In the last blog in our series, we concluded that the SDA’s formation “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”, as Lorenzo Arona, SDA Director put it.
By fostering a collaborative approach to Space Flight Safety operators have managed to effectively pool data in order to combat the risk of collision in orbit. However, with monumental changes occurring; increased space traffic and autonomy, mega-constellation, in-orbit services, militarization of space, and so on, Space Management is becoming increasingly complex.
Current methods may come up wanting in the decade to come if nothing more is done. In this instalment in the series we consider how increased policy and regulation is vital for success in our struggle for SSA.
The SDA would like to see SSA transferred from the sole responsibility of operators to that of the state. SSA is a real environmental issue. Without the ability to safely operate in space, many of the everyday services and those of a more complex nature across the world could become impossible. That is a real threat to the world and as such should be treated as an international, governmental issue.
On this topic, Brian Swinburne, SDA Director, notes; “SSA policies and standards are a slow-moving thing, and always will be due to them being developed by consensus across many different nations. They are trying to evolve but SSA is evolving at quite a pace, constellations are only just being thought about, and multi-national cooperation is always going to be a challenge.”
Whilst nations are stepping up to the plate in their efforts to increase space safety, the ideal balance has yet to be struck. Brian put it; “standardisation does a good job but they are not rules or legally binding, one can choose not to observe a standard as long as you have a stated reason for doing so”. Jean-Luc builds on this by adding; “More regulation might be good, but it should not come at the expense of added costs for commercial enterprise nor should it restrain the innovation movement that is going through the space industry these last few years.”
Over the next decade, we would also like to see a more holistic approach to SSA, including multiple tools and sources. Dan Oltrogge, SDA Technical Advisor, recently partook in a demonstration for the AIAA ASCEND conference that quantified that fusion across multiple data sources and data types improves SSA accuracy significantly (e.g., typical accuracy improvements of 1.5X for LEO space objects, and 10X for GEO space objects).
SSA, as well as flight safety and STM, could be greatly expanded by incorporating existing and planned SSA algorithms with commercial SSA services, crowdsourcing on a global scale, sensor-agnostic data fusion, and new government SSA and STM initiatives. The SDA has clearly demonstrated that spacecraft operators are willing to invest in improving the safety of flight, and we believe that the SDA (and the operators it represents) can work with governments and other operators to bring about the changes needed over the next ten, or hopefully five, years.
Dan captures this sentiment neatly; “The ideal mix is to ensure that nations regulate their spacecraft and launch operators to ensure a minimally-acceptable level of compliance with space safety and sustainability, coupled with the nurturing of operator voluntary aspirational best practice initiatives such as the recently formed space safety coalition. The reality is that the global space community needs to make improvements on both the regulatory and aspirational/non-binding sides. We cannot let the inertia of insufficient past practices, rules and analysis approaches cloud our judgment on what is truly required to achieve long-term sustainability of space activities.”
We believe there needs to be a drive for regulation and policy to be incorporated into the space environment. Equally, by having the national agencies taking-over SSA services, we also hope to alleviate some of the burden on operators which they have largely shouldered this past decade.