Why is the European Union investing in astral garbage machines?

MAY 2, 2023

Last November, the council of the European Space Agency (ESA) gathered in a conference room on the Champ de Mars, a plush park in Paris’ tony 7th arrondissement. Representatives from the 22 member states sat at a long table headed by French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire. Guests could look out onto the Eiffel Tower or at the ESA’s astronauts, who sat in the second row of the conference room, wearing blue spacesuits. The year had been marked by setbacks. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, collaboration between between the ESA and Russia’s Roscosmos space agency had mostly come to a halt. The ESA saw several of its projects delayed, including a much-anticipated mission to Mars. Yet the ESA’s budget was rising: to 731 million euros in 2022, a 17 percent increase over the budget established in 2019. Its members were determined — top donors Germany, Luxembourg, France, the U.K. and Spain, especially — to invest in Europe’s space future.

This future would be a sustainable one. The ESA would take the lead in cleaning up space. At the conference, Josef Aschbacher, the ESA director general, stated that “climate and sustainability remain ESA’s highest priority. Our science and exploration will inspire the next generation.” For the first time, the ESA’s budget included the world’s first flying garbage truck, an innovative way of dealing with the problem of “space junk.”

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Since Sputnik 1 was launched into space on Oct. 4, 1957, approximately 11,000 satellites have joined the Earth’s orbit. As space becomes privatized, mined and shot through with venture investment, this number has grown exponentially. Some 180 orbital launches took place in 2022, many of them funded by companies like SpaceX. This means that trash has accumulated, too. Vestiges of old satellites like Astérix — the first French space object, launched into orbit under Charles de Gaulle in 1965 — still hover up there nearly 60 years down the road, rubbing shoulders with hundreds of thousands of small pieces of metal and the occasional spatula or tool bag lost by astronauts during spacewalks.

Aware of these pessimistic projections, the space community — as the people who work in space research like to call themselves — has begun to call for better practices, making efforts to dispose of rocket bodies more sustainably. Yet in the absence of a global binding framework, these attempts remain entirely voluntary. The ESA appears determined to take the lead on debris removal. But is this a way of making space more sustainable or simply having a good conscience while filling it with more stuff?

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Space debris comes in all sizes and shapes. Some pieces are the relics of long satellites as large as a school bus, or chunks of defunct rockets from the Cold War. Others are tiny bits of aluminum, paint flakes as small as a marble — at least 200,000 between 1 and 10 centimeters, according to the U.S. Space Surveillance Network. Some reflect starlight and are fairly easy to spot. Yet others, even big pieces, remain invisible: At about 8 kilometers per second, they can be too fast to see, let alone tow.

These pieces of trash do more than obscure the stars. They present real danger. They risk falling back to Earth unexpectedly. Two hundred to 400 objects do so every year in a mysterious region of the Pacific Ocean known as Point Nemo, used by spacefaring nations to drop defunct satellites. It is a vast, isolated zone east of New Zealand, a gigantic spatial cemetery home to hundreds of space vehicles, including the Soviet space station Mir. Uncontrolled reentries also threaten human lives. In May 2020, a deafening noise rang out in a village in Cote d’Ivoire. “We first assumed it was thunder,” said Jean-Marc Kouassi, the mayor of a neighboring village. After close inspection, however, the villagers discovered a 12-meter-long pipe among the kapok trees. It was the remains of a Chinese rocket, launched eight days prior and headed to Tiangong, the Chinese space station.

In-orbit collisions are another risk. Anticipating collisions is part of the day-to-day job for space agencies. “We call them fragmentations,” explained Christophe Bonnal, a senior expert at CNES, the French National Centre for Space Studies. This is a euphemism. When I talked to him over the phone last November, he was in Japan, and there had been two recent fragmentation incidents. A Chinese rocket had recently exploded into 50 pieces. A Japanese launcher had created 50 more pieces of debris. “We still don’t know, in this case, whether it was a collision or an explosion,” he said. Every year, the CNES receives 3 million notifications of potential incidents. Each has a 1-in-10,000 chance to really collide. Out of these millions of alerts, the team executes only 20 satellite maneuvers to avoid damage.

This junk has created a rich terrain for diplomatic squabbles.

“Take an object A,” Bonnal said. “On Monday, it’s visible on trackers. Tuesday, Wednesday: nothing to report. Then on Thursday, instead of seeing A, we have 50 pieces of debris.” It’s extremely rare to find the cause of the fragmentation, he said. After all, no one knows how many pieces of space junk there really are. Only 25 percent of space objects are cataloged (that we know of). The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs lists more than 15,000. The U.S. Department of Defense lists 27,000. Tens of thousands remain out of reach. Some are known, but the information is classified. “Last year, we witnessed the fragmentation of three American launchers that ended up creating 2,200 pieces of debris,” Bonnal told me. “These launchers typically weren’t listed in the index.” Bonnal said the CNES and the U.S. government had a “real constructive exchange,” but “in the end, all they could say was, ‘These launchers never existed.’”

This junk has created a rich terrain for diplomatic squabbles. Since the mid-2000s, the main space powers have tested anti-satellite weapons, known as ASATs. But these tests, which consist of blowing up one’s own satellite in orbit to demonstrate the range and power of one’s anti-satellite weapons, are at least partly responsible for the multiplication of space debris. “The handling of ASATs has become a diplomatic tool,” said Lucie Sénéchal-Perrouault, a Ph.D. researcher at the CNRS, the French national research agency. “The U.S. likes nothing more than tackling China for their reckless behavior when it comes to debris,” she said. “Both nations like to present themselves as responsible actors, by opposition to the other.” In 2014, the Council on Foreign Relations said the accidental destruction of a U.S. space asset by China could trigger worldwide conflict.

More trash, more problems: In February 2009, the U.S. telecommunication satellite Iridium 33 accidentally collided with the Russian military satellite Kosmos 225, destroying both machines. “That was the first big collision, and it woke us up,” said Muriel Richard-Noca, chief engineer and co-founder of ClearSpace, a Swiss startup that recently signed an 86 million euro deal with the ESA to create the first space “garbage truck,” in a video that has now been taken down. At the time, Richard-Noca was about to launch the SwissCube-1, a mini-satellite built by her team of students at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. While conducting their mission, Richard-Noca and her students found themselves operating in a field of debris, which raised both concern and interest. Richard-Noca realized that scientists would need to react before it became impossible to navigate in orbit.

ClearSpace is not the only organization looking at the problem. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has been working on a contactless approach based on lasers, while the RemoveDEBRIS team — part of the Surrey Space Centre, the largest U.K. academic center for space engineering — performed an experiment a year and a half ago using a drag sail, a sail attached to a satellite that hastens the deorbiting of targeted debris, causing it to slow and fall. In 2021, the China National Space Administration successfully used a space debris mitigation satellite to push a defunct satellite all the way to the geostationary graveyard. Also called junk orbit, this yard serves a similar purpose to the Pacific Ocean’s Point Nemo, except it lies at an altitude of 36,050 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, safely out of the way.

In December 2020, ClearSpace signed a contract with the ESA to operate the first debris-removal mission from orbit. The contract is funded mostly by ESA member states, which, in return, expect their companies to contribute to the collective effort. In ESA jargon, this is called “geo-return.” For every 100 euros allocated by a member state to an ESA project, a contract equivalent to 100 euros will be offered to a company based in the donor country. In the case of the ClearSpace-1 mission, eight countries are participating in the development of the robot, including Germany, Poland, and Portugal, England and Switzerland, which belong to the ESA despite not being EU members. Omega, the luxury watch company, is also a ClearSpace sponsor. (Switzerland!)

“You have to imagine one vehicle approaching another at a speed of 8 kilometers per second, on conflicting
trajectories.”

The robot ClearSpace is building is a spidery object equipped with four robotic arms. It should be large enough to capture pieces of debris 8 meters long and 2 meters wide. (ClearSpace declined to give the robot’s actual size “for confidentiality reasons.”) The robot’s friendly look somewhat undermines the acrobatic job it will perform: “Once it’s out there, it’s typically not stable,” explained Richard-Noca in a video edited by ClearSpace. “So there will be a spinning, a tumbling. And that’s the whole challenge. How do you capture an object that is tumbling?”

“Have you ever seen a video of a fighter jet being refueled midair?” asked Pierre Lionnet, a space economist working at Eurospace, the trade association of the ESA. “You have to imagine one vehicle approaching another at a speed of 8 kilometers per second, on conflicting trajectories.”

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Picking up trash in space isn’t just a technical problem. Because of space laws, which for the most part are governed by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, it is forbidden to touch another nation’s satellite. Like ships, commercial satellites carry flags. For this reason, the piece of space debris programmed to be captured during ClearSpace’s first mission was very carefully selected from a list of objects belonging to the ESA: It is a piece from a European rocket left behind in 2013. With a mass of 100 kilograms, “its relatively simple shape and sturdy construction made it a suitable first goal,” said Luisa Innocenti, the head of the ESA’s Clean Space office.

During its first mission, scheduled in 2026, the ClearSpace-1 chaser will be tasked with seizing the object like a tow truck and dragging it down until it reenters the atmosphere. The idea is to bring it to a low enough orbit that after a few days or maybe a few weeks, it will automatically deorbit due to the friction of the atmosphere, according to Swiss astronaut Claude Nicollier in a ClearSpace video. If all goes according to plan, it will burn up to two-thirds of its mass while traveling through Earth’s atmosphere. ClearSpace is also working with the United Kingdom Space Agency on a second program aimed at catching not one but two pieces of junk at a time.

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As on Earth, inaction in space comes with a steep cost. With increasing space debris, rockets will become even more expensive to manufacture. “Whether it’s collision avoidance maneuvers, budgeting fuel or shielding your aircraft, it will have economic consequences,” said Tim Maclay, ClearSpace’s chief strategy officer. Collisions with satellites could have add-on effects. Satellites are not just telecommunications tools; they are also used for collecting data on climate change and making projections in case of catastrophic weather events. “If we didn’t have weather forecasts before a hurricane, how many victims could there be?” wondered Bonnal. Maclay noted that Cospas-Sarsat satellites, which listen from space for distress signals and notify the nearest ground station, have saved 52,000 lives since 1982.

For all the talk of cleaning up space, much of the race for orbital trash pickup seems to only encourage more trash.

Who will pay for this cleanup? Whether it’s a harpoon or a veil or an arm, all debris-catching techniques have one thing in common: They cost a lot of money. “Even when the robotic arms techniques will be fully up to speed, it will still cost at least 20 to 30 million euros per [piece of] debris,” Bonnal said. The cost may be a future source of diplomatic headaches: “The decision to finance future debris-removal missions should be discussed globally as the debris problem is a global problem which cannot be only supported by the European Space Agency,” Innocenti said.

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For all the talk of cleaning up space, much of the race for orbital trash pickup seems to only encourage more trash. In a separate contract with the ESA, ClearSpace is now exploring a new market, one that the company seems to think could become cost-effective in the same manner as, say, electric cars or renewable energy. “The next step is in orbit servicing,” Maclay said, “such as satellite repair or fuel replenishment.”

Yet some specialists don’t see the emergence of a spatial circular economy happening anytime soon. “Economically, it makes no sense,” Lionnet said. “It’s as if every time you took the trash out, you bought a new trash can.” He estimated, for example, that the two “mission extension vehicles” capable of extending satellite “lives” cost between 150 and 200 million dollars. “Even if you do find a way to finance a space tow truck, you still need to launch fuel,” he said. “To me, people who currently work on this are betting that at some point, we’ll find new energy sources, for example on asteroids, from which to make up fuel in orbit.”

Whether a space cleanup happens or not, quickly or not, the fact remains that the ESA is eager to invest. “Maybe ESA has a bit of a guilty conscience,” Lionnet said. “After all, one of the biggest debris in low orbit today belongs to ESA. It’s a satellite called Envisat, as big as a school bus, that was launched in 2002. After it stopped functioning in 2012, ESA failed to convince its member states to finance its deorbiting, and now it’s still up there.” It could also be that Europe feels a bit late to the party. Last September, the U.S. established new rules: In a game-changing move, the Federal Communications Commission announced it would require that satellite operators dispose of their satellites within five years of completing their missions. The ESA’s core philosophy has always been that it is a civilian space agency, not a military one, in contrast to the space agencies of the U.S., China and Russia. In an age of new rules and new paradigms in space, perhaps the ESA hopes to make up for all its bureaucratic cumbersomeness by leading morally.

Still, space’s gigantic potential market seems just too juicy to be ignored by governments, including European ones. Thierry Breton, the EU’s internal market commissioner, said he is determined to “go fast” to catch up with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos by sending a European-made mega-constellation, a new generation of large constellations of satellites, into orbit. Le Maire, France’s finance minister, has talked about wanting to start a French equivalent to SpaceX. All things considered, the future of space will likely be cluttered. Last November, during that same Paris conference, Aschbacher, the ESA’s director general, told the assembled crowds, “We need to speed up the commercialization of space.”