What can I say, the Earth's orbit is one big rubbish dump. Many private films, and even space agencies, have long been trying to develop a plan to clear our outer space, so that the garbage in it does not cause damage to rockets, satellites or even the International Space Station, because it can have tragic consequences.
It is estimated that there are as many as 170 million objects there bigger than 1 millimeter and 700 thousand bigger than 1 centimeter, which move at a speed of even 8 km / s. This is alarming data, especially when we take into account the fact that the space industry is experiencing its renaissance and in the coming years will fly a lot of rockets into space, and there will be even more new installations in orbit.
Our closest space can not only litter damaged or old satellites, but also astronauts on space walks. It often happens that they lose various objects.
However, the largest dreams of the agencies monitoring the orbit are currently spent on micro-satellites, e.g. made in CubeSat technology. The essence of this serious problem is well demonstrated by the operations of Swarm Technologies, which recently carried several such devices into orbit.
The whole hitch is that she did it without the permission of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), because she could. This was because the prototype devices were much smaller than the CubeSat, so they did not have to be registered by the FCC.
Swarm Technologies is going to send hundreds or even thousands of microsatellites into orbit. This idea very much dislikes the FCC, which in the light of the law in force not only can not prohibit their carrying out, but also does not have the technology to monitor the orbits of such small objects.
This raises a huge security problem not only for the inhabitants of our planet, future manned flights on the ISS or for missions to the Moon and Mars, but also for bringing various loads into space.
The US government, along with companies, agencies and other countries, should therefore develop new regulations regarding the deployment of various installations into orbit. Because if we want to clean the Earth's orbit from rubbish, then perhaps first we should stop further littering it.