Leading astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell has called for better international cooperation in space as competition for orbits and space resources intensifies.
In an interview with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, publishers of the Doomsday Clock, McDowell said fast-growing commercial activity in space and a lack of coordination mechanisms between operators is straining space safety and could even lead to accusations of warmongering between nations.
“For many years, there’s been an effort to try and establish international rules of the road in space that would actually define what’s acceptable behaviour and what isn’t. Unfortunately, they have pretty much stalled,” he said.
“People are just not in a treaty-making mood.”
McDowell says the lack of established mechanisms creates too much uncertainty around what could be considered an “Act of War” in space. While he says using “kinetic kill” technology to destroy a satellite would quite obviously be considered warmongering, what about bumping up to another satellite with a service module? Or listening in to cell traffic from the vicinity of a comms satellite?
The long-time astrophysicist, who said he grew up running around the corridors of NASA, says debris and the Kessler chain reaction – which could render space orbits useless – remain a source of tension, although he said movies such as Gravity have hyped the time-scale of a potential space junk chain reaction. “In reality the physics is real but the time-scale is much longer – a matter of many decades,” he said.
The early signs of a chain reaction right now are dominated by big satellite collisions as happened in 2009. “If we can just remove the hundred biggest pieces of space junk, we could buy ourselves several more decades,” said McDowell.
But private and commercial space activities are making fresh challenges in crowded orbits.
“Thirty years ago, you only needed the e-mails of three or four players to warn everyone of a potential collision between satellites. That just doesn’t scale to the number of actors in space that we have now.”
“In particular, I think the concern in the West is the absence of good coordination mechanisms with the Chinese—they don’t tell us which satellite is which, when they’re going to manoeuvre, and so on. And that is really straining the systems by which we ensure that space can be safely used.”
McDowell points to specific tensions between SpaceX’s Starlink and the new Chinese constellations, which share similar orbits. “[SpaceX doesn’t] have good communications with the Chinese, and so when the Chinese satellites manoeuvre unexpectedly, that’s a problem for them. They’ve actually moved a bunch of their satellites to lower orbits to avoid this,” he said.
“We’re desperately in need of an international space traffic control agency,” he said.
Astrophysicist McDowell is probably best known in the public space community for his Jonathan’s Space Report free monthly newsletter tracking satellite launches and locations.
