Paper detail

Looking out for a sustainable space

October 1957, and the successful launch of Sputnik 1 into Earth orbit, marked the dawn of the Space Age. The first of the 'fellow travellers' - humanity's first artificial satellite - orbited for a mere three months before re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, though its mission paved the way for an era of exploration that has endured to the present day. For many, a world without satellites would be a difficult one to imagine. As a society, we have become reliant on them for a vast array of services and applications. With a divine view of large swathes of the Earth's surface, and the ability to relay signals around its curvature, satellites have enabled the fast transfer of data on a global scale, bypassing the challenges associated with ground-based broadcasting, long-distance wiring, and so on. Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) satellites have revolutionised transportation by land, air, and sea, while weather satellites enable scientists to monitor and warn of large-scale phenomena as they develop in near real-time. Satellites have extended the frontiers of observation: looking outwards, astronomers are able to circumvent the Earth's atmosphere to look deeper into the cosmos than ever before; looking inwards, patterns and processes that feed into general circulation models can be monitored on a range of timescales, improving our understanding of climate change. Satellites, and the services they provide, are not going to disappear any time soon. That said, threats to satellite safety do exist, and it is important that they be addressed as soon as possible to avoid long-lasting damage to operations in the space domain. Nearly sixty-five years on from the advent of human activity in space, I chart the evolution of the orbital debris environment and review latest efforts to make space operations more sustainable.