Civil and Military Space Traffic Management
4th Manfred Lachs International Conference
on Conflicts in Space and the Rule of Law
Montreal 27-28 May 2016
By
Tommaso Sgobba – IAASS Executive Director
International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety
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Space is congested, competitive and contested
Congested:
Ever increasing number of space operators and countries owing space assets. Ever increasing space debris.
Competitive:
Commercial operators, as principal space actors, driving competition for higher performance and lower costs
of space systems.
Contested:
Over the past two decades, terrestrial dependence on space-based systems (civil, commercial and military)
has grown enormously, as well as their vulnerability due to development of new offensive capabilities.
Civil, commercial and military operators all are concerned about safety, sustainability and security of space
operations. Building a global space governance framework in general, and in particular establishing
effective space traffic management cannot be further procrastinated.
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Space Traffic Management
• Space Traffic Management (STM) consists of:
- safe access into outerspace
- prevention of collisions in outerspace, and
- safe re-entry from outerspace
• Space Traffic Management is aimed to control:
- public safety risk (risk for people on ground, at sea or travelling by air) during launch and re-entry
- risk of loss of space-based services
- safety risk for human spaceflight
- environmental risk
•
Since 2009, following the collision of Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 satellites the US military
Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) started de-facto a form of STM by monitoring
global space traffic and sending warnings to alert of collision risk
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Traffic above Earth
Airspace
NEW
HAZARDS
Exploitation =
civil/commercial and
military use
INTERNATIONAL GOVERNANCE DEFICIT
Near Space
Outer Space
Exploitation
region
Exploration
region
km 0
18
160
∞
36,000
International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety
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Airspace vs Outerspace: which boundary?
• Several operational boundaries exist between aviation and space:
- 18 km, upper limit of civil aviation traffic
- 50 Km, upper limit of atmospheric buoyancy (balloons);
- 100 Km, aircraft aerodynamic controls become ineffective (“Karman Line”);
Near-Space
- 120 Km, re-entry threshold for space systems;
- 160 Km, lowest practical operating orbit for satellites.
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The emerging “Near-Space” (18-160 km)
Because in aviation the decompression risk at high altitude cannot be mitigated solely by the use of oxygen
masks, commercial airliners are certified to fly no higher than 12-13 km (FL400-430). In the past only
military/intelligence aircraft have flown above 18 km (FL 600).
Rockets transit through near-space and may overfly foreign countries enroute. (It is in near-space that rockets
gain much of their horizontal speed component to get orbiting). It is in near-space that critical phases of space
systems re-entry take place (e.g. fragmentation/explosion during uncontrolled re-entry)
Commercial (and military) interests have begun to develop and operate systems for near-space that are
meant to fly from few minutes or hours, to weeks, months or even years: manned suborbital vehicles,
stratospheric balloons, pseudo-satellites and high-altitude drones.
Operations in near-space are a potential threat for air traffic beneath and for the public on ground, in case of
failures or malfunctions.
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Civil/Commercial and Military Space Systems
o Suborbital and High-altitude Systems
o Orbital Systems
o Trans-atmospheric Systems
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Suborbital and high-altitude systems
• A suborbital flight is a flight up to a very high altitude which does not involve sending the vehicle into
orbit (i.e. speed below 11.2 km/s). Unmanned suborbital spaceflight has been common since the dawn
of space-age by using sounding rockets. Suborbital spaceflight is a matter of limits on speed not on
altitude. A suborbital rocket can reach 700 km or even more, well above the orbit of the international
space station, but without achieving orbital speed.
• Commercial manned suborbital space systems aimed to 100 km are opening the new frontier of the
near-space region above Earth that's too high for airplanes but too low for satellites. The exploitation of
the near-space region will gain importance in future by applications like stratospheric balloons, high
altitude drones, and pseudo-satellites.
• The main aim of high-altitude systems is to operate on a “high-ground” above the busy airspace but
without the cost penalties and deployment constraints of orbital systems
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Orbital space systems
• Any spacecraft in low Earth orbit must reach speeds of about 28,000 kilometers per hour to remain in
orbit. The exact speed depends on the actual spacecraft orbital altitude.
• The pull of gravity gets weaker the farther apart two objects are, but this is not why things float on an
orbital spaceflight. For example, the force of gravity at the altitude of the international space station is
actually rather high: 89% of sea level. So why astronauts on-board experience almost zero gravity
(microgravity)? Astronauts float in space experiencing what we call microgravity because they are in
“free fall”. In fact, a spacecraft in orbit moves at a speed such that the curve of its fall matches the curve
of Earth. That speed is on average the 28,000 km/h mentioned above.
• Microgravity is not linked to being in space, but to being inside a spacecraft on “free fall” on orbit, or
inside an airplane or suborbital vehicle on a parabolic trajectory, or inside a (space tourism) capsule
released from a stratospheric balloon, before opening of the parachute.
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Trans-atmospheric space systems
• Point-to-point hypersonic spaceflight is often presented as the next step of suborbital spaceflight, and
even called suborbital point-to-point flight, thus somehow stretching too far the definition of suborbital
spaceflight. As a matter of fact, orbital winged vehicles have already the capability to be used on a
trans-atmospheric point-to-point flight path. Instead current suborbital vehicles do not have such
capability. When a sub-orbital space vehicle of current design reaches its maximum altitude at the
vertex of the parabola the horizontal speed is almost zero. It may be possible to adapt a current suborbital design to cover few hundred kilometers, but for true intercontinental or “hemispheric” point-topoint space travel a new class of vehicle is being developed: a hypersonic trans-atmospheric
spaceplane. This is a vehicle of much higher complexity and technologically advanced, orders of
magnitude more expensive to develop and operate than current suborbital vehicles.
• Orbital
winged vehicles have also point-to-point transportation capability. The Space Shuttle was
designed to satisfy a cross-range capability requirement, levied by the US military/reconnaissance
community, of 1,100 nautical miles. Until its cancellation in 1963, the Boeing Dyna-Soar project of the
USAF, a small lifting body vehicle to be launched on top of a Titan rocket, had a cross-range capability
upon its re-entry in the atmosphere of 1,400 nautical miles. The current USAF X-37, and private Dream
Chaser for cargo transportation to ISS, could have comparable point-to-point transportation capabilities.
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Alternate vision of STM main goals
• Security-Centered:
Primary objective is to prevent military incidents in space by allowing exchange of orbital operational
data and info, and to prevent development of anti satellites systems. Organization driven by military
space powers. Military SSA is about who are you (friend or foe), potential offence capabilities of foe’s
systems, what the foe is/may be doing. Why my system failed (malfunction or attack).
• Safety-Centered
Primary objective is to prevent collisions between aerospace systems during all phases of a space
mission. International organization on the model of ICAO. Civil/Commercial STM is about: what is your
plan of operations, what are your collision avoidance capabilities, enforcement of agreed rules.
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ICOC and Security-Centered Vision (1/3)
• Since US President R. Reagan decision in 1985 to launch the Missile Defence Program, Russia an
China have been proposing a ban on space weapons, known as PAROS (Prevention of Arms Race in
Outer Space), due to concerns of altered nuclear balance of forces
• Due to the large number of national military and commercial assets in space, the US has interest on:
- maintaining a leading role in space traffic management
- prevent development of ASAT capabilities (with the stated purpose of controlling space debris)
- transparent communication and confidence building measures as a way of preventing military
incidents
• The International Code of Conduct for Outer Space Operations initially proposed by the EU is an
international diplomatic initiative meant to mediate on the above concerns. The ICOC addresses both
space security (military) and space safety, but the original concern and main driver of the ICOC was and
remains security,
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ICOC and Security-Centered Vision (2/3)
• The ICOC key points are:
a) Principle on “freedom of access” to space for all countries
b) Principle of “inherent right to self-defence”, (interpreted as legitimating the continuation of research on space
assets vulnerability/protection (i.e. defence weapons)
c) Principle of international governance of outer space to prevent all kind of interferences
d) Principle that military support systems in space (e.g. GPS, telecommunications, etc.) do not contrast with the
principle of peaceful use of outer space, and that space should not become weaponized in a wide sense (i.e.
no deployment of ground-to-space, space-to-space, and space-to-ground weapons).
• The ICOC also includes:
1) Commitment to implementation of the UN guidelines on space debris mitigation (which are already failing on
their own because of limited enforcement: operators from 70 countries operate satellites but fewer than 10 of
them have space agencies able to monitor their space activities).
2) Vague commitment to sharing of yet-to-be-determined operational data, through a yet-to-be-determined
organizational setup.
International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety
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ICOC and Security-Centered Vision (3/3)
• The ICOC was discussed at UN Headquarters at the end of July 2015 at a “Multilateral Negotiation Meeting”
convened by EU. The meeting failed following disagreement on procedural matters (no UN Assembly
mandate), and on security matters like right to self-defence.
• The IAASS as UN COPUOS Observer made the following statement:
“The ICOC proposed by the EU aims to pursue a comprehensive approach to the challenges of safety,
sustainability, and security of space activities. There has been during the past days a focus on security, some
mention of space debris, very little or nothing about safety…..The time to regulate civil and commercial
space is now. Let’s address space concerns about safety and sustainability on one side, and security on the
other side in separate parts of the ICOC or by separate instruments as a Convention for the former and a
CoC for the latter. There are different levels of cooperation that can be achieved in those fields, and they are
orders of magnitude apart. Let’s establish a global civil space traffic and environment management
framework while developing a minimum set of civil and military traffic interoperability rules. It was done for air
traffic, and it can be done for space traffic. Let’s give civil/commercial space traffic a chance to get organized
cooperatively as done for civil aviation. “ (IAASS Delegation – T. Sgobba, Ram Jakhu)
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Finally moving towards a civil STM system?
• “Currently, military personnel at JSpOC is responsible for space traffic management providing services
including object tracking and collision avoidance warnings. It is time to explore whether someone else could
handle those duties. We spend a lot of time doing catalog and tracking and collision avoidance kind of things
If you think who does that in airspace, it’s not really the military. It is a civilian agency…most of the satellites
up there are not property of DoD.” (US Air Force Lt. Gen.James Kowalski, June 16 2015)
• US Rep. James Bridenstine, R-Okla., announced at the Space Symposium in April this year that he was
introducing the American Space Reinassance Act, a wide ranging bill that would among other provisions,
give the FAA authority to monitor debris tracking and to ask satellite operators to move spacecraft when
necessary to avoid collisions.
• Douglas Loverro, deputy assistant secretary of defense for space policy, at a panel discussion at the same
symposium endorsed the idea and said that “it was time to begin the process of giving the FAA, or some
civilian agency, more power over space operations because US military doesn’t actually have any of those
authorities. The idea to do so is widely desired amongst all the military space agencies including US Strategic
Command and Air Force Space Command”. (National Defense reporting from Colorado Springs, 14 April
2016)
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Establishing a Global Space Traffic Management (1/2)
Main issues to be addressed at INTERNATIONAL LEVEL:
Definition, and use of the denomination: “military space system”
Registration as military space system or civil/commercial space system and relevant obligations
Organization of the international body responsible for establishing STM standards and guidelines.
Funding of that organization
STM data integration, distribution
Exchange/distribution of data pertaining to military systems
Structure of international STM standards and guidelines
Actions in case of non-compliance with international STM standards
Jurisdiction in near-space and uniform rules and methods for overflight risk assessment and
management
Rules for delegation to a foreign country of national STM services
In cooperation with ICAO, integration of ATM and STM rules for spaceplanes and air-launches
National STM sensors interoperability requirements
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Establishing a Global Space Traffic Management (2/2)
Main issues to be addressed at NATIONAL LEVEL:
Single or duplicate Civil/Commercial and Military STM organization (model for single organization:
civil/military STM is the single ATM system in US (FAA), and Germany
National STM organization interfaces with ATM organization
Autonomous STM capability in case of conflict
Rule-making process (compliance with international STM standards and guidelines)
Flexible use of Near-Space
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