A catastrophic collision with space debris would no longer be a mere possibility, but a virtual certainty. This is certainly the opinion of Darren McKnight, head of the data analysis team at LeoLabs, who spoke in an interview with Forbes. The company uses a network of 10 radars at six sites around the world to track tens of thousands of orbiting objects measuring at least 10 centimeters.
However, there are a large number of smaller, untracked objects that circulate in the same orbital plane as the International Space Station. Even a piece of debris a few millimeters in size could be fatal for an astronaut during a spacewalk, according to Dan Ceperley, co-founder of LeoLabs.
Rocket stages from the space race
Collisions between debris could create a cloudcloud smaller fragments, which could in turn collide with other objects in orbit, creating a chain reactionchain reaction. This is the de Kessler’s syndromede Kessler’s syndrome. Darren McKnight notably criticizes practices during the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union, where the two superpowers jettisoned the upper stages of their rocketsrockets in orbit, without ever planning a way to clean it up. In June 2022, two of these stages came within 500 meters of a collision.
With Ian Christensen of the Secure World Foundation, Darren McKnight wants to persuade world governments to clean up Earth’s orbit. However, it would first be necessary to convince the three biggest space powers who are responsible for 90% of the debris: the United States, Russia and China. The British, Japanese and European space agencies are pioneers in this field and are developing missions to collect space debris. However, that may soon change, with the ORBITS Act, which has been introduced in the U.S. Senate. It would finance $150 million in technology demonstrations to recover the most dangerous objects. However, it still has to pass the House of Representatives.
