Space Traffic Management Through Environment Capacity

Abstract

Access to space is in principle regulated by international and national law. Once in orbit, however, the notion of national boundaries is not sufficient for space traffic management concepts as the physical reality dictates that actions of a single object in orbit has consequences on all its orbital neighbors. The space environment is therefore a limited shared resource, i.e., the ability to safely conduct operations. Based on reviewing the limitations of the current space debris mitigation guidelines, a natural extension is proposed by considering the capacity of the space environment to withstand risks associated with resource usage. To achieve this link, a metric capturing the resource consumption of an object in terms of collision risk induced on orbital neighbors is constructed. The integral risk over all actors in orbit is then used to quantify the notion of harmful interference with the environment. Managing this integral risk, i.e., the environmental capacity, in the same way as is done for other resources linked with orbits, e.g., frequencies, leads to a dynamical framework for achieving space safety and security through space traffic management.