The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) desires to lighten our planet’s space-junk load.
The FAA — which, amongst other duties, awards launch licenses — has proposed a rule that will limit the period of time that non-public rockets’ upper stages stay in orbit.
The proposed rule, which the FAA released in draft form on Wednesday (Sept. 20), seeks “to limit the expansion of recent orbital debris and reduce the potential for collisions with spacecraft and satellites to advertise a sustainable space environment,” the agency wrote in an announcement on Wednesday.
Related: Taking out the trash: Here’s how private corporations could possibly be vital for space debris removal
The potential regulation would give industrial launch operators five disposal options for his or her upper stages (the a part of the rocket that deploys the payload). Those options are, within the FAA’s words:
- Conduct a controlled reentry;
- Move the upper stage to a less congested storage or graveyard orbit;
- Send the upper stage on an Earth-escape orbit;
- Retrieve the upper stage (called lively debris removal) inside five years; or
- Perform an uncontrolled atmospheric disposal.
If corporations opt to let their upper stages fall uncontrolled from low Earth orbit, they’ll have 25 years for that to occur, based on the draft rule, which you’ll read here. But it surely leaves open a more accelerated timeline.
“Provided that all the mission lifetime of upper stages and their components is sort of short, and spent upper stages pose a big risk of debris propagation the longer they’re in orbit, it could be appropriate to have a shorter disposal timeline of 5 years or one other time period lower than 25 years,” the proposed rule states.
“Shortening the removal deadline would decrease the chance of orbital debris causing damage to spacecraft, which could create more debris, shorten one other spacecraft’s mission or endanger the lives of human spaceflight participants,” it adds.
Such regulations would help mitigate the threat from space junk, which is already considerable, given how crowded Earth orbit is getting.
“As of July 2023, the variety of orbital objects sized 10 cm [4 inches] or greater is estimated to be over 23,000,” the FAA wrote within the Wednesday statement. “Recent debris projections estimate a complete of one-half million objects sized between 1 and 10 cm [0.4 to 4 inches] on orbit, and over 100 million objects larger than 1 mm.”
The proposed rule can be published within the Federal Register in the subsequent few days. That milestone will kick off a 90-day public comment period, FAA officials said.