What If Space Debris Lands in Your Yard?
Imagine waking up to a smoldering car in your yard, which is still smoking and hissing after shouting towards Earth from space. This is an extremely unlikely scenario, but it remains true that space debris does happen. Of all the scientific instruments we launch into the stratosphere, some of them sometimes plummet back to where they came from, just to cause noise and confusion.
This is much more likely if you live close to a launch site, such as Cape Canaveral, Florida, but NASA recently sounded the alarm about 6,000 tons of LEO space debris littering more and more areas many miles above the Earth. So, if you find yourself in a seemingly incredible situation when you encounter space debris that lands where you live, or worse, damages your home, how do you deal with it?
Has a non-existent satellite become a cosmological souvenir? Is there any legal protection? Here’s how you can approach solving the space debris problem if it ever gets to your doorstep.
Who is responsible for space debris?
It may seem that all the erratic mechanisms orbiting the Earth have been forgotten, but in fact there is a certain degree of responsibility when it comes to damage caused by space debris. Two pieces of legislation recognized by the United Nations – the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and the 1972 Liability Convention – stipulate that governments are financially liable for damage caused by space debris, even if a private company launches the device.
Sounds simple, but it gets even harder when it comes to practice. For example, if a piece of a NASA satellite falls into your home, the space agency will pay the bill. But as Timibi Aganaba, a professor of space and society at Arizona State University, recently wrote for The Conversation, when multiple governments get involved, there is a kind of bureaucratic mess.
Basically, if a piece of space debris from China lands on your home, your country’s government will file a claim for compensation through diplomatic channels and then pay you – if they want to file a claim at all.
Such events are extremely rare. The Liability Convention was used only once, Aganaba notes, when in 1978 “the Soviet satellite Cosmos 954 fell into a barren region in northwestern Canada.” And while the Canadian government ultimately demanded a reimbursement of $ 6 million, the Soviets agreed to only $ 3 million for clearing the ship’s nuclear reactor of radioactive material.
What to do with space debris?
For the general public – which is unlikely to ever face this problem – the natural way out is to contact NASA, which traditionally is more than happy to pay the bill for any damage caused by their spaceships. The 1972 Liability Convention states that the United States is “absolutely responsible to pay compensation for damage caused by its space object on the Earth’s surface or flying aircraft,” NASA public relations officer Beth Dickey told Live Science in 2011 .
While this route seems straightforward enough – especially if you have overwhelming evidence that your property is being destroyed by random space debris – it’s less clear how the authorities are planning to deal with the bottleneck, debris currently accumulating in space.
A recent University of Colorado paper proposes a policy proposal that says a $ 235,000 “orbital fee” per satellite could deny operators the incentive to add to low orbit congestion. While such a proposal may be more tempting than the technological solutions currently used to feed space debris, it is not entirely clear how it will evolve (for example, no government can claim ownership of space).
Meanwhile, as space debris continues to accumulate, it’s good to know how to deal with it in the unlikely event it lands at your door.