Tracking space junk is becoming a job for the Commerce Department as the business-focused bureaucracy assumes a larger role facilitating commercial activities in space. But the task is easier said than done.
Comprehensively charting the location and path of space debris is not currently possible, and the department’s charge is to establish only a “basic level” of space situational awareness “for public and private use.”
Vice President Mike Pence and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced the new role last month. It will be handled by the department’s new Office of Space Commerce, and all parties appear to acknowledge the challenge.
A policy document being prepared for President Trump’s approval “will encourage the commercial space industry to partner with government to develop data-sharing systems, technical guidelines, and safety standards to apply domestically and be promoted internationally that will help minimize debris and avoid satellite collisions during launch and while in orbit,” a Commerce Department official told the Washington Examiner.
The Defense Department will continue its own space situational awareness data collection “and will work closely with the Department of Commerce as Commerce becomes the ideal interface for coordination of government data collection and private sector application,” the official said.
Far from being a rapidly formed FAA-for-space, Ross said last month that he intends to convene an international space regulatory conference by January 2019 to discuss the topic.
Tracking space junk is incredibly difficult, and even a basic level of space situational awareness will be tough as current technologies don’t comprehensively track objects orbiting the Earth. Different sizes, shapes, orbits and altitudes add to the challenge.
In low-Earth orbit, less than 2,000 kilometers from the surface, objects can be identified with radar. Higher up, in geosynchronous orbit, telescopes or special satellites are necessary.
About 20 land-based radar systems track items in low-Earth orbit, but coverage isn’t comprehensive and the small size of some objects makes them difficult to spot, said Brian Weeden, director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation — an organization that seeks “sustainable and peaceful uses of outer space.”
“It’s more of a spot check than a constant tracking,” Weeden said.
“Currently, we’re tracking about 23,000 space objects in orbit around the Earth bigger than 10 cm. That includes about 1,800 active satellites and the rest space debris,” Weeden said. “We think there’s another 500,000 or so smaller pieces of space debris down to 1 cm that we can’t reliably track at the moment.”
Space junk in low-Earth orbit consists of items such as rocket bodies and debris from collisions, and will eventually come down, said John Crassidis, director of the Center for Multisource Information Fusion at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Geosynchronous orbit, meanwhile, is a permanent graveyard for old commercial and government satellites, he said.
Crassidis said determining the path of objects is difficult, since knowing the speed and direction depends on calculations based on details such as shape that are not readily available. Radar systems that track space junk are not integrated, meaning there’s no central hub, and there are large gaps in coverage, including over unfriendly territory, Crassidis said.
“Even if you did have persistent surveillance … that becomes a huge data association nightmare. That’s solving one problem and creating another,” Crassidis added.
Until now, the U.S. government’s anti-space junk monitoring rested largely with the military.
In 2010, the U.S. military added tracking capabilities with the SBSS Block 10 satellite for geosynchronous orbits. In 2014 and in August 2017, the Air Force launched four satellites to monitor outer-orbit items as part of its Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program.
“Since 2010, the U.S. military has been providing close approach warnings to all satellite operators around the world,” Weeden said. “This was a policy change made after the 2009 collision between the US Iridium 33 and Russian Cosmos 2251 satellites. Prior to the collision, the U.S. military had been screening close approaches for only a limited number of satellites.”
Weeden said big challenges loom for the Commerce Department, including the fact that the military may not be inclined to share all of its data for corporate use.
“I think the biggest drawback of this approach is that they will still be hamstrung by the national security restrictions on sharing the data and on the capability limitations of the DOD systems,” he said. “A lot of the tracking data comes from radars that have other missions such as missile warning or missile defense, so there are restrictions on how much data can be shared. And the U.S. Air Force has struggled for more than a decade to upgrade its software and computer systems to be able to handle the increased workload.
“Continuing to rely on those systems will limit how much better the Department of Commerce can make the service.”
