Session
Poster Session 1
Location
Salt Palace Convention Center, Salt Lake City, UT
Abstract
A Debris Crisis Meets A Logistics Boom: Low- and high-Earth orbit keep accumulating debris faster than the atmosphere can clear it, even as NASA's Artemis and CLPS programs establish routine trans-lunar traffic. The 2009 Iridium-Cosmos collision and later anti-satellite tests proved that single fragmentation events can irreversibly degrade critical orbital shells, raising the specter of Kessler Syndrome.
- 46,600+ objects tracked on orbit today, with ~130 million sub-cm fragments (ESA, 2025)
- $500K-$2M cost per kilogram for dedicated ADR, fiscally intractable at system scale
- 5-10 / yr large objects must be removed to stabilize LEO (Liou & Johnson)
The Unit-Economics Problem: Purpose-built removers such as ClearSpace-1 and ELSA-d incur a full mission cost (launch, rendezvous, capture, and deorbit) for a single target. No binding instrument mandates removal, and remediation markets remain nascent, perpetuating a tragedy of the commons.
Document Type
Event
Included in
In-Transit Debris Remediation: Dual-Use Logistics for Sustainable Cislunar SmallSat Constellations
Salt Palace Convention Center, Salt Lake City, UT
A Debris Crisis Meets A Logistics Boom: Low- and high-Earth orbit keep accumulating debris faster than the atmosphere can clear it, even as NASA's Artemis and CLPS programs establish routine trans-lunar traffic. The 2009 Iridium-Cosmos collision and later anti-satellite tests proved that single fragmentation events can irreversibly degrade critical orbital shells, raising the specter of Kessler Syndrome.
- 46,600+ objects tracked on orbit today, with ~130 million sub-cm fragments (ESA, 2025)
- $500K-$2M cost per kilogram for dedicated ADR, fiscally intractable at system scale
- 5-10 / yr large objects must be removed to stabilize LEO (Liou & Johnson)
The Unit-Economics Problem: Purpose-built removers such as ClearSpace-1 and ELSA-d incur a full mission cost (launch, rendezvous, capture, and deorbit) for a single target. No binding instrument mandates removal, and remediation markets remain nascent, perpetuating a tragedy of the commons.
