them, working or not, are still orbiting in space. Of the 300,000 objects currently being tracked, only 1,265 provide sendee; all of the others are uncontrolled and uncontrollable debris.
Historically, spontaneous explosions of rocket stages containing leftover propellant were responsible for creating most of the new debris in space. More recently, as the volume of debris has increased, collisions among objects are becoming more frequent. Two events-in 2007, when China destroyed its own weather satellite, and in 2009, when a Russian spy satellite collided with an American communications satellite-illustrate the problem. Fallout from these two incidents alone produced an additional 5,000 objects, each of which may cause new collisions, thereby creating a chain reaction of collisions known as "the Kessler syndrome," generating constantly moving minefields of debris in the most popular orbits.2
The population of space debris is comprised of more than just fragments scattered from old collisions,...