Civil and Military Space Traffic Management · Civil and Military Space Traffic Management ... thus...

Civil and Military Space Traffic Management

4th Manfred Lachs International Conferenceon Conflicts in Space and the Rule of Law

Montreal 27-28 May 2016

ByTommaso Sgobba – IAASS Executive Director

International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety 1

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.

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 militaryJoint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) started de-facto a form of STM by monitoringglobal space traffic and sending warnings to alert of collision risk


Traffic above Earth

Airspace

Near Space

Outer Space

International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety

4

Exploitation

region

Exploration

region

18km 0 160 36,000 ∞

INTERNATIONAL GOVERNANCE DEFICIT

NEW HAZARDS

Exploitation = civil/commercial and military use

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”);

- 120 Km, re-entry threshold for space systems;

- 160 Km, lowest practical operating orbit for satellites.


Near-Space

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.

Civil/Commercial and Military Space Systems

o Suborbital and High-altitude Systems

o Orbital Systems

o Trans-atmospheric Systems


Suborbital and high-altitude systems

• A suborbital flight is a flight up to a very high altitude which does not involve sending the vehicle intoorbit (i.e. speed below 11.2 km/s). Unmanned suborbital spaceflight has been common since the dawnof space-age by using sounding rockets. Suborbital spaceflight is a matter of limits on speed not onaltitude. A suborbital rocket can reach 700 km or even more, well above the orbit of the internationalspace station, but without achieving orbital speed.

• Commercial manned suborbital space systems aimed to 100 km are opening the new frontier of thenear-space region above Earth that's too high for airplanes but too low for satellites. The exploitation ofthe near-space region will gain importance in future by applications like stratospheric balloons, highaltitude 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


Orbital space systems

• Any spacecraft in low Earth orbit must reach speeds of about 28,000 kilometers per hour to remain inorbit. 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 anorbital spaceflight. For example, the force of gravity at the altitude of the international space station isactually 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 curveof 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, orinside an airplane or suborbital vehicle on a parabolic trajectory, or inside a (space tourism) capsulereleased from a stratospheric balloon, before opening of the parachute.


Trans-atmospheric space systems

• Point-to-point hypersonic spaceflight is often presented as the next step of suborbital spaceflight, andeven called suborbital point-to-point flight, thus somehow stretching too far the definition of suborbitalspaceflight. As a matter of fact, orbital winged vehicles have already the capability to be used on atrans-atmospheric point-to-point flight path. Instead current suborbital vehicles do not have suchcapability. When a sub-orbital space vehicle of current design reaches its maximum altitude at thevertex of the parabola the horizontal speed is almost zero. It may be possible to adapt a current sub-orbital design to cover few hundred kilometers, but for true intercontinental or “hemispheric” point-to-point space travel a new class of vehicle is being developed: a hypersonic trans-atmosphericspaceplane. This is a vehicle of much higher complexity and technologically advanced, orders ofmagnitude more expensive to develop and operate than current suborbital vehicles.

• Orbital winged vehicles have also point-to-point transportation capability. The Space Shuttle wasdesigned to satisfy a cross-range capability requirement, levied by the US military/reconnaissancecommunity, of 1,100 nautical miles. Until its cancellation in 1963, the Boeing Dyna-Soar project of theUSAF, a small lifting body vehicle to be launched on top of a Titan rocket, had a cross-range capabilityupon its re-entry in the atmosphere of 1,400 nautical miles. The current USAF X-37, and private DreamChaser for cargo transportation to ISS, could have comparable point-to-point transportation capabilities.


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-CenteredPrimary 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.


ICOC and Security-Centered Vision (1/3)

• Since US President R. Reagan decision in 1985 to launch the Missile Defence Program, Russia anChina have been proposing a ban on space weapons, known as PAROS (Prevention of Arms Race inOuter 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 aninternational diplomatic initiative meant to mediate on the above concerns. The ICOC addresses bothspace security (military) and space safety, but the original concern and main driver of the ICOC was andremains security,



• 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 interferencesd) 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 ontheir own because of limited enforcement: operators from 70 countries operate satellites but fewer than 10 ofthem 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-determinedorganizational setup.



• 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, somemention of space debris, very little or nothing about safety…..The time to regulate civil and commercialspace is now. Let’s address space concerns about safety and sustainability on one side, and security on theother side in separate parts of the ICOC or by separate instruments as a Convention for the former and aCoC for the latter. There are different levels of cooperation that can be achieved in those fields, and they areorders of magnitude apart. Let’s establish a global civil space traffic and environment managementframework while developing a minimum set of civil and military traffic interoperability rules. It was done for airtraffic, and it can be done for space traffic. Let’s give civil/commercial space traffic a chance to get organizedcooperatively as done for civil aviation. “ (IAASS Delegation – T. Sgobba, Ram Jakhu)


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 wasintroducing 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 whennecessary to avoid collisions.

• Douglas Loverro, deputy assistant secretary of defense for space policy, at a panel discussion at the samesymposium endorsed the idea and said that “it was time to begin the process of giving the FAA, or somecivilian agency, more power over space operations because US military doesn’t actually have any of thoseauthorities. The idea to do so is widely desired amongst all the military space agencies including US StrategicCommand and Air Force Space Command”. (National Defense reporting from Colorado Springs, 14 April2016)


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


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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