Commercial Nanosats are a Go!

[Danderman]

http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21603240-small-satellites-taking-advantage-smartphones-and-other-consumer-technologies

"ALTHOUGH widely used, satellites are expensive to build and to launch. That began to change last year. On November 19th Orbital Sciences, an American company, launched a rocket from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. It carried 29 satellites aloft and released them into low-Earth orbit, a record for a single mission. Thirty hours later, Kosmotras, a Russian joint-venture, carried 32 satellites into a similar orbit. Then, in January 2014, Orbital Sciences carried 33 satellites up to the International Space Station (ISS), where they were cast off a month later."

"In the next five years or so some 1,000 nanosats, as small satellites of 1-10kg are called, are expected to be launched. Some will be smaller than a CubeSat; others bigger and heavier. Some are like a matryoshka doll: the Russian launch included a satellite that launched eight smaller ones, including four PocketQubes (a 5cm cube format). One of these smaller satellites, developed in Peru, released its own tiny bird."

[TrevorMonty]

Tethers unlimited have a range of nanosat modules including water based thrusters. Check out Spiderfab.

[Burninate]

What percentage of those have decay times longer than 5 years?

So far, almost all of the launches have been at or below the ISS's 420km, at which point they last substantially less than 5 years, sometimes weeks to months depending on altitude.  When I start hearing about 500-1000km altitude cubesats, though, I cringe at the debris problem - especially since many of these are too small to be highly effective at the task they're assigned, versus a 27u or 125u or 1000u cube.

How far are we from some kind of incentive to install end-of-life deorbit features on every new satellite?

[Llian Rhydderch]

What percentage of those have decay times longer than 5 years?

So far, almost all of the launches have been at or below the ISS's 420km, at which point they last substantially less than 5 years, sometimes weeks to months depending on altitude.  When I start hearing about 500-1000km altitude cubesats, though, I cringe at the debris problem - especially since many of these are too small to be highly effective at the task they're assigned, versus a 27u or 125u or 1000u cube.

How far are we from some kind of incentive to install end-of-life deorbit features on every new satellite?

There has been talk of it for years.

Basically, space debris are an unpriced negative externality, just like air pollution and water pollution. 

In all cases where a formerly unpriced negative externality became a matter of legal and administrative law, within some particular national polity, I can think of two things that were true:

1) the social change necessary to begin to price the externality (e.g., a tax on air emissions, or further restrictions on the purity of water effluent outflow) always takes decades to go from concern to implementation in public policy. 

2) when looking back at the historical periods of time prior to the restrictive laws and policies (in any nation, and with any form of economic system or government in power), governments in general, and military agencies of governments in particular, are typically some of the worst offenders in the amount of the "pollutant" externalities that were emitted and left in the environment.

In my observation, the space environment and space debris pollution is exactly the same thing.  It is the growth of use of some particular environment in an adverse way that is generally an important part of the change in social tolerance of that use, which helps result in changes in public policy.  And the (apparently) cost-free use of the environmental resource (in this case, outer space in the low-earth orbital regime) by the governments and military establishments are a part of the impediment to change.

So with respect to the growth of commercial nanosats (and of commercial mini-satellites like the proposed Google 360 constellation), it is precisely this growth that may provide higher visibility to the discussion of pricing the negative externality of space debris and derelict satellites left in orbit.  If that discussion occurs, then the very same forces may help serve as an aid to getting the matter on the policy agenda, and effective economic incentives could result.

There are many ways of potentially dealing with the matter of space debris and incentives for its reduction.  But the problem is not primarily a technological one, but one of economics and policy.  The space junk problem in the higher orbits has not been dealt with effectively in any national polity to date (just as chemical emissions in the air and chemical spills on the ground were not systematically dealt with, except perhaps as a legal tort, prior to the 1960s.  (The US government and the Soviet government both were big exploiters of this loophole in the 1940s-50s., as were their industries, whether in the capitalist or socialist system.)

But I predict it will be dealt with in the future, and large amounts of space debris will eventually become a priced externality.  It is just quite impossible to determine when this might occur!  (just as it would have been impossible to predict the timing of the 1960s/70s changes in policy with respect to air and water pollution during the 1940s/50s.)