Miles Lifson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Daniel Jang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Richard Linares, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Keywords: Source-Sink Evolutionary Modeling, Space Sustainability, Space Governance
Abstract:
Existing U.S. orbital debris rules largely focus on imposing certain minimum technical standards and disclosure requirements on operators. While such rules undoubtedly help reduce orbital risk and limit blatantly irresponsible behavior, they are only indirectly tied to actual policy objectives around preservation of the long-term sustainability of the Low Earth Orbit environment.
We argue that ensuring space sustainability will require a transition away from a reliance on fixed per-spacecraft or per-system rules to a process that combines both rules for generally responsible behavior and integrated environmental modeling to understand consequences of decisions for overall capacity and the space environment. Adaptive management and governance processes provide structured decision-making mechanisms to facilitate collaborative action to robustly achieve goals in the presence of uncertainty and change. Adaptive processes can help regulators and stakeholders ensure compatibility between actions and their sustainability goals, understand efficacy of various interventions, respond nimbly but predictably to unexpected events, and more efficiently adjudicate trade-offs between stakeholders.
We sketch out a notional adaptive space environment management process, using a source-sink evolutionary model (SSEM) from the MIT Orbital Capacity Assessment Tool to demonstrate potential roles for integrated modeling. Several potential use cases and scenarios are described. SSEMs simulate broad trends for the evolution of the space environment by aggregating consideration of general classes of objects such as active satellites and debris into large spatial bins. Despite inherent limits to fidelity, SSEMs have several attractive features for use in adaptive governance processes including low computational cost, simplicity, accessibility, and generality.
Date of Conference: September 19-22, 2023
Track: Space Domain Awareness