I Toured the Company Mapping Space Debris. Then I Polled Worried and Hopeful Scientists
[post_content]
Disclaimer: This article has been automatically aggregated from
Walking inside LeoLabs’ new space radar nestled in the Maui hills felt like entering a computer. Wires dangled overhead, servers whined, and the temperature climbed in the metal box as the air conditioning leaked out when we entered.
“You don’t want to be in there when the whole thing’s running,” said Matthew Adelman, LeoLabs’ senior manager of radar systems. “Not just for the safety, but also for the noise.”
Called Scout-S, this radar designed to track space objects is the size of a 20-foot shipping container and can be transported anywhere in the world. You can hook it up to an electrical grid and fiber internet, but its real calling card is portability. You could drop the Scout-S off-grid and have it running in a couple of hours. All you need is a generator and a Starlink dish to feed the radar’s data back to a computer.
I couldn’t help but appreciate the irony at the mention of the Starlink dish: The satellite internet service revolutionized the space industry, but it also jump-started a race to space that created the need for transportable radars like the Scout-S.
The Soviet Union launched the world’s first satellite in 1957; it would take another 53 years for the population to pass 1,000. When Starlink launched its first satellite in 2019, there were still only around 2,000 orbiting Earth. Today, we’re at 16,810, and nearly 2 out of every 3 belong to Starlink.
Each one of them is zooming above us at 17,000 mph. A collision between two of them could range from extremely troubling to catastrophic. Worst-case scenario, satellites colliding with each other or a piece of space debris could set off a feedback loop known as Kessler syndrome, in which one collision creates thousands of new pieces of debris that cause yet more collisions. It could ultimately make low Earth orbit, or LEO, the sweet spot where Starlink beams down fast, low-latency internet from 342 miles over our heads, so filled with space junk that it’s no longer usable.
“We worry a lot about it because we have seen that in the last few years, the number of spacecraft has increased exponentially, and we are not stopping it,” said Lorenzo Olivieri, a professor at the University of Padova. I spoke with him this week at the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies Conference, where he was presenting a paper on space debris populations from break-up events.
“The worrisome idea of the Kessler syndrome could be a real close future,” Olivieri said.
Exactly how worried you should be about a Kessler syndrome-like scenario depends on who you ask. When I polled scientists at AMOS, their answers ran the gamut. Some said it’s only a matter of time if we stay on our current trajectory, while others waved it off as the domain of science fiction. (See the 2013 movie Gravity for a particularly vivid dramatization.)
But you don’t have to be a Kessler syndrome pessimist to take crowded orbits seriously. Whether you’re a satellite operator looking to avoid collisions or the US military deploying space weapons, everyone at AMOS wants to know what’s going on in the skies. The industry, referred to as space situational awareness, is estimated to reach $1.9 billion this year.
Aside from dodging millions of pieces of satellite-killing debris, operators also have to communicate with each other about where and when they’ll be moving. It’s an enormous challenge: How do you get adversarial nations and competing companies to agree on appropriate behavior in space?
“Driving on the highway would be terrifying if everyone had their eyes closed,” Gabriel Swiney, the director of policy at the US Department of Commerce’s Office of Space Commerce, told me. “The problem is communication and knowledge.”
The issues circulating the AMOS conference were as terrifying as space lasers and as mundane as standardizing space data for easier sharing.
I was almost ready to write off these topics as niche industry concerns when I pulled my phone out to get directions back to my hotel. A GPS satellite zooming 12,550 miles over my head instantly showed me where I was and needed to go.
Key takeaways
- Orbital congestion: Nearly 17,000 active satellites raise serious concerns about potential orbital collisions and Kessler syndrome.
- Tracking technology: Ground-based portable radars and in-orbit cameras monitor space debris, though tracking objects under 10 centimeters remains difficult.
- Communication barriers: The main obstacle to space safety is the lack of open data sharing among competing entities and adversarial nations.
Traffic cameras for the skies
One engineer at AMOS described space awareness to me as having three stages: collection, processing and analysis. Many of the companies hawking their wares at the conference dabbled in multiple phases, but for the most part, they specialized in one of these buckets.
LeoLabs, the company that developed the transportable Scout-S radar, is primarily in the collection business. It has a dozen radar sites around the world, some of which can detect debris as small as 10 centimeters – a dangerous blind spot for most trackers.
“Think about the busy part of Seattle,” says Darren McKnight, senior technical fellow at LeoLabs. “If you have two traffic cameras, you don’t really know what route to take. You want traffic cameras at all the major intersections.”
It’s not always tiny pieces of debris — sometimes companies are even trying to find their own satellites up there. SpaceX, the company that operates Starlink, landed its reusable Falcon 9 rocket for the first time in 2015, kicking off a wave of “rideshare” launches.
Some of these had as many as 140 payloads, making it a challenge for satellite operators to even determine which ones were theirs.
“Once the first rideshare launch became a thing, that just exploded the number of things in orbit pretty quickly,” said Belinda Marchand, chief scientist at Slingshot Aerospace. “It was no longer just one launch vehicle and one object. It was one launch vehicle and a hundred.”
LeoLabs’ traffic cameras are all based on the ground, but other companies use cameras in orbit to give them a more detailed account of what’s happening in space.
“We use cameras that are in space to take pictures of other satellites in space,” said Hilary Cohen, director of operations at HEO USA. “There are trackers that track the dots and you know exactly where those satellites are. But this lets us go a layer deeper.”
Google Maps for satellites
But even if companies and countries do a good job of gathering information about their orbital goods, sharing it with other operators is an entirely different challenge. The key piece of information that everyone needs is called “ephemeris,” which lists the position and velocity of an object in orbit.
“Ephemeris basically is like my Google Maps,” McKnight said. “You’re sending it to everybody on the road with you and saying, ‘Here’s where I’m going to be.’”
The way scientists talked about ephemeris at AMOS sounded like castaways on deserted islands pleading for water. As good as the radars and space cameras have gotten, they don’t tell you when and where a satellite is planning on moving.
“Our community has an ephemeris sharing problem,” Jonathan Herman, senior director of Starlink Constellation Engineering, said at his keynote address. “The No. 1 risk in LEO is not debris. It is instead that operators don’t know where other satellites are going.”
Herman noted that Starlink satellites perform around 1,000 collision-avoidance maneuvers per day, all of which consume valuable fuel and decrease the lifespan of the satellites. That number of maneuvers was described to me as “horrendously high” in a previous interview.
It’s a double-edged sword: Starlink does an exceptional job at avoiding objects in space, but the fact that they have to move so much makes it harder for other operators to know where its satellites are going to be.
Still, almost everyone I talked to at AMOS spoke about Starlink as a responsible steward of space. If you wanted an example of reckless behavior in orbit, there were much easier targets.
The geopolitical barrier
Not all of the technical problems involving satellite maneuvering are particularly complex. Herman, the Starlink director, said they could be solved in a few hours by getting everyone in a room together. The bigger hurdle is communication.
“We may understand at an operator-to-operator level what the best practices are, and the Chinese operators may understand that, too,” Audrey Schaffer, senior VP of global policy and government strategy, said on a panel. “But the challenge that we have is that the Chinese government is uncomfortable with their operators going directly to other operators.”
Commercial and defense domains in space are deeply interwoven. (I heard some version of the sentence, “Space is a warfighting domain,” at least a dozen times at AMOS.) If there’s a space company that doesn’t rely on military money at all, I didn’t find it here.
“Within the last 18 months, we’ve seen a lot more open discussion of the importance of defense funding,” said Ian Christensen, senior director of private sector programs at the Secure World Foundation. “There’s been a real pivot towards defense funding as the most stable and largest source of funding.”
That tension between military and civilian operations was woven through many of the conversations I had at AMOS. This development hasn’t come out of nowhere – Elon Musk said over a year ago that Ukraine’s “entire front line would collapse if I turned it off” — but you could feel AMOS’ attendees on both the military and commercial sides grappling with the balance in real-time.
“Russia’s actions consider every vendor here a legitimate target based on their cooperation with the US government and governments of NATO,” Col. Jonathan Whitaker, chief of staff of NATO’s Combined Forces Space Component Command, said at a panel. “When you take that perspective, there’s really no safe harbor for a commercial company.”
The bottom line
I walked away from AMOS feeling simultaneously comforted and pessimistic. As one person put it to me, there are around 40,000 tracked objects, but the island of Maui alone has about 184,000 registered vehicles.
The reality is more complicated — there are an estimated 1.2 million objects in orbit the size of a softball or smaller that aren’t tracked – but it’s a fair point. As Elon Musk is fond of saying, “Space is really big.”
“What I worry about is not so much the number of objects, which do make easier headlines,” said Swiney, the director at the Office of Space Commerce. “The much harder problem to solve is, how do you get someone on the phone if you’re not allowed to talk to them, or if you don’t even know what their phone number is in the first place?
“The technical problems are relatively easy to solve if we can get past the policy.”
for informational purposes only. We do not claim ownership, accuracy, or liability for the content provided. All rights belong to the original publisher.