Request for more space cooperation, us policy prevents any bilateral exchange



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Kessler Impact

Debris Coming

Space debris is a real problem – it is lethal, growing, and it must be stopped soon.


David in ’11, Leonard, Space.com’s Space Insider Columnist, Ugly Truth of Space Junk: Orbital Debris Problem to Triple by 2030, Space.com, http://www.space.com/11607-space-junk-rising-orbital-debris-levels-2030.html

In a recent conference here, Gen. William Shelton, commander of the U.S. Air Force Space Command, relayed his worries about rising amounts of human-made space junk. "The traffic is increasing. We've now got over 50 nations that are participants in the space environment," Shelton said last month during the Space Foundation’s 27th National Space Symposium. Given existing space situational awareness capabilities, over 20,000 objects are now tracked. [Worst Space Debris Events of All Time] "We catalog those routinely and keep track of them. That number is projected to triple by 2030, and much of that is improved sensors, but some of that is increased traffic," Shelton said. "Then if you think about it, there are probably 10 times more objects in space than we're able to track with our sensor capability today. Those objects are untrackable … yet they are lethal to our space systems -- to military space systems, civil space systems, commercial -- no one’s immune from the threats that are on orbit today, just due to the traffic in space." Tough neighborhood From a probability point of view, General Shelton added, smaller satellites, more debris, more debris is going to run into more debris, creating more debris. [Video: Fragmentation: Growing Threat of Space Junk] "It may be a pretty tough neighborhood," Shelton continued, in low-Earth orbit and geosynchronous Earth orbit "in the not too distant future." When asked if the U.S. Air Force plans on funding space debris mitigation capability, Shelton responded: "We haven’t found a way yet that is affordable and gives us any hope for mitigating space debris. The best we can do, we believe, is to minimize debris as we go forward with our operations. As we think about how we launch things, as we deploy satellites, minimizing debris is absolutely essential and we’re trying to convince other nations of that imperative as well." Shelton said that, unfortunately, with the duration of most things on orbit, "you get to live with the debris problem for many, many years and in some cases decades. So minimizing debris is important to us and it should be to other nations as well." Point of no return The concern over orbital debris has been building for several reasons, said Marshall Kaplan, an orbital debris expert within the Space Department at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. In Kaplan's view, spacefaring nations have passed the point of "no return," with the accumulation of debris objects in low-Earth orbits steadily building over the past 50 years. Add to the clutter, the leftovers of China’s anti-satellite (ASAT) test in 2007. "The fact that this single event increased the number of debris objects by roughly 25 percent was not as important as the location of the intercept. The event took place at an altitude of 865 kilometers, right in the middle of the most congested region of low-orbiting satellites," Kaplan pointed out. Toss into the brew the collision of an Iridium satellite with an expired Russian Cosmos spacecraft in February 2009 -- at an altitude similar to that of China’s ASAT test. As a result of 50 years of launching satellites and these two events, the altitude band from about 435 miles (700 km) to a little over 800 miles (1,300 km) has accumulated possibly millions of debris objects ranging from a few millimeters to a few meters, Kaplan said.

Space debris is increasing and can cause detrimental damage – Debris mitigation is needed.


ESA in 13, European Space Agency, Focus On Growing Threat of Space Debris, ESA, http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Operations/Space_Debris/Focus_on_growing_threat_of_space_debris

The continuing growth in space debris poses an increasing threat to economically vital orbital regions. Next week, hundreds of top experts from across the globe will meet at Europe’s largest-ever debris forum to share their latest research findings and discuss potential solutions. Satellite operators worldwide, including those flying telecom, weather, navigation, broadcast and climate-monitoring missions, are now focusing their efforts on controlling space debris. All human-made objects now in space result from the near-5000 launches by all spacefaring nations since the start of the space age. Around two thirds of catalogued objects originate from orbital break-ups – more than 240 explosions – and fewer than 10 known collisions. The 2009 collision between America’s Iridium-33 civil communications satellite and Russia’s Kosmos-2251 military satellite destroyed both and created a large amount of debris – more than 2200 tracked fragments. Scientists estimate the level of space debris orbiting Earth to be around 29 000 objects larger than 10 cm, 670 000 pieces larger than 1 cm, and more than 170 million above 1 mm. “Any of these objects can harm an operational spacecraft,” says Heiner Klinkrad, Head of ESA’s Space Debris Office. Heiner explains that satellite collisions with fragments larger than 10 cm would be catastrophic, releasing hazardous debris clouds that can cause further catastrophic collisions that may lead to increasing debris in some orbits. “Space debris mitigation measures, if properly implemented by satellite designers and mission operators, can curtail the growth rate of the debris population. Active debris removal, however, has been shown to be necessary to reverse the debris increase,” says Heiner. The ultimate goal is to prevent collisional cascading from setting in over the next few decades.

In the Squo there is little to no effort on removing space debris capable of taking out spacecraft


Leonard January 16, 2015 ; David, “Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is former director of research for the National Commission on Space and is co-author of Buzz Aldrin's 2013 book, "Mission to Mars — My Vision for Space Exploration," published by National Geographic with a new updated paperback version to be released in May. “ Dealing with Space Junk: The Rocky Road Ahead, Space.com, http://www.space.com/28288-space-junk-problem-conference.html

Earth is encircled by an orbiting junkyard. Following 50 years of space exploration and utilization, more than 22,000 pieces of space junk at least 4 inches (10 centimeters) wide are now being tracked in Earth’s orbit. And hundreds of thousands to millions of bits of space flotsam are too small to be spotted with current tracking capabilities. Many of these tiny, fast-moving pieces are capable of crippling or taking out a spacecraft. In October, for example, the International Space Station had to be maneuvered via Europe’s Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) to avoid a hand-size piece of Russia’s Cosmos 2251 satellite, which broke up after colliding with another satellite in 2009. Any cleanup program will take years to implement and decades to carry out. To be sure, space junk is an international concern and will be the topic of many high-level discussions in 2015 and beyond. The University of Maryland's Center for Orbital Debris Education and Research (CODER) held an Orbital Debris Workshop over three days this past November to discuss a number of space-junk issues, including intersections with space policy and national security, as well as treaty and legal concerns. Also detailed in the meeting were entrepreneurial opportunities, as well as debris tracking, modeling and simulation technologies. The historical aspects of debris creation were addressed by Donald Kessler, NASA’s first senior scientist for orbital debris. Now retired from NASA, Kessler has been dubbed the "Father of Orbital Debris." In the 1970s, he proposed that space-junk collisions could have a dramatic cascading effect, eventually generating so much debris that the flotsam could threaten space exploration and satellite operations. This troubling snowball effect is now known as the "Kessler syndrome." Sustainable space environment Kessler was pleased to see a diversity of experts at the meeting, all of whom were interested in maintaining a sustainable space environment. "In the past, most of the attention has been focused on technical issues. However, legal issues and outdated policy could discourage the financial incentives necessary to solve the technical issues and make them operational," Kessler told Space.com. Active debris removal requires delicate navigation to the target. Kessler said that there is a critical need for government, commercial and legal communities to work together "to develop a realistic long-term space management policy that leads to a sustainable space environment." Another workshop participant was Roger Launius, Associate Director for Collections and Curatorial Affairs at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. "My first thought is that this is fundamentally a policy problem to be solved, yet there seems to be no serious effort underway — not even modest rules of the road — that will solve this problem," Launius told Space.com. A good majority of the people participating in the meeting were engineers who focused on technological fixes, Launius said. "Some of those [proposed solutions] might actually work, but they also raise more policy issues which no one seems to know how to fix," he said. Lasers in the jungle For example, the use of lasers to de-clutter space was championed by some during the meeting. "Even if technically feasible, what level of international saber rattling would come from efforts to laser anything in space, either from the ground or from spacecraft? Weapons in space … how could they be considered anything else?" Launius said. "What could possibly go wrong?" "Orbital debris really seems to be a 21st century problem of the community of nations, and it will have to be solved in an international setting," Launius said. One worrisome trend, he said, is the increasing number of tiny CubeSats and their potential for creating large additional debris fields. Technical problem Another workshop attendee was Dennis Wingo, CEO of Skycorp Inc., based at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. "The principal problem with low-Earth orbit [LEO] orbital debris is that the Russians own most of it and will allow nothing to be done," Wingo said. "Nothing will be done for the rest until a disaster happens and everyone is forced into it." Wingo’s view is that there’s a fundamental technical problem: the amount of energy that it takes to move from one piece of debris to the next. "As far as I can see, electrodynamic tethers are the only realistic means of dealing with the problem," Wingo said, referring to a strategy that would use magnetic-field forces of the Earth to hasten the orbital decay of a satellite. Making a business case The experts at the CODER meeting also focused on ways to make taking out space junk profitable. "Due to energies required to move from orbit to orbit, it is almost impossible to make a business case for commercial LEO orbital debris removal," Wingo said. But the situation at the higher-up geosynchronous orbit (GEO) — where many communications and weather satellites lie — is a different story, Wingo said. Most debris in GEO is co-orbital — two or more objects share, or almost share, an orbit. "In GEO, we cannot wait until a disaster, due to the enormous financial consequences involved in a single collision," Wingo said. "Yet neither the operators nor the insurance underwriters seem to have any sense of urgency on the matter." Launius sees a host of unanswered questions surrounding the orbital debris issue. "I wish I had some answers, but at least the first step is to admit we have a problem. The people at the workshop at least recognize the problem. I'm not sure most others do," Launius concluded.

Without immediate action, more debris will collect in orbit and ASAT weapons will continue to proliferate


Grego and Wright 2010

Laura Grego: a senior scientist in the Global Security Program of the Union of Concerned Scientists, and David Wright: a senior scientist and co-director of the UCS Global Security Program. “Securing the Skies Ten Steps the United States Should Take to Improve the Security and Sustainability of Space” Union of concerned scientists November 2010. Website. Accessed 6-27-16. http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/legacy/assets/documents/nwgs/securing-the-skies-full-report-1.pdf



Third, threats to satellites can amplify the risks of other undesirable outcomes, such as the creation or escalation of terrestrial crises. The development of ASAT capabilities by one country could create enough suspicion and tension to spur the development of ASAT weapons by others. Because so much of satellite and space-launch technology is dual-use, development of space systems would increase the chances of dangerous misinterpretations, especially in the absence of clearly stated policies and meaningful communication between countries. Moreover, if ASAT weapons are being developed and tested, the loss of an important satellite during a time of political tension could be interpreted—rightly or wrongly—as an attack. Quickly determining the reason for the satellite’s disruption might be difficult or impossible, and this incomplete information together with the absence of reliable channels for communication between countries that are not close allies could exacerbate the crisis even further, possibly leading to its escalation. Recent “war game” conflict simulations confirm that such a satellite loss could have very serious consequences.6 without near-term attention, some of the aforementioned issues could become much more difficult to address in the future. Despite the development of international guidelines for slowing the accumulation of debris, the amount of large debris (greater than 10 centimeters in size) in orbit has grown by 50 percent in the past four years, primarily because of events that would not have occurred had there been full compliance with these guidelines (see Figure 1). Half of the known collisions between objects in space have occurred since 2005 (Wright 2009). (See Table 1.) In 2009, the first collision of two intact satellites, an active Iridium satellite and a defunct Russian Cosmos satellite, produced a large amount of debris. This event demonstrated the need for better coordination among space users and better monitoring of space objects. As more countries launch satellites, the need becomes even more pressing for establishing safety standards—pertinent both to launches and to the satellites themselves—and for improving compliance with debris-mitigation guidelines. The increase in the number of satellites and debris is also highlighting the existing weaknesses of the SSN to accurately track them in a sufficiently timely manner, in turn limiting the ability of the United States to unilaterally manage space traffic and predict possible collisions. While the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST) provides that all countries are free to use space for peaceful purposes so long as they respect the interests of other space users7 and operate in accordance with international law, it does not explicitly prohibit deliberate ASAT attacks on satellites or prevent the testing of ASAT weapons in ways that pose risks to other space users. The OST bans orbiting nuclear weapons, but it does not outlaw the possession of other kinds of space weapons. Additionally, few limits or guidelines exist on technologies suited to ASAT use, such as hit-to-kill missiles and high-powered satellite-tracking lasers. The demonstrations of destructive ASAT capability by China in January 2007 and the United States in February 2008, along with recent Indian statements of interest in developing an ASAT capability,8 indicate that the long-standing restraint regarding such systems has been weakened.9 Devising effective limits on ASAT capabilities or use becomes increasingly difficult as more weapons are developed and tested and more countries develop policy rationales and military doctrine for using them.

Debris Bad- Destroys Satellites



Space debris has the potential to destroy all satellites in low earth orbit


Sharon Weinberger 18 May 2012 http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120518-danger-space-junk-alert Staff Writer for the BBC

Kessler first started thinking about space debris in 1970 when there was concern about pieces of asteroids and comets, known as meteoroids, and the risk of them striking an Apollo spacecraft. Kessler was studying asteroid collisions, which are responsible for much of the meteoroid population, when it suddenly occurred to him that sooner or later satellites in Earth’s orbit would also collide, producing growing numbers of fragments. “I was just curious as to how long it would be before that would happen,” recalls Kessler, who is now retired and living in North Carolina. Before he could come up with solid estimates, NASA ended the Apollo program and put him to work in another area. But Kessler continued to think about satellite collisions, and he got another shot at pursuing the problem in the late-1970s when NASA created an office to look at the environmental impacts of the space shuttle program. Kessler was asked to look at solar power stations in Earth’s orbit. “I used that as an excuse to then work on orbital debris and did the calculations,” he says. At the time NASA scientists generally believed that North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad) was cataloguing all man-made objects in space, but Kessler suspected there might be small debris that was slipping past the military’s radar network. And if the debris wasn’t there yet, it would be eventually, he reasoned. In a landmark paper published in 1978, he calculated that the number of trackable man-made objects orbiting Earth had increased by 13% per year from 1966 to 1976. He predicted that by about the year 2000 fragments from satellite collisions would pose a serious threat to other satellites, creating a "debris belt". “I was shocked at the answer,” he says. That’s not all, however. Because each collision in space would result in hundreds of pieces of new debris, the threat of future collisions would grow exponentially, until low Earth orbit, the region between 100-1,240 miles (160-2,000 km) above our planet, would become a no-go zone for spacecraft. “That ended up getting a lot of people’s attention," he said. Following the publication of his report, Kessler became the seer of space junk, and the snowball effect he described was dubbed the “Kessler syndrome.” For many years, however, his work remained mainly of interest to scientists and space agencies. That quickly changed five years ago. In 2007, China conducted an anti-satellite weapon test, which destroyed a decommissioned weather satellite, turning it into 150,000 pieces larger than 1 cm across. And two years later a defunct Russian communications satellite called Cosmos 2251 struck an Iridium communications satellite some 500 miles (800 km) above the Earth. Just as Kessler predicted, the catastrophic collisions spawned tens of thousands of new pieces of debris, some of which were large enough to take out other satellites, and large numbers of smaller pieces big enough to cause significant damage. It was a piece from the Cosmos satellite that struck the ISS in March. The Kessler syndrome has long since ceased to be a merely theoretical doomsday scenario.

Destroys Hege/Econ

Kessler Syndrome destroys military readiness, the power grid, all wireless communication, GPS, credit cards, weather surveillance, and climate research


George Dvorsky 6/04/15 2:00pm http://io9.gizmodo.com/what-would-happen-if-all-our-satellites-were-suddenly-d-1709006681 Chair of the Board for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

Lastly, there’s the Kessler Syndrome to consider. This scenario was portrayed in the 2013 film Gravity. In the movie, a Russian missile strike on a defunct satellite inadvertently causes a cascading chain reaction that formed an ever-growing cloud of orbiting space debris. Anything in the cloud’s wake — including satellites, space stations, and astronauts — gets annihilated. Disturbingly, the Kessler Syndrome is a very real possibility, and the likelihood of it happening is steadily increasing as more stuff gets thrown into space. Given these grim prospects, it’s fair to ask what might happen to our civilization if any of these things happened. At the risk of gross understatement, the complete loss of our satellite fleet would instigate a tremendous disruption to our current mode of technological existence — disruptions that would be experienced in the short, medium, and long term, and across multiple domains. Almost immediately we’d notice a dramatic reduction in our ability to communicate, share information, and conduct transactions. “If our communications satellites are lost, then bandwidth is also lost,” Jonathan McDowell tells io9. He’s an astrophysicists and Chandra Observatory scientist who works out of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. McDowell says that, with telecommunication satellites wiped out, the burden of telecommunications would fall upon undersea cables and ground-based communication systems. But while many forms of communication would disappear in an instant, others would remain. All international calls and data traffic would have to be re-routed, placing tremendous pressure on terrestrial and undersea lines. Oversaturation would stretch the capacity of these systems to the limit, preventing many calls from going through. Hundreds of millions of Internet connections would vanish, or be severely overloaded. A similar number of cell phones would be rendered useless. In remote areas, people dependent on satellite for television, Internet, and radio would practically lose all service. “Indeed, a lot of television would suddenly disappear,” says McDowell. “A sizable portion of TV comes from cable whose companies relay programming from satellites to their hubs.” It’s important to note that we actually have a precedent for a dramatic — albeit brief — disruption in com-sat capability. Back in 1998, there was a day in which a single satellite failed and all the world’s pagers stopped working. We would also lose the Global Positioning System. In the years since its inception, GPS has become ubiquitous, and a surprising number of systems have become reliant on it. Lockheed-Martin’s GPS-III-AHI satellite “Apart from the fact that everyone has forgotten to navigate without GPS in their cars, many airplanes use GPS as well,” says McDowell. Though backup systems exist, airlines use GPS to chart the most fuel-efficient and expeditious routes. Without GPS and telecomm-sats, aircraft controllers would have tremendous difficulty communicating with and routing airplanes. Airlines would have to fall back to legacy systems and procedures. Given the sheer volume of airline traffic today, accidents would be all but guaranteed. Other affected navigation systems would include those aboard cargo vessels, supply-chain management systems, and transportation hubs driven by GPS. But GPS does more than just provide positioning — it also provides for timing. Ground-based atomic clocks can perform the same function, but GPS is increasingly being used to distribute the universal time standard via satellites. Within hours of a terminated service, any distributing networks requiring tight synchronization would start to suffer from “clock drift,” leading to serious performance issues and outright service outages. Such disruptions could affect everything from the power grid through to the financial sector. In the report, “A Day Without Space: Economic and National Security Ramifications,” Ed Morris, the Executive Director of the Office of Space Commerce at the Department of Commerce, writes: If you think it is hard to get work done when your internet connection goes out at the office, imagine losing that plus your cell phone, TV, radio, ATM access, credit cards, and possibly even your electricity. [...] Wireless services, especially those built to CDMA standard, would fail to hand off calls from one cell to the next, leading to dropped connections. Computer networks would experience slowdowns as data is pushed through finite pipelines at reduced bit rates. The same would be true for major networks for communication and entertainment, since they are all IP-based today and require ultra-precise timing to ensure digital traffic reaches its destination. The lack of effective synch would hit especially hard in banking, where the timing of transactions needs to be recorded. Credit card payments and bank accounts would likely freeze, as billions of dollars could be sucked away from businesses. A financial crash is not out of the question. The sudden loss of satellite capability would have a profound effect on the military. Useless without GPS: The U.S. Navy’s Harpoon missile (U.S. Navy) The Marshall Institute puts it this way: “Space is a critical enabler to all U.S. warfare domains,” including intelligence, navigation, communications, weather prediction, and warfare. McDowell describes satellite capability as as the “backbone” of the U.S. military. And as 21st century warfare expert Peter W. Singer from New America Foundation tells io9, “He who controls the heavens will control what happens in the battles of Earth.” Singer summarized the military consequences of losing satellites in an email to us: Today there are some 1,100 active satellites which act as the nervous system of not just our economy, but also our military. Everything from communications to GPS to intelligence all depend on it. Potential foes have noticed, which is why Russia and China have recently begun testing a new generation of anti-satellite weapons, which in turn has sparked the U.S. military to recently budget $5 billion for various space warfare systems. What would happen if we lost access to space? Well, the battles would, as one U.S. military officer put it, take us back to the “pre digital age.” Our drones, our missiles, even our ground units wouldn’t be able to operate the way we plan. It would force a rewrite of all our assumptions of 21st century high tech war. We might have a new generation of stealthy battleships...but the loss of space would mean naval battles would in many ways be like the game of Battleship, where the two sides would struggle to even find each other. Moreover, and as McDowell explains to io9, the loss of satellite capability would have a profound effect on arms control capabilities. Space systems can monitor compliance; without them, we’d be running blind. “The overarching consideration is that you wouldn’t really know what’s going on,” says McDowell. “Satellites provide for both global and local views of what’s happening. We would be less connected, less informed — and with considerably degraded situational awareness.” Compromised Weather Prediction and Climate Science One great thing satellites have done for us is improve our ability to forecast weather. Predicting a slight chance of cloudiness is all well and good, but some areas, like India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, are dependent on such systems to predict potentially hazardous monsoons. And in the U.S., the NOAA has estimated that, during a typical hurricane season, weather satellites save as much as $3 billion in lives and property damage. There’s also the effect on science to consider. Much of what we know about climate change comes from satellites. As McDowell explains, the first couple of weeks without satellites wouldn’t make much of a difference. But over a ten-year span, the lack of satellites would preclude our ability to understand and monitor such things as the ozone layer, carbon dioxide levels, and the distribution of polar ice. Ground-based and balloon-driven systems would help, but much of the data we’re currently tracking would suddenly become much spottier.


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