When you start off small, you don’t always pay attention to the environment that you’re working in. This has been true for humanity over the millennia, when people didn’t have to worry as long as the environment is big and their impact is small. This leads to the ‘tragedy of the commons’ when everybody assumes that somebody else will take care of the problem.
This is why for a long time, satellites have been a rare thing. You didn’t have many of them and as space is big, there were no problems and not many rules. Similar to when aviation just started, there was no air traffic control. But when air traffic became more congested, mechanisms were needed to ensure that everyone was following the same rules. This is also true for maritime.
However, space has been an open territory without a lot of rules, even though there are bodies like the International Telecommunication Union to coordinate on spectrum. Some large countries—the United States in particular—have had some rules about orbital debris for a number of years. But it’s not about satellites running into each other – it’s more about ensuring that satellites do not leave a lot of debris behind.
But now, in an era of mega-constellations, we feel that it’s incumbent on space operators to do what all other industries have done over time, which is to establish rules to ensure that space is collectively taken care of.
For geostationary satellite operators, this has been going on for a long time. There’s one very narrow space which is the geostationary arc, and in that arc, there are essentially informal rules that govern how operators move around and coordinate positions with one another.
But once you enter the lower orbit, where there are more players and a far greater number of assets that are going every which way. Becoming disconnected from each other, it’s important to ensure that we have rules in place to address conflicts when they occur — when satellites are decommissioned or if we lose control of them, or to ensure that we can avoid one another in space.
Today, we have to launch through the LEO belt to get to GEO. Our early operations of getting into the GEO orbit involve looping, in and out of the LEO space. We, as GEO operators, are very concerned about what happens in LEO because we cannot afford to have an accident that spreads debris, which has occurred in the past.
Can you tell us about Inmarsat’s commitment to ensuring continued growth and innovation in space?
Inmarsat has always been on the leading edge as we are the first to introduce activities in a variety of frequency bands, as well as the first to debut new technologies for combining space-and-ground networks like what we do with the European Aviation Network.
We integrate these capabilities into new, innovative systems. For example, Iris is a system we’re deploying in Europe to support air traffic navigation, with manned and unmanned platforms working side-by-side. The same problem that we’re talking about in space is being addressed in Europe’s aviation environment because they have too many planes and are getting into things like drones which have to operate in that same space.