To celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the SDC’s creation, we will be producing a series of blog posts highlighting different themes and achievements over the last decade. This first blog will weigh-up space safety in a pre-SDA world.
2010: Space debris, or space junk, wasn’t as much of a prevalent issue as it is today. Before 2010 there existed what some call a “Space is a Big Place” mentality. Both government bodies and figures within the SpaceComs industry saw space as a limitless frontier, however three instances changed this misconception entirely.
Both China and the USA had made intentional collisions into their satellites. Both occasions led to either vast amounts of debris or highly toxic fuel in the atmosphere.
However, the third, and perhaps the most prominent of contributors to the raised awareness of SSA was a collision that happened in February 2009. An active Iridium communication satellite collided with a defunct Russian satellite. What ensued was an almighty cloud of debris with a long lifespan. This unexpected and accidental collision catapulted the concept of Space Situational Awareness to the fore.
This “Space is a Big Place” mentality has been laboriously hatched away at over the last decade, but it still hasn’t been completely felled. Operators within the satellite industry clubbed together to form the Space Data Association, which would revolutionise and raise awareness for SSA ten-fold. To fully appreciate how far the struggle for increased SSA has come over the last decade, we must fully understand the scene prior to the SDA’s creation. What then, was it like in this dystopian, pre-SDA world?
“Operators relied on publicly available data such as SpaceTrack or had separate agreements with JSpOC”, they also “made personal contacts between various Flight Dynamics groups that had established over the years”, says Executive Director, Jean-Luc Froeliger, Intelsat. This epitomises the fragmented approach the industry had towards SSA before 2010, what’s more is that these institutions “would not consider manoeuvres, and so warnings were not always reliable”, says Standard Member Director, Lorenzo Arona, Avanti.
When it came to potential collisions in space, the best an operator could hope for was a heads up, which unfortunately didn’t allow them the time to alter the trajectory of their satellites. Whilst governing bodies had tracking management systems in place, their lack of cooperation held SSA back.
Forming the SDA “leapfrogged the institutional services by providing more reliable conjunction warnings, which underpinned the need for a shared approach for the utilization of near-Earth space”, Lorenzo put it. The SDA brought industry leaders together in order to pool their data, so that satellite movement could be managed and tracked effectively. This principle of collaboration emerged as the core pillar of the SDA’s work over the last decade and will persist to do so in the next. Our Chairman, Pascal Wauthier, SES, put it neatly: “by providing these systems and by developing an efficient monitoring and warning system using operator/member operational information, SDA provided CA capabilities to a large number of operators”.
As a result, Jean-Luc states that the formation of the SDA and SDC “raised awareness by having the largest satellite operators cooperate together” as it “filled the need to have a commercial solution that is independent of a given nation’s desire to provide a free, non-optimum service”. In the end it was those within the industry itself that stepped in to raise the profile of SSA, and whilst there is still much to be done, it is sometimes well worth sitting back and appreciating the work and progress institutions like the SDA have made in the field over the last 10 years.