There's a massive, evolving body of work on space law and a lot more than meets the eye. This article doesn't really canvas the extent to which the community to working towards tackling the long-term issue of space sustainability.

Every IAC, there's a space moot court run by the International Institute of Space Law (IISL) [0]. This is an excellent opportunity for space law young professionals to engage in pressing issues like Space Traffic Management (STM).

The issue with space debris is much like the climate change challenge: it's serious and nuanced. A few years ago, I co-authored a paper on the applicability of the IADC's 25-year guideline ,mentioned in the article, for Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites [1] (happy to send anyone a copy of the full manuscript if interested).

I've also done some work on the technical side of Active Debris Removal (ADR), and published a paper on figuring out how to target solutions to the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) for multi-target missions using low-thrust transfer trajectories [2] (likewise, happy to share the full paper if interested).

I'm sharing this is to highlight that the problem of space debris is not trivial. I find that it's often trivialized in articles intended for a general audience, when the devil really is in the details.

For instance, the article misses the important topic of addressing object ownership. There are no salvage laws in place for space assets. What's more, the fundamental definition of what is considered "junk" is in the eye of the beholder. Russian rocket bodies are often cited, however what's missed is the fact that Russia continues indefinitely to retain full ownership of these objects: hence, you can't touch them even if you could safely and economically remove them, without Russia giving explicit consent. This speaks to how intractable space law actually is: it's a massively complex geo-political maze.

The article also fails to mention that despite space being big, we witnessed the effects of a collision back in 2009 [3]. I had the pleasure of grabbing a drink with TS Kelso, the genius behind CelesTrak, last week during the conference. Fact is that we're hampered on all side (technical, economic, legal, political) to deal with the space debris problem.

There's an idea being floated to develop a Space Sustainability Rating (SSR), recently announced at the World Economic Forum [4]. I'm currently working on an idea with one of the participants in the consortium (Prof. Moriba Jah at UT Austin). He's got this quote that he loves to use to describe the right approach to Space Situational Awareness (SSA): "to know it, you must measure it; to understand it, you must predict it!" To that end, we're looking at connecting our global space supply chain database [5] to the knowledge of the space debris population, to better assess risk and enable lawmakers to understand what needs to be regulated (disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders at satsearch).

In short, this article only skims over a highly complex topic with many dimensions.

[0] https://iislweb.org/iac-2019-technical-programme-iisl-colloq...

[1] https://iafastro.directory/iac/archive/browse/IAC-15/A6/IP/2...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027311771...

[3] https://www.celestrak.com/publications/AAS/09-368/AAS-09-368...

[4] https://phys.org/news/2019-05-space-sustainability-aims-amou...

[5] https://satsearch.co