It’s Time to Regulate Outer Space
An explosion in the number of satellites is dramatically increasing the risk of collisions.
Not on its own for long.
Photographer: ESA/Getty Images
Last week, the European Space Agency reached out to to warn Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. that one of its satellites might collide with a SpaceX communications satellite. When ESA first raised such concerns in late August, the chances of a crash were 1 in 50,000; SpaceX had said then that it didn’t think the risk was high enough to justify action. Now the odds had narrowed to 1 in 1,000. Yet ESA received no reply.
Eventually the space agency unilaterally moved its satellite out of the way when it was barely half an orbit away from SpaceX’s. Company officials later explained that they'd failed to respond because of "a bug in our on-call paging system." In short, they'd missed the message.