Why is the Earth's orbit congesting?

In the last years of aerospace a new problem has reached the minds of many astrophysical experts and spacecraft engineers, but also normal people who didn’t know that much about aerospace have at least heard about space debris. There are many different opinions of how we should deal with space debris and how to stop the pollution of the earth's orbit in the future. Until now space debris is a growing problem that could affect our future aerospace sustainability negatively if we don’t solve it quickly.

What is space debris and how it goes into the earth orbit?

Space debris represents a huge spectrum of waste that is “produced” by spacecraft, rockets and satellites. It starts at satellites that are just out of order, rubbles from collisions of satellites, boosters and other parts of rockets and ends at old space stations. According to an analysis by Holger Krag, leader of the space safety department at the European Space Agency (ESA) 23.000 objects of this kind are moving around our planet. The problem is that the gravity of the earth is in a balanced relationship to the centrifugal forces, which are caused by the fast movement of space debris. That’s why most of the objects in our earth orbit aren’t “falling” to earth or burn up in the atmosphere of the earth. They are just moving around the earth like the International Space Station, which already was forced to do some evasive manoeuvres. This shows how dangerous space debris can be.

Why space debris is a huge problem

In the past, the problem of space debris grew with a fast speed, because according to new calculations an object with only a radius of 1cm that has a speed of thousands of kilometres per hour can affect a surface as an exploding hand grenade. For example in 2009 the US American communication Satellite Iridium 33 collided with the Russian observer Satellite Kosmos 2251 with a speed of 12.000 kilometres per hour. The collision caused 100.000 rubles that are still in the earth's orbit. These objects aren’t under the control of any space agency, which means that they could destroy other satellites. Another big problem is a process called the “Kessler- effect”. The Kessler- effect describes the exponential increase of collisions between rubbles. If for example, two satellites are colliding, the fragments of this collision will collide with other satellites, rubbles or space stations which will cause a process of the exponential rising of the number of collisions.

Which options and solutions do we have?

There are a lot of opportunities to fight space debris, but until now the elimination of space debris isn't commerce orientated and not profitable for companies. So at the moment, there is only a small number of companies to fight space debris. For example, the startup “Cleanspace SA” based in Switzerland set the goal of cleaning up the earth's orbit. The company also gets supported by the ESA with 86 million euros to grab the upper part of a Vespa rocket and push it into the earth’s atmosphere where it will burn up. This mission where a space collector spacecraft, designed by clean space SA, will try to eliminate the rocket part is planned for 2025. According to a statement of an ESA speaker, it's important to build up a commercial market for the lobby of companies to clean up space, because the problem will grow much faster if we won’t start solving the problem now.

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