These are boom times for the space business.
In the U.S. alone, satellite launches have surged more than 600% over the past decade, and their pace is only expected to accelerate as the race to deploy data centers into orbit heats up. What happens in space now touches almost every aspect of modern life, from agriculture to national security to navigation to internet access.
But as our activity in space picks up, so does the need to study its effect on Earth’s atmosphere and find ways to prevent potential harm.
This paper is an attempt to jumpstart a nuanced conversation about how to address these environmental issues without sacrificing the benefits of our growing space presence, which are too great to lose and felt daily by everyday Americans.
In Washington, discussions about the space industry’s impact on our atmosphere often focus on a binary question about whether or not there should be more regulation. This is a mistake that ignores the many major questions still in need of answers. We believe it would instead be beneficial to find a pragmatic, integrated path forward that engages both industry and government in identifying ways to maximize our rewards from space and minimize atmospheric effects.
Crafting this integrated approach will require tying together several different policy and scientific conversations. To understand the potential harm side of the equation, it is essential to study the impact of rocket fuel emissions into the atmosphere and of satellites largely breaking up into particulate matter during reentry. While there are also concerns about the footprint of space activities on Earth from siting to discharges of pollutants, we already have established statutory and regulatory frameworks in place to govern them. Our focus in this report is on the less understood and unseen atmospheric and near-Earth environment.
To calculate the benefits, we need to broadly map the contributions that space-based science bring home in the areas of emergency and environmental management, agriculture, and conservation. Congress has fortunately resisted budget cuts to NASA and other climate agencies proposed by the Trump administration that would make this task much harder. But as we’re thinking about the environmental return on investment in space, the conversation should be evolving from merely sustaining research to how we maximize the impact of data gleaned from space using new tools, partnership structures, and audiences.
There are five primary questions policymakers need answers to in order inform thoughtful, integrated solutions:
These questions are each insufficient on their own — they need to be considered holistically and in context with each other. But even before we learn their answers, there are clear next steps to be taken, covering a wide range of issues. They include:
