Imagine waking up to a smoldering piece of machinery in your garden that is still smoking and sizzling after yelling to earth from space. This is an extremely unlikely scenario, but it remains true that space debris does happen. Of all the scientific instruments we introduce into the stratosphere, some occasionally crash where it came from, just to cause turmoil and confusion.
This is far more likely if you live near a launch site like Cape Canaveral, Florida, but NASA recently raised the alarm 6,000 tons of low-orbit space debris More and more areas are clogging miles above the earth. So when you’re in the seemingly unlikely situation of dealing with space debris ending up where you live – or worse, damaging your home – how do you deal with it?
Does a satellite that no longer exist become a cosmological souvenir? Is there legal protection? Here’s how to approach space debris handling if it ever lands on your doorstep.
Who is responsible for space debris?
It may seem that all of the faulty machines orbiting the earth have been forgotten, but there is actually a certain level of liability when it comes to damage caused by space debris. Two United Nations recognized pieces of legislation – the 1967 Space Treaty and the 1972 Liability Agreement– Both stipulate that governments bear financial responsibility for damage caused by space debris, even if a private company started the entity in question.
G / O Media can receive a commission
It’s a subject that sounds straightforward, although it becomes more difficult as you practice. For example, if part of a NASA satellite entered your home, the space agency would pay the bill. But, as Timiebi Aganaba, a professor of space and society at Arizona State University, recently wrote for The Conversation, when multiple governments get involved, it becomes a bureaucratic mess.
If a piece of space junk from China were to land on your house, your country’s government would claim compensation through diplomatic channels and then pay you – if they chose to do so at all.
This type of event is extremely rare. According to Aganaba, the Liability Convention was only applied once, when in 1978 a “Soviet Cosmos 954 satellite fell into a barren region of the Canadian Northwest Territories”. And while the Canadian government ultimately sought $ 6 million in compensation for cleaning up radioactive material spilled from the vehicle’s nuclear reactor, the Soviets settled for just $ 3 million.
What should you do with space debris?
The natural option for the general public – who are unlikely to ever address the issue – is to turn to NASA, which has traditionally been more than happy to pay the bill for damage caused by their Spaceships are caused. The 1972 Liability Convention provides that the US “has an absolute obligation to indemnify for damage caused by its space object on the surface of the earth or to aircraft in flight,” said Beth Dickey, NASA public affairs officer Live Science in 2011.
While this route seems pretty straightforward – especially when you have irrefutable evidence that unpredictable space debris is destroying your property – it is less clear how authorities intend to deal with the bottleneck of trash currently accumulating in space.
A recently published paper from the University of Colorado offers a proposed directive indicating that an “orbital usage fee” of US $ 235,000 per satellite could discourage operators from increasing congestion in low orbit. While such a proposal may be more tempting than the technological solutions currently in use to clean up space debris, it is not entirely clear how it would play out (for example, no government can claim ownership of space).
In the meantime, while the space debris continues to build up, it’s good to know how to deal with it in the unlikely event that it ends up at your door.
