Crashing space debris poses a serious threat to even the most crowded airspaces
The probability of space debris crashing in particularly crowded airspace is 26 percent per year. The risk could be reduced.
(Image: Nazarii_Neshcherenskyi/Shutterstock.com)
The probability of space debris falling to earth hitting an airspace with a particularly large number of airplanes is 26 percent per year. This was determined by three researchers from the Canadian University of British Columbia. Although the risk of an aircraft actually being hit is very low – they calculated a probability of 1 in 430,000 per year – such debris nevertheless poses a danger to which aviation would have to react. The responsible aerospace companies and agencies would therefore pass on costs and risks to the general public that could be avoided.
Risk can be avoided
It was known that crashing space debris is not a purely theoretical danger for aviation. The risk was most recently made visible to the general public by the Chinese “Long March 5B” rockets. They are not designed for a controlled fall back to earth, so after each launch it is sometimes unclear until a few minutes beforehand exactly where the remains will fall. Due to such an uncontrolled crash, a large part of Spanish airspace was even temporarily closed to air traffic in the fall of 2022. The probability of such a quiet area of international airspace being hit is as high as 75 percent every year, the research team writes.
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If space debris crashes in a particularly busy airspace, the responsible aviation authority would have to decide whether to take the – low – risk or divert aircraft. “But why do the authorities have to decide this at all?” asks co-author and physicist Aaron Boley. Uncontrolled crashes are not a necessity, but a consequence of design decisions. The entire industry could also use rockets that crash in a controlled manner over remote areas. As many already do. But as long as this is not prescribed, it will not become the standard.
Just how dangerous such crashes can be become clear at the beginning of the year, shortly after the test launch of the giant Starship rocket from the US company SpaceX. Its upper stage exploded, and the debris not only crashed into the sea north of Puerto Rico, but also occasionally onto the Turks and Caicos Islands. Aircraft had to be diverted there too. With the ever-increasing number of rocket launches, the risk will continue to grow and politicians must take action, the researchers now believe. They present their research in the journal Scientific Reports.
(mho)
