Decades of shooting rockets into orbit, interspersed with the firing off of anti-satellite missiles to shatter spacecraft circling the globe, are surrounding Earth with ever-moving minefields that will threaten spacefarers and space stations into the future.
Ghost rocket stages that revolve at 28,000 kilometres per hour, and missile shards from exploded ASATs, collectively form “a ticking time bomb” imperilling human spaceflight and the satellite constellations that ring the planet, says Darren McKnight, Senior Technical Fellow at the world-leading orbital mapping firm LeoLabs.
Dr. McKnight, one of the planet’s foremost spacecraft trackers, told me in an interview he is set to sketch out urgent solutions to these escalating dangers at the upcoming meeting of the International Astronautical Congress, which opens next week in Milan. Vanguard space scholars around the world, like McKnight, flock to the yearly gathering of the IAC to map out strategies to safeguard the future for the entire spaceflight sector.
The author of a remarkable series of studies on space debris and its potential to trigger catastrophic collisions, McKnight heads the science team at the Silicon Valley-based LeoLabs, which operates a global web of phased array radars that scan low Earth orbit (LEO) while charting more than 20,000 objects in flight – from abandoned rockets to the clouds of ASAT shrapnel that circumnavigate the globe.
LeoLabs combines cutting-edge radar imagery with predictive AI tools to model imminent orbiting threats, and notifies satellite operators and other space players of high-probability smash-ups waiting in the wings.
The outfit’s founder and Chief Operating Officer, Dan Ceperley, issued an ominous oracle on LeoLab’s website, warning of the “inevitability of a disaster in low Earth orbit” due to clouds of missile shards and clusters of derelict rockets that are spinning around the globe.
He says while LeoLabs tracks tens of thousands of space objects that measure at least 10 centimeters, it is so far technically unable to map countless smaller fragments, resulting from earlier explosions, that have spread out across the orbital plane that the International Space Station flies through.
With this proliferation of rogue debris, he says,“This grim reality means that collisions are not a question of if but when.”
“Potential disasters in LEO,” Dr. Ceperley predicts, range from an astronaut being blasted by “lethal, small debris” to an “operational payload attacked by an adversary.”
His “Guide To Disasters In Low Earth Orbit” cautions that minuscule shards in orbit – measuring less than one centimeter – could be deadly to aeronauts spacewalking outside the International Space Station or floating outside their space capsules.
“Any size fragment above a few millimeters is likely lethal to astronauts,” says Ceperley, who holds a doctorate in engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.
The world caught a glimpse of this peril when a tiny chip of shrapnel ripped a 5 mm hole in the robotic Canadarm2 positioned outside the ISS. “Put simply,” he says, “what we can’t see has the potential to kill us.”
Yet Darren McKnight says the jettisoned rocket stages that stalk the higher reaches of low Earth orbit might present the greatest threats to future space missions – both human and robotic.
At the height of the first Space Race and Cold War I, he says, the twin superpowers routinely cast off their spent upper stages in orbit, and never forged an agreement on dismantling this space obstacle course.
Like specters from the past haunting the modern celestial world, two of these colossal rocket bodies – one Soviet and one American – came within 500 meters of crashing into each other in June of 2022, even as Moscow and Washington sparred 800 kilometers below over Russia’s invasion of democratic Ukraine.
The clash would have been cataclysmic, McKnight says, spewing debris “over many hundreds of kilometers” and creating deathly daggers of shrapnel that would “linger for centuries,” posing a risk to space capsules and satellites for generations.
The Kremlin-lofted Zenit rocket involved in the narrowly avoided crash, he adds, was just one of 18 identical phantom Russian spacecraft that still plague the high-risk graveyard that whirls around the planet.
All 18 have been placed on a space Most Wanted List, part of “the top 50 objects” that LeoLabs says should be captured and removed from LEO.
The space superpowers’ rogue rockets present such an overwhelming threat to human exploration just above the Earth’s atmosphere that all the world’s space agencies should begin acting now to remove these hazards, says Ian Christensen, a senior director at the Washington-based Secure World Foundation. The Foundation is a vanguard think tank that aims to secure peace across the super-terrestrial sphere by uniting with scholars, statesmen and spacecraft operators across the continents to reach that goal.
Christensen, who teamed up with LeoLabs’ McKnight to help stage a space summit in New Zealand earlier this year focused on ultimately ridding orbit of spectral spacecraft, told me in an interview that many space scholars have concluded that perhaps “only a major debris-generating collision would stimulate true international resolve and commitment for debris remediation missions.”
“The biggest diplomatic challenge,” he adds, “is convincing the three major spacefaring countries (the United States, Russia, and China), who are responsible for 90% of the risk, to begin remediating their own large debris objects,” especially the deserted rockets that crisscross orbital zones 800-1000 kilometers above the globe.
A onetime researcher at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, Christensen says space agencies in the UK, Japan and Europe that are spearheading precursor missions to active debris removal flights are far ahead of the space superpowers that have cast away their spacecraft in the heavens.
In a new study that he co-authored with McKnight, to be presented at the International Astronautical Congress, Christensen says unleashing the potential of the unfolding Space Race II will depend on a collective, global drive to clear the high-traffic orbital zones of the detritus of Space Race I.
A massive barricade blocking that goal, he says, is that there is now “no economic incentive to remove debris [and] no economic incentive to really avoid creating debris.”
But that might be about to see a sea change, he predicts: “With the space economy forecast to grow to over $1 trillion by 2040, ADR [Active Debris Removal missions] should in theory be affordable.”
Both Christensen and McKnight have lauded the introduction in the United States Senate of the ORBITS Act, which aims “To establish a demonstration program for the active remediation of orbital debris,” and would provide an initial fund of $150,000,000 to conduct tech demos on deorbiting the most dangerous space objects.
The bill has never been voted on in the House of Representatives, yet McKnight told me LeoLabs is urging its passage, while pressing the White House to back the legislation.
Meanwhile, McKnight says he has joined forces with space scholars around the world to craft a cluster of cutting-edge studies to be unveiled at the Milan IAC convention.
The most fascinating experiment, jointly conducted by McKnight, two astronomers at the University of Bern, and scientists at MAXAR, which operates a fleet of advanced observation satellites, focused on capturing images of five massive rocket stages and their flightpaths through orbit.
Each partner in the experiment gathered incredible imagery of the rockets, in part to determine each spacecraft’s “tumble rate” and suitability to be captured by a future space tug and deorbited. MAXAR’s photographs of one candidate spacecraft are super-high-resolution, and could enable the team to sculpt a precise digital twin of the rocket to simulate a future capture mission.
Their advances in precisely charting and modeling these abandoned spacecraft “could be very useful for operationalizing ADR [deorbiting missions] soon,” the American and Swiss researchers say.
Meanwhile, Jeffrey Manber, one of the NewSpace sector’s leading tech visionaries, says he’s perfecting futuristic blueprints to recover cast-off rockets and save them from being crashed into the Antarctic seas.
Manber, President of International and Space Stations at Voyager Space, which is designing Starlab, the most technologically advanced space station set to be launched before the ISS is decommissioned six years from now, told me he aims to begin converting these rescued rockets into station modules across the 2030s.
With breakthroughs in developing orbital transfer vehicles and space robotics, he says, Voyager could begin sending out droid-piloted recovery teams to capture these ejected spacecraft and transform them into orbital habitats and science labs within the next decade.
Voyager has already received $217 million from NASA under a Space Act Agreement to develop an independent orbital outpost, but he says there will actually be a series of Starlab stations in times ahead. Starlab 3, he adds, could become the first floating factory run by robots, which will redesign spent stages into space stations “for low Earth orbit and around the Moon.”
