Two years after the democratic space powers cut almost all ties with Roscosmos – following Russia’s blitzkrieg on liberal Ukraine – space agency leaders planet-wide are joining a summit in Milan to map out their collective future in light of the Kremlin’s endangering life in orbit.
Even after Moscow’s last firing off of a hit-to-kill anti-satellite missile created clouds of lethal shrapnel that forced astronauts aboard the International Space Station to seek shelter inside their escape capsules, Vladimir Putin’s lieutenants have repeatedly threatened to begin shooting down Western spacecraft providing humanitarian aid to besieged Ukraine, unleashing Space War 1.
New Russian ASAT launches targeting SpaceX satellites, which fly above the ISS and beam life-saving internet connections to Ukraine’s embattled citizenry, would create even more space minefields that speed around the planet at 17,500 miles per hour, says Darren McKnight, Senior Technical Fellow at LeoLabs, the world’s top independent spacecraft tracking outfit.
The heads of the European, Japanese, American, British and Indian space agencies are set to convene at an International Astronautical Congress gathering this week to sketch out solutions to safeguarding human spaceflight and the new independent space stations now being designed in the U.S. and Europe.
Dr. McKnight told me in an interview that after he raced to model the exploding billow of Russian ASAT missile fragments as they approached the ISS, he calculated that the dangers posed by this deadly debris could stretch out for decades and extend to most satellite constellations in low Earth orbit.
LeoLabs operates a world-spanning web of phased array radars that scan low Earth orbit in real time and track nearly 25,000 objects in flight – from colossal, abandoned rockets to hyper-speed shrapnel created by ASAT space weaponry – and sends emergency messages to spacecraft operators on potential collisions.
Yet McKnight says these orbiting specters of exploded shells might not represent the greatest danger to spacefarers and space habitats. This space shrapnel grabs the headlines crafted by leading space writers around the world, he says, but the massive rockets that have been jettisoned in orbit – if they collide – could spark a cascading catastrophe that imperils the entire manned space corridor and “thousands of newly deployed satellites that are fuelling the global space economy.”
In a fascinating new study, titled “Long-Lived Rocket Body Mass Accumulation in LEO,” that he is set to unveil before his space scholar confreres at the week-long IAC conference, McKnight says LeoLabs’ remarkable “living map of orbital activity” depicts every one of the rockets that the world’s space powers have marooned in orbit since the start of Space Race I, and their trajectories.
“The top three contributors of rocket bodies above 615 km average altitude account for well over 90%” of the rogue rockets still circling the planet, he says.
The three space superpowers – Russia, the United States and China – have deserted the vast majority of these rocket stages, which are likely to remain in orbit for a quarter-century or more, he says.
Russia tops the chart of cast-off rockets at this altitude, with 512 uncontrolled spacecraft that could ultimately threaten robotic and human explorers across low Earth orbit. The U.S. places second, with 242 rockets, and China ranks third, with 135 spent upper stages.
“Russia leads in both mass and number of rocket bodies in LEO,” McKnight told me.
The potential for catastrophe is skyrocketing.
“Every time a collision or explosion occurs in LEO, especially at higher altitudes, the harmful results are additive,” he says, “because the debris created from the collision is not cleared from orbit for decades, even centuries.”
If two derelict rockets were to “collide in LEO, the result would be catastrophic,” says LeoLabs founder Dan Ceperley.
In a worldwide warning that he blasted out on the LeoLabs website, Dr. Ceperley said that the worst “potential disasters in LEO” that now imperil the space sphere include planned attacks on a spacecraft by an adversary – like the assaults on SpaceX’s constellation proposed by the Kremlin – and the long-predicted smash-ups of twin forsaken rockets.
A hyper-velocity “collision would disperse debris across hundreds of kilometers in altitude and potentially impact multiple constellations,” Ceperley says, “creating a ripple effect of dangerous collisional encounters.”
Since the turn of the century, he adds, “The United States, India, Russia, and China have proven their ability to physically destroy a satellite by testing anti-satellite weapons.”
Yet the U.S. has since renounced its ASAT tests, and adopted a unilateral moratorium on these launches while urging other space powers to follow its lead.
But Russia’s last ASAT demo mission, and its provocations on staging missile attacks on Allied satellites, mean the risks are still expanding, Ceperley says.
“Russia’s threats against Space X’s Starlink satellites during the war in Ukraine, for example, have illustrated how real this risk is.”
Although Russia and its shrinking circle of allies voted against a U.S. sponsored resolution at the UN General Assembly to halt all tests of anti-satellite missiles, 150-plus UN members backed the proposal.
That means Washington should push forward its drafting of a global ASAT test ban treaty, McKnight says, even as the great space powers begin launching demonstration flights aimed at clearing low Earth orbit of the shrapnel and rogue rockets that are jeopardising the next phase of human space exploration.
At the same time, McKnight warns, the rising dangers of the phantom rockets that haunt low Earth orbit “must be dealt with now.”
