There's no incentive to me to make my satellite safely de-orbit before it gets broken into pieces. So why would I bother? That's expensive.
But like all 'easy to litter, hard to clean up' problems of this nature, we have a solution already: require a cleanup deposit ahead of time that will be returned to whoever cleans it up.
All space-launching countries should sign an accord that said something along the lines of "Every satellite must have a deposit to the international Kessler Fund", say something like $X/kg, inflation adjusted. Companies would spring up with the sole purpose of de-orbiting defunct satellites. Launch would become more expensive, yes, but soon every bit of metal in space would come equipped with a plan for how we're getting it out of orbit.
A few problems holding a solution like that back right now:
1) It takes a ton of fuel to change your orbit once you're in space, and space is _really_ big (even just the orbital ranges we're talking about). It's just not currently feasible for a ship like that to capture debris and then use _more_ fuel to bring it back down.
2) Relative velocities of some debris are so large (and they are so spread out) that it's not yet feasible to capture it and bring it back with any current approach.
Dead satellites are mostly dangerous for the scattered debris they _might_ become if something hits them/they bread up. So while bringing them back is important, it's not as immediate a danger as things that have already broken up.
Basically, we don't have any approach that would make a major difference, even if money was no object (which it is).
Maybe it would be time to have a global agreement that all satellites must implement the means of "disposal re-entry" so they can be taken out of the space scrapyard and safely (as much as possible anyway) crashed to earth.
The amount of debris in space is going to be a problem that's going to be both costly to solve and very detrimental to future space systems if we continue to not do enough about it.
It's not big satellites in controlled orbits that are a major problem from a space junk standpoint. Mostly it's the smaller fragments that are the problem, which outnumber satellites by a huge margin. Besides which, the easier it would be to launch satellites into orbit the easier, and cheaper, it would be to launch programs for cleaning up debris and abandoned satellites.
In fact, if launch were significantly cheaper then Earth orbiting satellites could be equipped with special sub-systems designed to deorbit them if the main satellite became inoperable.
Nice idea using them for clearing orbital debris, but the $1bn cost of doing it "conventionally" seems a reasonable price to pay for continued access to space.
If we don't do something, we will end up trapped on this ball of rock by lethal kessler syndrome.
Why isn't there legislation mandating that space operators tidy up after themselves?
Wait, stupid question, we can't get that right even on earth.
Obviously the fix for this is to let the one that wants to have the satellite in that orbit pay for the cleaning of that orbit instead of some government.
An interesting idea, but it would be prohibitively expensive; in terms of Delta-V and cost.
You are already launching a satellite into an orbit where it will try avoid existing space debris. So, anything added to the payload to de-orbit space debris would have to spend delta-v adjusting it's orbit to match that of the space junk. Then it would need enough fuel left over to de-orbit the target.
I think it would be better if a certain amount of the launch cost would go towards a fund meant to de-orbit space junk.
Debris can be caused by defunct companies that put sats up when this all wasn't a concern.
Also, deorbiting a sat at end of life is one thing, but deorbiting debris from an accidental collision (or an intentional one, just not intended by the sat's owner!) is a completely different thing. Companies do plan for end of life sat deorbiting, but it's hard to ask them to plan for unintentional collision debris deorbiting.
Paying for debris cleanup could be a thing that new sat deployment could be required to have covered, but without first knowing the cost of debris cleanup, it's hard to charge enough. Debris cleanup has never been done, so we don't know the cost of it! Also, if the government were the escrow agent, you know the money would just be spent, so the escrow would have to be a private entity.
Lastly, a lot of debris in orbit is due to anti-sat missile testing by nation states, so you're really asking them to clean up their debris.
Thinking ahead, we’ve learned from projects like skyscrapers to engineer destructability into projects, and from abandoned infrastructure like windmills to require the builder to post bonds to pay for abatement and removal. Why aren’t we doing this in space?
We regulate the heck out of launches; why not require orbital devices to have a built in deorbit mechanism (or “move to a parking orbit mechanism” for non-LEO), and/or require posting a bond to pay for someone to go clean up your mess?
For the most part they already do what you suggest.
Companies are required to have plans for save disposal. The problem is currently if you have a total failure, you are not required to pay for removal. This could be added as a law and then it would just be part of the insurance package.
Also, most actual space junk in LEO are government sats or parts of rockets that launched government sats.
Commercial stuff is mostly in GEO and there you also have a disposal problem but its quite a different problem then LEO.
> Space companies pay a fee per launch. Amount gets pooled.
This seems to be a very bad approach. Amount of launch does not have much to do with how much debris exists.
Mission-for-mission makes no sense, who decides what mass or orbit of junk counts for your mission? You really have to wait years and set up a whole different mission architecture before you can launch your own project? It's bananas. However a cleanup tax on satellite launches used to fund recovery efforts might work.
IMO we need to stop putting satellites in orbits above ~800km altogether. No matter how careful you are there will always be accidents, and once a collision or explosion occurs in high orbit the debris is essentially a permanent fixture of the solar system, lasting far longer than a human lifetime. There is no feasible method to clean up such collision debris for the foreseeable future. Even assuming SpaceX Starship is wildly successful and launching a thousand times more mass to orbit for dirt cheap, collision debris cleanup is still infeasible. The only realistic way of cleaning collision debris is the natural way, the atmosphere. But it only works on reasonable timeframes when you're below a certain altitude.
Luckily the reasons why we used to launch satellites into high orbit are mostly obsolete now. We did it for three reasons: firstly so the satellites would last longer because they are expensive, secondly to get higher land area coverage from fewer satellites again because satellites are expensive, and thirdly to make it possible to use stationary or slow-moving satellite dishes. Now that launching satellites is much cheaper and likely to get even more so, the first two reasons are obsolete. The third reason is made obsolete by modern phased array antennas that can be pointed without moving. So we don't need to take on the debris risk from high orbiting satellites anymore.
It's basically free to let the orbit decay. It is hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to return it to earth. It doesn't make sense to spend a billion dollars on literal trash.
But as it gets cheaper to put new satellites up, cleanup gets cheaper too. And if access gets cheap enough I could easily see an international treaty mandating that all satellites have an EOL burnup system installed. When 20kg costs $2mm a lot of people will balk at the idea. When 20kg costs $200k or $20k it's a lot easier to require people to include it. It could even be a bolt-on kind of thing, separately powered and controlled such that it doesn't have to be re-invented for every new satellite.
Also with access being cheap enough we could start doing active cleanup, beyond just not making the problem worse. Aerogel is supposed to be great for capturing particles because it's basically frozen air. We could build a space-based aerogel factory and ship silicon ingots up which then get turned into aerogel panels to be used as replenishable armor for the factory. And once you have the factory up you just start making the area that the armor sweeps bigger and bigger. Build out sideways to clear a particular orbit faster, build up or down to clear orbits of various heights. It'd be insanely expensive right now, but if launch costs come down to $100/kg or $10/kg it starts to look reasonable.
Instead of a knee-jerk reaction to spending money on a particular solution, think about the problem.
Most things of significant mass are in stable orbits or they wouldn't be there for very long. Regional sats like the one from Dish are in GSO way away, so they don't really matter. The problem is that Dish didn't have a disposal plan for this satellite. It's mostly when operators create clouds of junk, especially fragments from unnecessary collisions that cross other orbits, that pose a threat to lives and property. It's good to require operators to have a deorbit or parking orbit plan.
The biggest threat is LEO-crossing MMOD, which is why crewed craft have hundreds of Whipple shielding configurations to choose from for a given application.
This isn't a problem in need of solving in such a deliberate, costly, and arbitrary manner. Instead, the solutions are holistic: don't create debris that poses a risk to LEO, have a decommissioning plan for GSO objects, and protect what needs protecting by defensive spacecraft design.
Edit: The Kosmos 2251/Iridium 33 collision was reckless operation by the Russians leaving space junk in LEO.
The following is based on the assumption that more and more stuff is going into earth orbit over time.
As others have noted, putting satellites in lower orbits, below 500km or so, definitely helps with keeping things tidy.
Beyond that, robust regulation about ensuring that very little or no additional non-useful stuff is placed into orbit is also good. That is, require everything that isn't useful to deorbit right away or relatively quickly, and have the ability to deorbit at EOL.
What's beyond all that is the set of all things in orbits that aren't useful and that will naturally stay up there for a long time, in addition to any NEW stuff that's added, either by error or by accident. For example, a satellite in a 1000km orbit that has everything it needs to deorbit at the ends of its life, but fails to do so for whatever reason.
As others have noted, matching orbits is a lot harder than most people realize. Specifically, it's quite energy intensive.
At this point, basic physics tells us what we must do. In order to get long-lived, useless stuff out of orbit, we need to be able to send up specifically designed stuff, and a lot of it.
In summary: the most fundamental solution to this problem is to vastly decrease the price per kg to orbit. Regulation helps, but does nothing to clean up what's already there, and to resolve the unintended addition of new junk.
Summary to the summary: the newest crop of launch providers are aggressively working on this problem by aggressively pursuing reusability.
There is currently no system in operation that can deorbit large amounts of space debris.
If there's some debris in space, who pays to clean it up? Is it a company that wants to use an orbit that might be affected? Or is debris attributable and the 'owner' pays to clean up their own mess? Or is there a fund that a consortium of governments and businesses that use space should (will?) pay into?
I can imagine that the tech to do clean up is eminently achievable, and getting something to orbit to actually do the job is likely to be cheap enough soon, but I can't quite imagine why anyone would actually be a customer of a space cleaning company.
The problem is overall pollution of exit trajectories... Imagine how much more difficult it will be in 100 years to launch anything without hitting something on the way out. It should be a requirement of any satellite manufacturer to have a decomm plan. A plan which will eject the thing from orbit, or let it burn up on re-entry.
It's not big satellites in controlled orbits that are a major problem from a space junk standpoint. Mostly it's the smaller fragments that are the problem, which outnumber satellites by a huge margin. Besides which, the easier it would be to launch satellites into orbit the easier, and cheaper, it would be to launch programs for cleaning up debris and abandoned satellites.
But like all 'easy to litter, hard to clean up' problems of this nature, we have a solution already: require a cleanup deposit ahead of time that will be returned to whoever cleans it up.
All space-launching countries should sign an accord that said something along the lines of "Every satellite must have a deposit to the international Kessler Fund", say something like $X/kg, inflation adjusted. Companies would spring up with the sole purpose of de-orbiting defunct satellites. Launch would become more expensive, yes, but soon every bit of metal in space would come equipped with a plan for how we're getting it out of orbit.
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