Navigating Governance in a New Space Era

Transcript

Bruce McClintock, Senior Policy Researcher, RAND Corporation

I'm Bruce McClintock, and I'm the lead for the RAND Space Enterprise Initiative, as well as a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. There's a lot happening in space these days; much more than there was in the past. It used to be that space was inaccessible and not really something that anybody on the planet really had to worry about. It was the province of superpowers, if you will; the Soviet Union and the United States, primarily.

Audio Recording of Neil Armstrong, Moon Landing, July 16, 1969

“That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Bruce McClintock

But now, in a new space era, we're in a time where space is accessible to many more, and there's multiple nations that are accessing space on their own and even more that are utilizing space for the benefit of their society. The barriers to entry are lower and the reasons for competition and conflict are higher. So that leads to a lot of possibilities for things ranging from incidents to worst case scenario catastrophes. We're in an era with all of this increased activity where we need to have greater forms of governance to take care of space because it does benefit all of us and it has the risk of having adverse impacts on all of us if we don't come to some agreements about how to protect it and sustain it.

What a lot of people don't realize is that space affects our daily lives in many, many ways. One of the most obvious and really kind of day-to-day activities to think about is any time you’re trying to get from point A to point B, you're likely using satellites for the navigation to do that in conjunction with other resources. Other examples that are more significant; the idea of Earth observation is the term used for observing from space the activity on the earth, and that’s everything from the movement of water formations or icebergs to how well crops are being developed. Farmers use space resources all the time to do things. And then at a national security level, there’s a lot of benefit to having the capability to observe things from space. Closer to home, there’s things like the satellite communications that we use to transmit television or what we used to call cable. And then there's also the emerging realm of using satellites to provide Internet capability around the world.

Space is extremely congested these days compared to what it was like in the Cold War era where there were just a few nations putting objects into space. The most extreme estimate is that if you take any size object, there are over a million objects in space. The number of active satellites is somewhat less than 10,000. But the number of pieces of debris, which is 95% of what’s on orbit right now, is in the hundreds of thousands depending on the size of the debris.

The reason that we should all be concerned about the continued debris and clutter in space is that it affects us all. And because of the way orbital mechanics work, debris in space stays there for a long time. Sometimes it stays there for centuries. And what it ends up doing is making certain places in space, what I refer to as orbital shells, unusable for others because it's debris that you have to avoid at all times. And by having to avoid that debris, you basically make that part of space unusable.

So, to give you two examples of some specific cases where debris can have an impact on us directly, the first one I'd offer is the International Space Station. On average, the Space Station has to maneuver about once every year to avoid debris, because if debris strikes you at 17,500 miles per hour in low earth orbit, even a paint fleck can cause significant damage to your satellite or your space station. And you don't want to puncture a hole in the space station with a piece of debris and put astronauts’ lives at risk. One that's closer to home, if you will, is some of the new mega constellations that are flying around that are being used for Internet connectivity globally, they operate in certain orbital shells. And if those orbital shells were contaminated by debris, those systems would become inactive or they'd have to maneuver in ways that they weren't designed to do. So, that could impact everybody on the planet that's using those systems, not just a handful of astronauts.

Based on our research, we believe there are five things that could be done to actually improve long-term space sustainability. And the first one is increase communication and engagement. And that is just helping people better understand our dependence on space and then talking about what we believe the problems are. The second thing that we like to talk about is this idea of increased transparency and space situational awareness. Sharing that kind of information more widely so everybody has a common picture of what's actually happening in orbit. The third thing we recommend is that we look for quick wins. We need to start doing things at a mini lateral level. That means just having a few nation states agree on some common rules of the road or norms of responsible behavior rather than getting caught in the logjam that is the UN right now trying to get a formal treaty moving forward. The next thing that we point out is that we need to be pragmatic and realize that we need to focus on safety first rather than security interests. But finally, we do acknowledge that it's important to take on the security interests and differences of views between the major space powers.