The space debris have caused a great concern for further space exploration in the future. Satellite swarms and constellations have also gained popularity in the recent years, which leads to even greater concerns regarding the over-population of the space environment around the Earth. In the past two years, the satellite amount in the Earth's orbit has increased by 50% and SpaceX have secured go-ahead for another eleven thousand satellites and are applying for launch of additional thirty thousand satellites. Other companies such as OneWeb, Telesat and Amazon are on similar track. Currently there is a lag in the space governance domain, which can't keep up with the ambitions of the large space technology companies that are in-cooperating load distributed systems involving many satellites. The main goal of the article is to present the issues and tragedies that may arise from applying the consumer electronic model to the space technology.

Currently active collision avoidance mechanisms and standards in satellites is lacking and potential for it in the near future is not promising. Thus, improved space situational awareness is required to ensure that the risk of collisions, that will lead to even increased quantity of sap[ace debris, is reduced. The improvement of situational awareness would include improved communication and cooperation between multiple satellite operators. In 2019 ESA satellite had to take initiative to avoid collision with a Starlink satellite after failing to reach SpaceX by e-mail. Currently there are no laws that would ensure the right of way for satellites, allowing companies to play chicken with one another to avoid using propellant of the satellite, which would reduce  the mission lifetime.

As the satellite constellations are becoming more popular, the satellites within these constellations have finite lifetime, meaning that eventually they will have to de-orbit. In the case of Starlink the operational lifetime is 5-6 years, and individual satellite will take approximately 6 months to de-orbit. Approximately, 10% of the satellites of the Starlink constellation will be performing de-orbiting at any given time. If other companies will implement similar constellations and lifetime periods, it may lead to having thousands of satellites performing de-orbiting. This causes other concerns as many satellites will be congesting the lower orbits, increasing the collision risk even further. As the satellites are at the end of their lifetime, their abilities to avoid collisions are also reduced, and the avoidance will have to be ensured by the operational satellites that live in the specific orbit. Which is not fair. Currently the communication between the operators are voluntary.

Surface impacts and atmospheric effects are also a concern when talking about satellite mega-constellations. Currently the trend of re-usable rockets is becoming more and more popular, but not everyone is using this approach. Un-salvageable rockets which do not involve controllable descends, that raises safety concerns. As the satellite launches increases, so does the proportion of launches that are performed by these types of rockets. Most of the rockets are landed in the ocean, and increased launch frequency raises concerns regarding introducing toxic compounds in the ocean environment that will accumulate over time. One such compound is the unspent hydrozine fuel, for example. First Starlink satellites included some components that can survive the re-entry that may collide with surface objects such as a person. Re-entry also increases the different element concentration in different atmosphere altitudes that is unnatural and the overall effect of this is not known.

Satellite mega-constellations has certain uses and advantages in today's society, but applying the electronic consumer approach to satellite manufacturing causes some serious risks that will make the current space debris problem, that is bad already, even worse.


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