Solving the space junk crisis isn't just about counting trash-it's about control and economics

If people ever think about cleaning up space debris, they typically think of something equivalent to a giant garbage truck in the sky, collecting lost astronaut tools and dead satellites, then hauling them back down to Earth to be deposited in a landfill. But dealing with space debris doesn't work that way, and a new paper by Dr. Slava Turyshev of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, available as a preprint on arXiv, makes a good argument as to why. We typically cover Turyshev for his work on the solar gravitational lens idea.

The study is published in the journal Acta Astronautica.

Turyshev has turned his attention to orbital debris at a critical juncture. According to filings made to the FCC, SpaceX, the company that runs the largest satellite megaconstellation, had its Starlink satellites perform 144,404 collision avoidance maneuvers in the six months from December 2024 through May 2025. Even accounting for the fact that there are more Starlink satellites in orbit now than ever, that means, on average, each one is having to dodge a potential crash every week.

Fortunately, Starlink satellites themselves aren't exactly in the "danger zone" of orbit. They typically orbit at around 500–600 kilometers (311–373 miles), along with other megaconstellations such as Amazon's Kuiper and China's Qianfan. In the paper, Turyshev separates these orbits from those higher up. At 500–600 kilometers (311–373 miles), there is enough atmosphere left that the area is partly self-cleaning—dead satellites and debris in these orbits will burn up in a few years.

Higher up, though, there are bigger problems, both literally and figuratively. At around 850 kilometers (528 miles), giant rocket stages from past launches lurk with no control and little to no atmosphere to drag them down in a reasonable time frame. They could stay in orbit for decades or centuries and don't have any means of avoiding one another. When they inevitably collide, they will spray debris not only into their own orbit but also into higher and lower ones, potentially causing even greater problems for the lower-orbiting communications megaconstellations.

According to European Space Agency data cited in the paper, about 96% of the long-term collision risk comes from these dead objects. And Turyshev further shows that, even if we stop launching rockets tomorrow, the debris already up there would collide and shatter faster than nature can clear it.

This isn't a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the problem of space debris for any length of time. That orbital cascade, commonly known as Kessler syndrome, has been a problem orbital dynamicists have been grappling with for decades. According to Turyshev, controlling it comes down to three separate levers.

First, regulators have to ensure that satellites are designed to intentionally deorbit quickly once their missions end. Luckily, they are already moving in that direction, with the FCC recently introducing a rule requiring satellites to clear out within five years of retirement, rather than the 25 years that had held sway for the last few decades. According to the paper, if the reliability of disposal rises from 90% to 99% and a satellite's allowable afterlife is cut to five years, the environmental hazard decreases by a factor of 50.

A second lever is better vision. Space situational awareness (SSA) systems are great at tracking large, bulky objects but terrible at tracking smaller objects the size of a bullet. But even for larger ones, there's still a level of "fuzziness" that analysts have to deal with, which means they know a general box where an object is in space, but not its exact position. When that box is large, satellite operators waste precious fuel dodging objects that never really posed a threat in the first place.

Rather than trying to track every bolt and nut floating through space, Turyshev suggests that we need to concentrate on shrinking the uncertainty zone around potential high-risk close calls. That idea aligns directly with the real-world infrastructure upgrades that are happening through NOAA's Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS), which is expanding its pilot program to reach more commercial operators this year.

The third lever is what to do with the semipermanent debris that's already in space. Instead of launching expensive missions to grab and deorbit every single one of these objects, Turyshev suggests an alternative he calls just-in-time collision avoidance. If two dead rocket upper stages are about to crash, operators could use ground-based lasers or small swarms of shepherd satellites to move them a few meters out of the way just before impact.

While not as much of a long-term solution (since it simply avoids the immediate problem), it does offer a much less expensive option than attempting to deorbit everything.

Economic calculations will play a major role in any future space debris solution, and right now the market is broken, as Turyshev points out. Due to agreements in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, a private cleanup company cannot simply fly up to an abandoned Soviet rocket booster and deorbit it. Technically, that rocket booster is still owned by the government that launched it (even if, in this case, that government doesn't technically exist anymore).

Also, orbital space suffers from the "tragedy of the commons," as one firm removing a rocket booster benefits all of the other companies with equipment in orbit, despite the cost not being spread among them.

Turyshev's solution is to create contracts that would pay for verifiable reductions in long-term risk—in other words, they would incentivize companies like Astroscale, which intends to remove space debris, to remove the most dangerous pieces first. This would be financed by governments, using money from "disposal bonds" that pay back if the satellite successfully deorbits without active intervention from Astroscale or one of its competitors.

Ultimately, this seems like a reasonable framework to build a long-term plan for space debris mitigation. But there are still some issues—like sheer scale. Even at a 99% successful deorbit rate, with potentially millions of satellites in orbit, that would still leave tens of thousands of derelict ones at any given time. And there's definitely no clear path forward to a successor to the Outer Space Treaty.

But the longer we as a spacefaring civilization ignore these issues, the worse the problem is going to get. Hopefully, this paper helps provide part of the impetus to push toward a formally adopted solution framework—or at the very least, start a more comprehensive conversation about it.