How to Prevent Catastrophe in Outer Space

Deanna Lee

You're listening to Policy Minded, a podcast from RAND. I'm Deanna Lee. During the Cold War, there were just two players in outer space, the United States and the Soviet Union. Today, outer space is more congested, contested and competitive than ever before. And it's not just nations that are active in outer space, private companies are pursuing the potential profits from developing major industries in space, including tourism. Recent RAND research looks at this "New Space Era," which presents a lot of opportunities, but also serious and urgent challenges. Today, I'm joined by two authors of that research, some of our top experts on space, Bruce McClintock and Doug Ligor. Bruce is a senior policy researcher and lead of the RAND Space Enterprise Initiative. And Doug is a social scientist and the director of the Management, Technology, and Capabilities program for RAND's Homeland Security Research Division. Doug and Bruce, welcome.

Doug Ligor

Thank you. Great to be with you.

Deanna Lee

Thank you so much for joining us. You've written about what you call the "New Space Era" and I mentioned this in my intro. Can you describe what space is like today? How is it different from, say, what it was 50 years ago? Bruce, if you wanna go ahead and start.

Bruce McClintock

Yeah, thanks. It's great to start with just a discussion about the term the new space era, because that sounds a little wonky to some people. But one of the ways I would put it, you've already mentioned it, but in the early days of human space activity, it was really just the United States and the Soviet Union. And then in the first few decades after that, you could literally count the number of space active nations on two hands. Now you run out of fingers and toes and really have to have more than 80 digits to be able to count the number of entities that have satellites or are active in space. So our reference to the "New Space Era" from the Responsible Space Behavior report talks about this idea that it is no longer just for select nations, but it's really just a combination of today of nations, companies, universities that are able to put satellites in orbit, primarily due to the reduced launch cost. So things are very active in space right now.

Deanna Lee

Anything to add Doug?

Doug Ligor

I would just say that as Bruce mentioned, you know, one of the biggest differences between space in the days of the Soviet Union in the U.S. and now is the commercial actors and the commercial players. Space has become big business and that has fostered a lot of new technologies that we now all rely on in space. Not just position, navigation and timing, but international financial transactions, weather, telecommunications, internet. And that has really sort of radically-changed our—humanity's—reliance on space as well. And that's just gonna continue to grow.

Deanna Lee

I'm glad you mentioned that because I did want to ask you about a little bit more of the why behind there's why why is there so much activity in space. I'm sure our listeners are aware of and you just mentioned a couple of these things: GPS, internet, and the role that satellites play in providing those things to us. But what are some of the specific goals or objectives that are driving this activity in space, what are nations trying to do, what our private companies trying to do.

Bruce McClintock

Sure, I'll jump in and then just build on what Doug's already said, which is directly hitting the point. So first of all, I guess I'll start with why should people care? And then we'll talk a little bit about why it's so busy if that's our idea, because sometimes people hear space and they're like, well, that doesn't affect me. But as Doug mentioned, and we want to really reinforce it, it affects really every aspect of our daily life. It's just kind of invisible to people, how much they depend on space capabilities for daily living. As Doug mentioned, things like just transactions at your bank or getting gas at the gas pump. Most people think about like GPS navigation, but weather monitoring is a big one too. So it's really important to everybody's daily life in ways that we take for granted, right? So now why are nations and companies getting more active in space? Why is it so busy? For nations, all the way back to the beginning of the first space race between the United States and Soviet Union, it was about national security. All right, so there's aspects of space that are important for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, being able to see into other countries. That continues to this day. For companies, it's really more, as Doug said, it's about commercial opportunity. And again, people depend on satellites for, a lot of times the TV services that they get, the communications that they get, now there's a lot companies even providing internet satellite to places that weren't accessible by any other means years ago. So it's an ongoing race. Those are the two kind of primary players, as Doug mentioned, nation states, and commercial entities. And that's why it's so busy.

Doug Ligor

And I would just add that we're able to do research now in space using satellites and satellite technology that we weren't able to do. So that's why additionally you have, as Bruce mentioned, you have universities, you have research, other research organizations, you have non-governmental organizations within states that are using satellite technology and space technology to further research. But you also have both governments and commercial entities doubling down on something called remote sensing, which is the ability to look back at the Earth. Bruce mentioned that the number of satellites that countries are putting up is growing. I think almost 90 or about 90 countries have at least one satellite and they're using it, as I said, for one of the things they're using it for—and this is even middle and lower income countries—is to look at their own geography and topography. And that's helping them with things like, not only weather, but farming, resource extraction, population and migration issues, all kinds of information and data that is both useful to states and communities, but also companies that are providing those services. So it's really There's so many different reasons for states and industry and commercial entities to get into space. And that's why it's going to be, I think next year, somewhere in the ballpark of a $800 billion business. And it's forecasted to continue to grow from there.

Deanna Lee

Right. And that was going to be my next question. It doesn't sound like there's any sign of things slowing down, it's only going to grow in all areas, right?

Doug Ligor

Yeah, the launch rate, it continues to grow every year. Every year is a new record. I think 2024 was something like 250 some-odd launches. Next year, it's probably gonna top that. SpaceX alone will probably have about 180 launches. A few years ago, there were, we were only sending up 200 space objects a year. Now I think we're averaging 1600 space objects a year getting sent up into into space. And there's there's no indication that that there's a plateau ahead or that that's slowing down again because of the national security needs and and the commercial growth but I'll kick it over to Bruce.

Bruce McClintock

Yeah, Doug's hit definitely all the high points and I'll just add on, the future is bright for space and it's gonna continue to increase in terms of the activity. The other measure I'll mention of launch rate is China's launch rate. In 2016, their national record was 22 launches. That more than doubled by 2022 to 55 and it was 67 in 2023. And that number is gonna grow tremendously. They're aiming for about 100 launches by around 30 planned commercial actors. So again, very active in China, which is a key space player now. Doug talked about the United States. The European Union is active. So yes, it's a very active area and it's going to continue to grow.

Deanna Lee

Right, and let's talk numbers a little bit more. All of that activity that is happening and growing obviously is creating more stuff in space. So can you tell us how many satellites, pieces of debris and other objects are actually in space right now and how big they are?

Bruce McClintock

So the numbers vary because it is hard to get a precise number for reasons that we can talk about, but let's start big and kind of zoom in. The most current estimates say that there's about 130 million pieces of space debris orbiting the earth right now. That's 130 million. And there's only about, this is the striking part to me at least, only about 35,000 of them are large enough to be tracked. So some of them are so small they can't be tracked. Most of them are so small that they can be tracked, and they're actually incredibly dangerous to the satellites that are still active. So they've got these untrackable pieces of debris that are flying around at thousands of miles an hour that can crash into active satellites that we can't even keep track of. So that gives you a sense. There's really only about 2,000 active satellites in Earth's orbit right now. And slightly more than that, inactive or dead satellites.

Deanna Lee

What does small mean in this context?

Bruce McClintock

Great point. I mean, it's important to note that the size of debris in space can be anything down to as small as like a chip of paint or even smaller. So millimeter size pieces to things that are the size of small school busses, right? So there's a, you know, size is relative. So there is the range there. The number normally associated with trackable debris is something that is greater than 10 centimeters in length.

Doug Ligor

Yeah, and as Bruce mentioned, how you measure these things varies in the data that different countries and organizations get varies a little bit. The European Space Agency is tracking about 40,000 pieces that are approximately 10 centimeters. But since we've been launching satellites, we've put up almost 20,000. The number of these that are still in space, according to European Space Agency, is roughly around 13,000. And then of that, only about 10,000 are functional. Now, Bruce mentioned there's 2,000, what we would consider like conventional satellites that people think about when they think about a satellite. But there's about 7,000 to 8,000 small satellites that make up what they call mega constellations now. So these are much, much smaller satellites, but they're all in the same orbit and travel together. And this is what's really pushed up the number of satellites into space. But as Bruce mentioned, the debris is really one of the primary concerns here, because it is it is not controllable. Old dead satellites are not controllable because they don't have a propulsion system anymore. And so those operators who have active satellites now are in the business of avoiding that junk, which is hard to do if you can't measure it, you can see it. And if you don't the right type of propulsion, you can't avoid it.

Bruce McClintock

Yeah, and let me offer one more point on this very quickly, because I prefer to give kind of analogies rather, you know, 10 centimeters, some people are like, well, what does that mean? You know, how big is that? Right? So that's roughly the size of a grapefruit. So imagine a grapefruit flying around in space at 17,000 miles an hour. Or, you know, if you want to use an Earth analogy, if that hit your car windshield at 17,000 miles an hour, you're dead, your car is destroyed, right? We can track something the size or grapefruit for the most part. If something's the size of an orange, they can't necessarily track it. So you can't avoid it. As Doug said, those objects that are debris, they cannot maneuver. So it's up to the active satellites to be the ones maneuvering.

Doug Ligor

And satellites are extremely fragile. So a small bolt, a nut traveling at 17,000 miles per hour, the physics of this, if it impacts a functional satellite means it could destroy the satellite or make it non-functional, turning it yet into another piece of junk, which can lead to a cascade effect that they call the Kessler syndrome, which is something else we can talk about as well.

Bruce McClintock

Yeah, so the Kessler syndrome is a hypothetical, although arguably starting to happen at a slow rate situation where you get a chain reaction of collisions between space debris that ends up creating more debris. So one thing runs into another thing which creates usually thousands of pieces of debris. Now that increased amount of debris creates more collisions later. It's important to mention it was named after a NASA scientist, Donald Kessler. He proposed the idea in 1978. The movie Gravity is one that gives what I would call the very, very overly hyped dramatic example of the Kessler syndrome, so it's highly unlikely that it would happen as fast as depicted in that movie, but the point is the same, meaning that an orbital area became unusable because of collisions that caused more collisions that cause more collisions. So it's the cascade effect in orbit. We talk about orbital shells becoming unusable, and I think that's a more appropriate way to kind of refer to it. It's not about all of space becoming unusible, more than likely. It's about some segments or shells of space becoming unusble because of the collisions and the debris.

Doug Ligor

And what Dr. Kessler wanted to emphasize is the cascade will not be controllable. These things will be crashing into each other and we will have no say about it. And the exponential rise in collisions can just get worse and worse and worse again until we lose those orbital shells and we'll be powerless at that point to do anything about it

Deanna Lee

Are satellites the biggest cause of debris? Things breaking off of them, or are there other culprits?

Bruce McClintock

It's really more the launch platforms than the satellites that drive the debris and then the collisions of satellites with other debris that creates more debris, like Doug talked about the cascade effect, but the launch platforms are the original sources of debris. And in many cases, those are the pieces that are, you know, size of a small school bus because, and it's still happening when rockets are launched, they usually use multiple stages and those later stages are just left in orbit to either decay and return to the Earth—ideally burn up—or there's several that are tracked that are quite large, and we know they're out there. And then when you have a collision with whatever the object is, that creates more debris.

Doug Ligor

And defunct satellites and rocket bodies and other launch materials, they can explode. They can have fuel and batteries on board that cause them to explode and create more debris. Most of the launch bodies that Bruce mentioned, again, they don't have propulsion to them. We have to wait for them to burn up in the atmosphere, or you have to have a plan to shoot dead satellites and these objects into what they call a graveyard orbit where they won't hit anything else. But that's not happening at the rate that we need it to happen. A good example is a 2009 collision between a Iridium telecommunication satellite and a defunct Russian satellite that created almost 3,000 pieces of debris, between 2,000 and 3,000 pieces of the debris. Most of the debris is still up there because it can take up to centuries for debris to decay into the atmosphere. Um, so, because we've polluted these orbits for decades with so many launches and so many satellites and not had a mitigation strategy for it, it's all up there and a lot of it's not going anywhere, which is why it has to be avoided, but it's just making things more and more congested and dangerous.

Deanna Lee

And we're gonna get into some of those dangers and the, you know, why this is a problem in a minute. But first, I'm gonna ask a question that might sound a little silly, but I think when a lot of us think of space, we think about it as being infinite, but crowding is a problem, the congested nature of space is a problem that we've been talking about, so how much space is in space? There's a limited area in which things are in orbit, correct?

Bruce McClintock

It's a great question, right? So, you know, the to infinity and beyond kind of line is one that a lot of people spend time from when they think about space. Oh, it's vast, it is vast. The majority of human activity occurs within about 35,000 kilometers of Earth. And again, well, 35,00 kilometers. How do I wrap my head around that? For comparison, I live near Denver, Colorado. A flight from Denver to Paris is about 8,000 kilometers. Gives you a sense of how far away what is called geosynchronous orbit is from the Earth. Most of the space activity occurs inside that near Earth space volume. And most of it is even lower, down closer to a few hundred kilometers, closer to around like six to 800 kilometers from the earth, which is very short distance, right? So, I mean, it's really close. You can see the International Space Station with the naked eye when it flies over at night, and it's that close. So it's not that far. Near Earth space, it starts relatively close, and it goes out to about 35,000 kilometers. And then the next relevant distance is out to the Moon. The Moon is about 385,000 kilometers from the Earth, right? So a little bit more than 10 times that geosynchronous orbit. That's much farther. There is activity out around the Moon right now. We obviously know that humans landed on the Moon decades ago, and now people are starting to talk seriously about lunar, returning to the Moon with humans and possibly setting up some outposts for exploration and leveraging Moon resources.

Doug Ligor

Usable space is actually very finite because most of our satellites are in low Earth orbit, LEO, which is about 100 kilometers out to about 2,000 kilometers. These are the orbital shells or pathways that satellites use as they go around the Earth to provide the services that we rely on. They need to be in those orbits. So each orbit is going to have a certain capacity to it. There's only so many satellites you could put in an orbit. And we already have what's called, what's being referred to as bad neighborhoods, you know, 500 kilometers to 800 kilometers, where there's so much junk and so many satellite because they want to be there because it optimizes their telecommunications or their ability to provide the service, whatever it is. You know that that is filling up. And geosynchronous orbit, which allows a satellite to basically you know watch or be focused on one point of the earth as it goes as the earth revolves, that is also finite, you can only put up you know there's probably seven eight hundred satellites I think in in geo, but you can only put so many satellites in that orbital shell where they don't, where they will not interfere with each other and where they can maneuver sufficiently to avoid debris. So at some point we are gonna reach capacities and there's not gonna be the opportunity to put more stuff up there.

Bruce McClintock

I'll add just a bit to that, so, cause I clearly like analogies, so I'll give you two analogies. So the LEO, Doug talked about kind of these orbital spheres? Think about a multi-lane interstate highway. Some of those lanes are already too crowded and traffic is starting to slow down and the risks of collisions with other vehicles is growing. Right, so the highways get more and more crowded, and there is an upper limit to what you can actually put up there. So there's not an unlimited amount of satellites that you can put into these orbits. Doug talked about the bad neighborhoods. Those are places where the operators already have to take consideration of just how busy it is because of the potential for collision, right? The other analogy I'll give you is the parking lot, right, so geosynchronous orbit, the one that I talked out that's further out, even though it's further away and the volume of space is higher. The physics required in geo are such that there are limited parking slots and the parking lot is almost full already, right? So it's already managed by, for frequency purposes by an organization called the International Telecommunications Union. But there's already risks of collisions in geosynchronous orbit, that further orbit. Even though those satellites appear to be kind of stationary in most cases, the parking lots getting full is the way I would put it.

Doug Ligor

Yeah, and just to piggyback off of Bruce's exceptional metaphor of the highway, right? Imagine, if your listeners could imagine getting on the highway and getting up to 65, 75, 70 miles an hour. But just imagine a highway where no collision has been removed. No debris has ever been removed from the highway from all the collisions that happened on that highway. And you have to traverse this highway because that's where you need to be to provide your service. That's basically, that's not a bad way to think about it.

Deanna Lee

We've been tiptoeing around this a little bit. We've talked about collisions. We've talk about explosions. But I want to ask you both explicitly about the biggest risks and challenges that come with this traffic in space. I imagine the risk of conflict is probably another one of those. So can you talk a little about those risks and challenges and maybe give us some specific examples of things that have already happened or perhaps nearly gone wrong. I know Doug you mentioned a collision from 2009, but I think it would be helpful for people to get a deeper understanding of what we're actually talking about in terms of dangers.

Doug Ligor

Yeah. So, um, so there was a collision almost last year. Well, there was collision, uh, near collision last year in February, 2024 of a NASA satellite, which had no propulsion. It was functioning and had no propulsion. And again, another defunct Russian satellite. They only missed each other by 65 kilometers, which is very, very close. It would have caused, you know, anywhere between 700 and a couple thousand pieces of debris. So these conjunctions, what they call them, near misses are happening more and more and more and at some point we're gonna just see more collisions because they're not gonna be avoidable. But the other danger relates more broadly to the lack of governance that we have in space right now. There are no binding rules for how you have to maneuver your satellite or your space object. No binding rules if you're a state, no binding rules if you are a commercial entity, other than the rules that a state might impose on a particular provider. So we live in what we call a voluntary non-binding governance regime. But history has told us that complex, congested, increasingly complicated non- binding, voluntary regimes become unstable over time. And Deanna, you mentioned the possibility of conflict, right? If you have this increasing instability without rules of the road to follow, then it increases the risk of mistakes, misperceptions, misrepresentations and accidents, which can then be perceived as threatening by a country or can be perceived potentially is a use of force against the country, which can escalate the potential for conflict. And that's really something we should all be very, very concerned of. Because in other regimes, the maritime regime, the aviation regime, we have literally hundreds, thousands of pages of regulations, standards, which countries have agreed to be bound to and agreeing to incorporate in their own laws. We don't have that in space right now, and it's a huge problem.

Deanna Lee

Bruce, anything you wanna add?

Bruce McClintock

Yeah, I'll just point back to Doug of course, nailed it. That's why it's so great to work with him. But the original outer space treaty, which the RAND Corporation has its, I say RAND's fingerprints are on the outer space treaty, right, because we advise the U.S. government back when that treaty was established to essentially create the freedom of operations in space and there were national security reasons why the U.S. did that because we wanted to candidly be able to overfly the Soviet Union and detect the placement of nuclear missile launch sites. So it was for national security reasons. Of course, it went through an international body, governing body, but the concept of freedom of flight in space is what really has set the groundwork for this environment that we're in now. And back to kind of the metaphors or analogies, it's like, okay, we're talking about the super highway before, there's debris out there now. In the early days, there was just few players, so it didn't matter. The road was wide open. You could drive, do whatever you want. You didn't have to tell other people. Now it's getting crowded and busy and like Doug said, to put it more simply, there's no law requiring you to turn on your turn signal to say that you're gonna change lanes, right? And there's no way to decide, there's no traffic cop that says, well, you know what you're the one that was responsible for this latest accident and you're going to have to pay. And all those kind of, those lack of kind of these guidelines and even technical standards in many cases is what's was what we identified in our first International Space Traffic Management report. All this led to this tipping point where we concluded that there's a need for some kind of an international space traffic management system and that's the direction we're trying to move. The reality is that there are still nation states that say no, it's pretty much a free-for-all out there, we can do what we want. We're not gonna sign up to anything because we're used to operating for decades in the environment that we grew up in.

Doug Ligor

Yeah, I would just add to that that in other domains, like the maritime domain and in the air domain, like maritime domain, you know, UNCLOS, the Law of the Seas, we're talking about 320 articles. We're talking a huge degree set of rules, nine annexes, three conventions for the air domain, you know, IKO, which is the convention that outlines the rules for the air domain: there's 96 articles, 19 annexes. The Outer Space Treaty is 2,500 words. The Magna Carta is longer, right? And the Outer Space Treaty is written in ambiguous principle-based language. So again, you know, we have operators who, you know, their stuff is coming at each other, and they're literally e-mailing each other or getting each other on the phone saying, "You gonna move, or am I going to move?" "No, you move." "No, I don't want to move. It's going to cost me too much money to move, you move." Playing these, you know games of chicken to figure out how not to collide with each other and that's when and that is when they can both move—remember that a lot of stuff is is not not maneuverable up there. So that's where we're at.

Deanna Lee

Let's talk about going forward now. You've both touched on the need for governance and in your research, you write about the need for an international space traffic management system. What exactly would that look like and who would need to be involved in creating it?

Bruce McClintock

So we talked already about the, we've reached the tipping point in space. It's so congested, so busy. There's a lack of a governance structure that it's really starting to undermine the ability to operate safely, at least in some of the orbital shells. So that was one of the things we concluded. We also concluded in our international space traffic management report that there are multiple best practices from other systems, right? We looked at the maritime domain, Doug talked about that. We looked the air domain. We looked some non-traditional kind of areas of international coordination and management such as the banking system, the internet naming convention system, another one in the International Telecommunications Union. Another thing we concluded was, candidly, this problem has been overstudied for a few decades, right? So it's not like this is some new concept. We weren't the first to look at it. There are multiple reports out there that talk about, well, what are options for how to organize this? So based on all that, one of our main recommendations was there needs to be some kind of an international convention, meaning a meeting of the minds, if you will, that includes not just governments, but commercial launch operators and satellite operators, which is a change from some of the past approaches, although historically that's been done in other domains like the maritime domain. And they need to get together and talk. We said within the next five years, in order to establish some kind of an International Space Traffic Management organization within 10 years. A lot of people said, hey, that's really aggressive. And we said, yes, it is, but the problem is significant. And we think that people need to start taking it more seriously. We were careful not to pick a winner, so to speak. We didn't pick a specific system. We didn't say like, well, this should be an organization led by this international body, or this should follow this model. I'm not even using the names of the most commonly referenced models because I don't want people to latch onto that. I mean, we all have our favorites when we think there's the right one to work. Our, our point was get the experts together and have them talk about it and start using a system for the modern era. And that followed off of some of what we learned from best practices from those other domains. Part of that, getting the experts together thing, we also noted that there's not enough experts, right? There's not people that understand these problems or work on them on a regular basis to be considered subject matter experts. There is a growing body of people that talk about space traffic management and they have the technical expertise to develop standards. So there is some work happening in a bottom-up approach, but the world needs to grow that community. So let me stop there and hand it to Doug for other things we said.

Doug Ligor

When we say this is a governance problem, what I would say to the listeners is this goes back to what we call basic social contract theory. And space is an international commons. It is a free use commons Just like back in the Middle Ages, you had a patch of land that was a commons for farmers to use. Now, whenever you have a commons, you have what's called the potential for a moral hazard, which is an overuse or degradation of the commons at other people's expense, because you don't have rules to prevent that. Then you have the tragedy of the commons, which means the commons becomes unusable. And that's basically what we have in space now. Now we've had this problem before in other commons, the high seas are commons. We got serious about fixing how we transport hazardous materials over the high seas like oil after the 1967 Torrey Canyon spill off the coast of England. That impacted tens of thousands of people and severely impacted the environment. People couldn't fish, people couldn't put food on the table. And so the international community said, we're all doing this, we're are all shipping oil, we need to get together and come up with some rules. And that's how you come out, in social contract theory, that's why you come of a state of nature where you don't have rules and you come into a governance regime where you have reciprocal rules that everybody respects, right? And you only get there by including the entire international community, right, not just the space players but the non-space players because the people who haven't used the commons yet have a right to the commons and if you destroy it before they get to use the commons then shame on you, whatever country you are. So international maritime organizations, IKO, ITU, we've done this before in these other regimes. And for some reason we think we can get away with not doing it in space. As Bruce said, we've not imposed an international regulatory regime or organization on space for 40 years because for some reason we think we can away from it. And what we've learned in history is a catastrophe or a necessity will drive you towards governance and out of the state of nature. The question for all of us is, do we want to do it after a catastrophe or do we wanna do it before a catastrophe? And we can do it before a catastrophe because we know what works. You have a legitimate organization, you have expertise, you have funding and you have enforcement mechanisms that allow that organization to be authoritative and legitimate. And everybody comes to this table and gives up a little authority in order to get the safety, security and sustainability that the organization provides.

Bruce McClintock

I'll just tie it back to some of our earlier kind of descriptive approaches. There, there are no rules on the super highway right now. There is no traffic authority to regulate the traffic, and there's no toll, so anybody can use it if they can get there, they can drive on the highway and do whatever they want basically. And so we need to move sort towards some system where there's rules of the road, there's some, there's going to be some costs to the people that are using the road, and there needs to be some regulation and mechanism for enforcing those rules. So that's the way I, you know, Doug's the lawyer and a much more deep thinker than I am on these subjects, but that's way I think about it, right? And people push back on that. Everybody wants to drive on a road without having to pay a toll. But we started talking about how there's a need for investigating things like orbital use fees to underwrite these kinds of organizations. And it's happened in other domains. It's just taking longer to happen in space because of the history of the Outer Space Treaty. And it is a relatively limited-access domain. But that was true also of the high seas and the air domain to a great extent.

Deanna Lee

So let me ask the the report that we've been referencing that you two are authors on this International Space Traffic Management report was published in 2023. Are we any closer today to getting a system like this in place than we were when that report released?

Doug Ligor

Unfortunately, my view is no. We continue to rely on the idea that we're gonna develop voluntary norms of behavior and rules from a bottom-up approach. I have no problem with the bottom-up approach. The problem is if you look at the scoreboard, it's not working, right? We don't have positive norms of behavior. A norm of behavior requires there to be some sanctions against non-compliant negative behavior, right? We do not have that right now. What we've incentivized is, hey, first movers, get to space, get your orbits, get your money, get your access now, right? The sanction is if you don't do that, you're gonna lose, right? But there's no sanction to disregarding space traffic management guidelines. There just isn't any sanction. So this bottom-up approach is not working. We have really no top-down approach because we've not created this organization. We have an organization in the U.N., Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, but it's a consensus-driven organization to which the outer space treaty members are a part of, but they can't come to agreement on a lot of these issues. And so, you know, we're caught in this situation where space continues to degrade and get more dangerous again, pushing us to a catastrophic or series of catastrophic incidences that are going to drive a rules-based regime whether we like it or not. And those rules may be suboptimal because we're doing it in a state of emergency rather than through through proper planning. But over to Bruce.

Bruce McClintock

This is common for Doug and I, and it's a good balance. So Doug's more of the realist, and I'm more of the optimist, I guess. And so I think there has been progress. And I mean, I'll offer some evidence of that. So when our public report was published in 2023, Doug and were both went to a space sustainability summit in New York City to roll it out and introduce it to the space community and start talking about this. And there was significant pushback. I won't use names, but from a senior official in the U.S. government at the time that was responsible for space situational awareness outside of the Department of Defense. They pushed back hard because they were so focused on establishing the U.S. system, transitioning space situational aware from the Department of Defense to Department of Commerce, right? They said, this is getting way ahead of the U.S. government. We're, we just are trying to figure out how to run our own system, uh let alone some kind of an international system. And I said, you're right. Our, our job is to look a decade out in the future. Not at the most immediate concern within the next year or two. Fast forward two years, the same individual at another space event who previously was unwilling to discuss kind of international roles said publicly, there's no way to easily compare the output of two space situational awareness systems. So we, the United States, are calling for a global dialogue on the varying SSA systems. And we're gonna challenge the international community to come together to compare these systems and work together. I see that as progress. Now, whether or not we helped drive that is subject to debate, we'd have to ask that specific individual. I do know there are significant discussions going on between the United States and the European Union and other nations globally to start talking about this. It's not the kind of international convention that we've called for, but people are starting to take some note and there is movement in the right direction. I think I would align with Doug. I'd be surprised if he said otherwise. I think it's too slow. It needs to happen more quickly, but it is movement, positive movement.

Doug Ligor

Yeah, Bruce is right. There has been positive movement. As a lawyer, I can tell you that in terms of, in terms of customary international law, aside from treaties, we create law internationally by state practice and the recognition by other states that they're obligated to a certain rule or, or a certain condition. Although there's rhetoric to building a more sustainable governance system, we're lacking the state practice. We're lacking the actual action there. You know, we called for a convention, there has been no convention, right? There hasn't been calls for a convention, right? But again, the scoreboard is looking pretty bad. Debris continues to go up exponentially. We continue to militarily escalate, because space is now a war fighting domain. We have more and more commercial actors without really any restrictions put on them. We have to be sanguine about the rhetoric, but we have to realistic about the data and the information. Nobody should be surprised when there's a catastrophe because rhetoric doesn't help you mitigate a catastrophe.

Deanna Lee

So if I had to sum it up, I guess I'd say some progress, but a lot of problems, a lot of challenges remain, obviously. I want you both to kind of consider two different futures. What happens if we do nothing? And then on the flip side, what happens if we get it right or at least do a good job at space traffic management?

Doug Ligor

If we get it wrong, there's going to be what, I mean, some people think we're already, some scientists will already tell you we're in a Kessler-type syndrome where we have these cascade effects of increasing collisions in debris generation. If we got it wrong we lose orbital shells where we can no longer put satellites into those shells or through those shells in order to get to a higher orbit. So we lose position, navigation, and timing, we lose GPS. We lose certain telecommunications. We lose the international financial transactions. We lose ability to predict weather. And the cascade effect of catastrophes that could come off that are almost indescribable in terms of the pain that will be foisted on people all across the globe. There's also a national security element to this. That if you have a more chaotic environment, there's more chances of mistake, misperception, misrepresentation and an invitation to conflict, right? Deterrence doesn't work that well in space because of the physics, right. You can't control an orbit, like you can a piece of terrain or a piece of a river or part of an ocean. So, this increases the chance of potential war. And it would be a war because we have, primarily the Russia, China, and the U.S.; it would be a warfare conflict of nuclear powers, right? So you can imagine that the consequences of not getting this right are really, really severe. The consequences of fixing this problem and developing some rules of the road and some governance is almost 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Space is an opportunity for incredible prosperity and growth for every single nation on the face of the planet, right? Everything from resource extraction to increased telecommunications to better weather forecasting, to, I mentioned it earlier, remote sensing, telling people about the environment that is around them. So that they can better manage their environment, right? Which creates stability in every community from a small town or hamlet, all the way up to nation states. So if we get it right, it's unbounded in terms of the potential success, stability and prosperity here. If we get wrong, it's equally cataclysmic.

Bruce McClintock

Yeah, Doug has nailed it. I'll just give kind of a shorter visual perception and kind of, if you think about like 70, 50 or 75 years in the future, where could we be if we do nothing, think of the movie Wall-E and the scene where the rocket's launching from earth up through near earth space. And it is just nothing, but this just like junkyard of debris flying around. And the rocket has to like pass through that to get to the distant spaceship, right? So, you know, you can probably find that if you're a listener, you can find that reference online. So the movie Wall-E and the launching from Earth, right? So it can get that bad, right. I mean, they're already talking now about how they have to consider launch windows to account for on-orbit debris at a very isolated case. But 50, 75 years from now, if we don't do anything, it'll be that bad. Conversely, if we get it right, it's all the things that Doug talked about. But imagine, if you will, 50 or 75 years from now, not everybody could, but some people in the same way that they might be able to save up money and afford to go on a vacation to Europe or Asia or something like that, some people might be able to save money 50 or 70 years from now and go on vacation to a low-Earth orbiting hotel. These are things that are being discussed now. But we have to preserve the environment. For that. And then also, as Doug talked about, 50 or 75 years from now, it is not unthinkable that if we do this right, there will be outposts, human outpost on the Moon, not just doing scientific exploration, but as Doug talked about, doing some resource extraction in ways that gathers materials for the benefit of humanity. And there are already things that are happening on orbit in terms of improved medicines and things that we can't do on Earth because of gravity. So there's a bright future out there. But we have to sustain the environment now and the space traffic management system and these technical standards are the steps that we need to take now to ensure that bright future that I talked about and that Doug described is possible.

Deanna Lee

I'm glad you brought up gravity, because it's been holding me back for years, really. It's time to just rid ourselves of the burden. Thank you both so much for being here. And I hope to continue the conversation about space on another episode of this podcast in the future. So thanks for joining us and for sharing all your insights.

Bruce McClintock

Thanks for having us, Deanna. It's been great.

Doug Ligor

Yeah, it was a pleasure to be here, really appreciate it.

Deanna Lee

You can learn more about the research we discussed on this episode at rand.org/policyminded. Thanks again to our guests, Bruce McClintock and Doug Ligor. This episode was produced by me, Deanna Lee. I recorded it, along with Evan Banks, who also edited the episode. RAND's Director of Digital Outreach is Pete Wilmoth. We'll see you next time on Policy Minded. RAND is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis.