Space Debris: Is It a Crisis?

One question I’ve been wondering about (and please hear me out because this is an honest question and I know nothing about this area.)

SpaceX’s Starship is being built based on the (business) principle that extremely low cost-to-orbit will be a good business, because it will unlock a huge market for launches. Some tiny fraction of these launches will probably go beyond Earth’s orbit. A much larger fraction (eg Starlink) will be aimed at low orbits where Kessler Syndrome can be avoided (unless there are major accidents.) But at least some of that new mass is going to wind up in higher orbits where Kessler syndrome is already a risk, and this new mass will obviously increase the risk of a disaster. And so far I’m only talking about Starship and SpaceX, not its competitors.

My question is: is there a world where Starship is a viable economic project — meaning its investment pays back at the rate SpaceX is betting on — but where it does not also dramatically increase the risk of disaster? And what exactly does the model of “successful Starship / no Kessler syndrome” look like in terms of future launches? Has anyone modeled this?

I would imagine the incentives being aligned (SX can’t make full economic and cultural Starship ROI if there is a planetsized wall of debris they can’t fly through) means that there will be multiple independent overlapping checks both private and government for each launch mission to ensure that it doesn’t become worse.

SpaceX stands to lose just as much as the rest of us if they fuck this up, possibly more.

> SpaceX stands to lose just as much as the rest of us if they fuck this up, possibly more

No it will go bankrupt and be forgotten.

While we leave future generations with a problem that may not be economically or technically solvable and ruin space for ever.

I would hope with all that mass to orbit you can also work on space debris cleanup. For example using lasers somehow.

I'd bet there is a very wide gray zone between the current situation, and a "planetsized wall of debris", which badly damaged SpaceX's bottom line.

And, in much of that gray zone, SpaceX could be the very profitable leader in a booming market for launching all the replacement satellites, heavier collision-"resistant" satellites, and debris-sweeping satellites.

Unsure if facetious, but geostationary is a single orbit, so the crowding is end to end. The space outside of that one orbit is infinite and will never be a “wall”.

As long as there's enough time lag between making money and destroying the planet, there's no disincentive.

The mechanism you describe, logically, should've prevented tetraethyl lead in gasoline.

Orbital space tourism and space manufacturing could potentially make a significant market in terms of launch mass (that is, if you launch 1000-ton facilities instead of 1-ton satellites without necessarily occupying a large number of new orbits). But this is kinda speculative at the moment.

I think the real motivation for Starlink is precisely this -- there is otherwise no near-term market for greatly increased launch capacity. Starlink actually doesn't make too much sense from a purely technical perspective: in wireless point-to-point communications, distance is your enemy squared, both in terms of signal power and density. And it only gets worse when you have to punch through a cloud layer. But it is also the only near-term application that could absorb the launch volume offered by the Starship, so the two kind of feed off each other. This is not unlike the past ISS - Space Shuttle relationship, but at least the public is not paying for it this time.

This is a good point, but I thought the fundamental idea of Kessler syndrome is a cascade trigger point which rapidly and inevitably becomes the point of no return at which the effects become inescapable.

The energy and velocity and economics and distances just don't add up for that. (I would love to be wrong)

Solar powered satellites in counter-rotating orbits. A low powered laser focused on the leading edge of a piece of debris will (very) slowly bleed velocity until it drops into a decaying orbit. It'd be exceptionally slow, but with machine vision you can just let it auto-acquire targets unattended for a few decades or centuries.

Guess: Doom-preaching scientists often have vested interests in preserving very expensive, hard-to-replace satellites - say, Hubble. Journalists know that "more doom" => "more clicks". Nationalists and military folks love to talk smack about other nations' debris-spreading accidents and ASAT activities. And the whole canon and mindset of Kessler-ology was established before SpaceX made launch (of replacement satellites) anywhere near so quick and cheap as it would be now.

Do you have any ideea how fast debris passes by (or hits) in a counter-rotating low orbit?

There was no immediate market for low-orbit launch capacity in the manner of Starlink: SpaceX essentially created that market by being its own customer (and having access to cheap excess launch capacity.) Now there are multiple networks being launched, some at higher orbits.

The first question is whether even more low-cost launch access will continue to create more new applications like this one. The second question is whether the business projections for Starship already assume that's the case.