> China launched 21 of the 26 hazardous new rocket bodies over the last 21 months, each averaging more than 4 metric tons (8,800 pounds). Two more came from US launchers, one from Russia, one from India, and one from Iran
What are the American ones?
> most of the rockets used for Guowang and Thousand Sails launches have left their upper stages in orbit
Are they in the same orbit as the satellites? If so, China is effectively mining their own constellations.
(Side note: Ars is usually much better at citing its sources. This is terribly written by their standards.)
A common way to do that is to perform an extra burn and tip the second stage's orbit into the atmosphere - so that it burns up in a controlled manner. That's what's done on Starlink launches - the most common type of US launch.
Other countries may choose not to do that, because the second stage has to be designed to allow for those extra burns, and the fuel used cuts straight into the performance margins.
> Are they in the same orbit as the satellites?
Not exactly. Most larger satellites nowadays carry their own fuel and engines, and perform orbital adjustments and station-keeping. Which has a way of putting distance between them and the second stages. They might end up in the same orbital plane, but not the same orbit.
For some satellite types, the second stage only gets the satellite to a transfer orbit - and the satellite itself gets to the deployment orbit from there under its own power.
The FCC individually licenses every launch, and explicitly cares about collision risk. I'm not sure if there's a specific rule about when second stages must be deorbitted, but I'm pretty sure that if a launch provider intended to leave a second stage in a crowded orbit the FCC would cause trouble for them.
Of course the above is a game of prisoners dilemma. You are risking others defecting first. In the current situation there doesn't seem to be much cost if you are last to defect (since regulations will come in just a few rounds). In other situations there can be great gain in defecting first.
Edit: I stand corrected!
The FCC does deal with disposal requirements for US satellites that are launched. In order to secure a license from the FCC you have to prove that your satellite will meet the latest guideline that it will be disposed of (either de-orbit for LEO, or moved to disposal orbit for higher orbits) within 5 years after mission complete [2]. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to apply to upper stages for some reason even though I would say that it is an orbit object that gets licensed and would "complete the mission" after deploying the satellites and have to abide by the 5 year rule.
[0] https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/faa-proposed-rule-would-reduce-...
[1] https://spacenews.com/faa-to-complete-orbital-debris-upper-s...
Edit: The FAA is also proposing orbital debris rules that were supposed to be finalized this year, but aren't released yet[2]. This whole area is a mess, and really needs congress to set clear responsibilities.
[1] https://www.fcc.gov/space/orbital-debris
[2] https://spacenews.com/faa-to-complete-orbital-debris-upper-s...
This is LEO, so it's everyone's orbits. And in any case the big worry about space junk is not so much that it takes out one or one thousand existing satellites - which China could replace - but that it makes the orbits unusable by future spacecraft.
The point is that having junk in your own orbits is an interesting self goal. It opens the window to hybrid war strikes, for example.
It takes a lot of energy to change orbital planes. Debris tend to stay in constrained orbits (usually their original ones). If the upper stages are in the birds’ orbits (which is a big if), the debris will all tend to stay there.
> they have the capabilities to do it in a more targeted manner
But not plausibly deniable. My point is China is leaving the front door open to shenanigans by leaving high-energy mass next to its birds. (If, again, it is.)
I don't see any plausibly deniable scenario involving apparent spent rocket stages suddenly reanimating in militarily useful way. c.f. routine electronic warfare jamming. Even a "malfunctioning satellite" would have more deniability, and certainly equal ability to threaten others' space assets.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
1. 2024-125H — Firefly Alpha FLTA005 Stage 2, launching demo cubesats for NASA
2. 2025-077C — Orbital Minotaur IV (8) Stage 4 (Orion 38), launching a few spy satellites
Fun fact: the first stage of the latter rocket was manufactured in 1966.
Was it? Minotaurs repurposed components of Peacekeeper missiles. Development of the SR118 first stage motor—reused as the first stage on Minotaur IV—didn’t start until 1978. [1, pg16]
[1]: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20120016230/downloads/20...
[1]: https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/06/15/three-nro-satellites-l...
[1] https://www.n2yo.com/satellite/?s=61448
I know I read about another over the last year, but can't remember of the top of my head.
In 2022, the FCC adopted a “5-Year Rule” requiring that satellites in low Earth orbit (below ~2,000 km) be disposed of (deorbited or moved to a safe disposal orbit) “as soon as practicable but no later than five years after mission completion.”
It used to be 25 years but less stringent and more of a guideline. This is problematic for CubeSats that are already on tight budgets and some are requiring redesign like AMSAT’s
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00945...
I'm not sure if this would be practical. I wonder if a laser fired from a higher orbit at the debris as it approaches over the earth horizon would slow it down, and gradually push it to lower orbits and eventually reenter. This could possibly work for the small stuff anyway.
The above is a consequence of physics and not an opinion. Even if we discover "new physics" it still needs to fit all the data we have and so that is unlikely to help.
Also your space station suffers the same lifetime issues of a generation ship: it will decay over time, so you still are dependent on earth (or at least a planet) to provide resources.
That's a 1975 design using quite conservative 1950s tech - lots of bulk steel and aluminium with unprocessed Lunar regolith for shielding.
I guess that's the nature of internet arguments.
But that tether will have to lift the entire weight of your ship, plus a share of its own weight. The longer you make it, the heavier it will be, and you get a problem similar to a space elevator, and before you get to city-sized, it seems to require exotic materials already.
The choice of materials impose a maximum size for any design that rotates as a whole.
The elites will send their art collection to space before the poor
It'd also be interesting if what gets sent to space is an SQL database which most important table has the columns account_owner, account_balance..
And here we have the basic requisite military-industrial pitch to develop this dual-use tech and git er done.
[0] https://spacenews.com/chinese-on-orbit-servicing-and-debris-...
Another point is that NASA also works as a job program for a lot of states.
If this second provider was a NASA project everyone would be screaming how much of a waste it is. Conclusion? Space remains hard.
As a European, I would be happy if ESA planned a mission to deorbit Envisat. Besides making the orbit safer, I'm thrilled by the engineering challenge of capturing a large uncontrolled spacecraft.
When will it be safe and cost-efficient to - instead of deorbiting toward Earth's atmosphere - Capture and Haul and Rendezvous and gently Land orbital scrap on non-earth locations like the Moon or Mars or a thrust-retrofitted asteroid for later processing?
Would ISS be more useful as an oxygen tank in earth-moon orbit than in Earth's atmosphere and ocean?
You'll likely get recycling in orbit (where the spacecraft are) before the moon (which has abundant aluminium anyway) first, so the compromise would be shifting debris in LEO to storage orbits with longer decay times
If it's iron or aluminium, someone probably will pay silly (Earth) money for it on the Moon during early colonisation, but maybe not right at the start when there's no bandwidth it facilities for recycling scrap. Right up until the bigger regolith smelters come online.
The box of pre-loved Beanie Babies, perhaps also quite valuable: who knows how much hydrocarbons will be worth in early lunar colonies. Carbon isn't especially abundant in regolith (compared to silicon, aluminium, iron, etc) and has to be baked out as gases. Though I still doubt you'd have takers if the shipping isn't included...
Oxygen is usually plentiful in various minerals, but hydrogen tends to get blown into space if there isn't a reactive atmosphere to recapture it.
Perhaps crashing a carbonaceous asteroid into the moon or disassembling in orbit and landing the results may work?
Does anybody have Tom Mueller's phone number?
Astroscale is working on that in collaboration with various space agencies, they're currently planning a mission (ADRAS-J2) to connect to an uncontrolled rocket body and deorbit it circa 2027: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/02/astroscale-aced-the-wo...
I'm somewhat surprised SpaceX hasn't tackled this problem yet. Even including just one StarCleaner every 2-3 Starlink launches could make a huge difference.
SpaceX even has the perfect test satellite. RatSat was their first successful launch in 2008, and it's barely decayed despite saying it would only last five to ten years.
The objects in the article are all at the bigger end. Presumably Aeroscale have started with a technically easier mission than some of the 50 in the article, but they will also eventually benefit from economies of scale. So you can estimate the cost to remove the 50 bodies in the single digit billions.
[0] https://www.kratosspace.com/constellations/articles/astrosca...
I'm sure the contracts are more complicated than "this amount of money for this job" but the price, at least, is not hypothetical.
It’s not necessary. But it helps turn what is currently research curiosity into something someone can fund at scale.
A ground based high energy laser could ablate material from Earth which would provide propellant mass and incrementally knock objects into deorbiting trajectories.
In future it would of course probably be technically easiest to attach a deorbit package (tether for example) to satellites at launch...
How convenient that the key culprits are Russia (and the scary Soviet Union) and China.
Especially when Trump wants to take on China while handing off The Ukraine to Europe.
Uh, it’s widely known that the Soviets before and Chinese now abandon rocket bodies in orbit.
What, does it reduce the risk from 0.001% chance to 0.0005%?
(if we're imagining, without damage to ISS and scientific projects, of course)
It’s tempting to think a big crash would finally wake people up, but that’s not how it works. When things fall apart, folks just rebuild the same broken setup, only shakier. Look at the Internet. It was supposed to change everything. And it did! Except we just ended up mostly reinventing the same old power structures we had before, just with different players. (There are some really good exceptions tho!)
The real move is to figure out what makes people change and get them to do to, before it all goes up in flames.