Earth’s space age is being threatened by the overcrowding of orbits where satellites and spacecraft perform important communication and navigation functions, as per a space safety report by the European Space Agency (ESA). The number and scale of commercial satellite constellations in certain Low-Earth orbits (LEO) is increasing every year while intact satellites or rocket bodies were now re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere on average “more than there times a day”.
“Combined with increasing launch traffic and high levels of solar activity, the number and size of re-entering objects is also increasing, with 1200 intact objects re-entering in 2024,” the report highlighted.
It added that there are more than 1.2 million objects larger than 1 cm in size that are capable of causing damage to existing satellites and the International Space Station (ISS) were floating in the orbit.
Such is the precarious situation that even if spaceflight operations were to cease completely today, the amount of space debris objects in Low Earth Orbit would only increase as “fragmentation events add new debris objects faster than debris can naturally re-enter the atmosphere”.
The accelerated accumulation of space debris has already raised the real possibility of a “collision cascading” effect called the Kessler Syndrome — a hypothetical scenario proposed by NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler in 1978.
Kessler Syndrome predicts that when the density of objects in Low Earth Orbit — roughly 100-1,200 miles above our planet reaches a certain critical level, it could lead to a chain reaction of collisions which could render the orbit unfit for human use and halt the space age.
Most satellites are placed in this orbit which is now viewed as the world’s largest garbage dump. As per NASA, there are close to 6,000 tons of materials in the orbit which will only increase with the advent of private players.
“To prevent this runaway chain reaction, known as Kessler syndrome, from escalating and making certain orbits unusable, active debris removal is required,” the report added.
Debris crashing
In December last year, the Kenya Space Agency (KSA) stated that fragments of metal, belonging to a rocket weighing nearly 500 kg, crashed into Mukuku village in the Makueni county in the country’s northern region.
Similarly, last month, a portion of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket made an “uncontrolled re-entry into the atmosphere” over Poland and crash-landed into a man’s lawn, according to the Polish space agency.
