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Comment by MichaelCollins | Hacker News Reader

> The rule shortens the time required for satellite operators to deorbit LEO satellites to no more than 5 years after completing their mission, from 25 years.

De-orbiting faster means reserving more propellant for the final de-orbit burn. Since the lifespan of satellites is already generally determined by how much propellant they have, this new rule effectively reduces the lifespan of any satellite high enough to require a de-orbit burn.

Companies that use very low satellites are impacted less, since atmospheric drag does more of the work.

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To be honest, this seems quite reasonable. Space is obviously a unique environment, but to use an imperfect analogy: we don't let cars that break down just sit in the middle of the road, and we don't let dilapidated buildings sit unattended until they collapse.

There's an externality to leaving a EOL'd satellite in LEO, now these new rules require that externality be priced in. Either through the cost of reserving enough propellant for a de-orbit burn, or perhaps, one day, for more expensive satellites, a new industry could emerge for refueling/boosting/servicing to extend the sat's life.

This regulation seems like a good sign that the commercial space industry is starting to mature in a healthy way.

The future is here! I know of at least one company, Orbit Fab, who already has signed contracts for their in-orbit refueling service. It's a bit early to see how successful or profitable this will be though.

If rules didn't cause inconvenience to someone, they wouldn't have to be written.

I was thinking more along the line of the new rule giving another commercial advantage to SpaceX. Starlink will be effected, their satellites already deorbit faster than 5 years. But many other satellite operators will have to launch more frequently, and SpaceX is positioned to meet that growing demand.

I don't really see it as "giving" a commercial advantage to anyone if the new rule's purpose is to prevent something harmful and someone happens to benefit because they're already not doing that harmful thing.

In my view it's really a separate issue if SpaceX has too many advantages and that levelling the playing field somehow would be useful; allowing companies to grow too powerful does cause problems, and I don't think there's a moral requirement for regulators to be "fair" when dealing with corporations. They are not humans.

The need for that sort of intervention should not keep us from instating otherwise beneficial rules, though.

> In my view it's really a separate issue if SpaceX has too many advantages

That's not what I was saying. I was offering an observation, not a critique. I think this new rule is good.

Oh, I didn't really read it as a critique; mostly just the phrasing of "giving another commercial advantage" made me want to comment since it can be read as if that's the (or even just a) purpose of the rule.

> But many other satellite operators will have to launch more frequently, and SpaceX is positioned to meet that growing demand.

Read the article. It's about deorbiting after mission is finished.

If you have enough fuel on board you're free to keep your satellite for 50 years on the orbit. You just have to deorbit it within 5 after you stopped using it.

How does this FFC rule work in an international market? I assume it applies for US companies with US based launches.

Does it apply to US satellite companies with ex-US launches?

Are US companies free to purchase service/bandwidth from ex-US launched satellites which are not compliant?

US companies launching satellites with foreign launch providers still need to get a license from the FCC if their satellite uses radio communications.

How about foreign satellites on foreign launch systems that wish to communicate with ground stations in the US? I assume they also need an FCC license.

Yes, satellites communicating with ground stations in the US need licenses from the FCC, regardless of where they're launched or where the owner is based. US satellites that exclusively communicate with ground stations outside of the US might not, but I'm not sure about that. Satellites launched by other US government agencies (NRO, etc) might also be exempt.

The EU is talking about imposing much the same rule, if they haven't already (link is from 2019): https://spacenews.com/eu-space-envoy-calls-for-satellites-to...

> De-orbiting faster means reserving more propellant for the final de-orbit burn.

One new technology is releasing a sail to increase drag.

Example: http://www.parabolicarc.com/2021/08/23/millennium-space-syst...

I'm no rocket scientist, but could there be a service which knocks satellites out of orbit for people? I wonder how cost effective such a service could get. Could one mission knock 10 satellites out of orbit?

It would cost more than reserving some propellant.

With a vehicle, probably not. Moving form one satellite's orbit to another is extremely fuel-intensive (you'd typically need ~thousands of km/h of velocity change to do it), so it's not really practical to have a single vehicle up there moving from satellite to satellite.

But maybe there'd be some other way to do it? There have been proposals for de-orbiting little pieces of debris from the ground with lasers, and I suppose it's possible that those approaches would scale to bigger objects (or maybe you could do it with lasers from other satellites whose orbits were fixed, or something).

A set of satellites that could do laser ablation of debris or EOL sats would be great, but would need safeguards to not become a weapon of economics or war.

Avoiding splash-over or collateral damage to other sats in or near the line-of-sight would be an issue, especially if any of those other sats might have capabilities that their nation/owner might want to keep secret. Perhaps an arrangement of vetos over particular ablation shots would suffice. Countries wanting to hide their interests in some sats could veto N times as many shots as needed, making uncovering which sats are special more difficult.

In any case, laser ablation would need much less delta-V than the usual imagery of plucky space-cowboys chasing errant sats with a net, or some such. Who knew that _Planetes_ would have such a strong effect on our collective imagination.

In the far future, perhaps orbit-cleaners could eat dead satellites and space debris, atomizing the debris and turning it into reaction mass.

I'm aware of Astroscale (https://astroscale.com/). They're a Japanese company with a presence in the US and UK that's commercializing this sort of service. I'm not sure if they have plans for multi-satellite de-orbit services, but they do have single-satellite plans.

Among other things, they're promoting a standardized docking adapter (https://astroscale.com/docking-plate/) to give satellite operators a path to either life extension (refueling and/or orbit raising) or de-orbit.

Going from travelling at Mach 25 in one direction to travelling at Mach 25 in a different direction takes an amount of energy comparable to going from 0 to Mach 25. Being outside of atmosphere helps a lot, and being able to use the less powerful but more efficient electric ion propulsion engines helps a lot, but 10 satellites per mission is usually not feasible. 3 per mission is the number I've heard.

Some companies approaching this problem are hoping to utilize refueling depots. It adds another expensive rendezvous but it does help.

Woz seems to think so.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/01/tech/space-junk-steve-wozniak...

Given Woz's post-Apple track record, that's not a good sign..

Doing better than Jobs!

It would be most likely far more expensive than just adding few kg to your payload to allow for faster deorbit.

Designing the satellites to self de-orbit would be massively more efficient, but this technology is being developed to de-orbit older sats and other debris without that capability. It could also be useful to remove satellites that fail or who's de-orbit system fails. There was a recent test of a grapple system that harpoons a target sat, but it's early days in the development of such systems for arbitrary sats, rather than recovery missions designed for a particular target sat.

Astroscale is trying to push a standardized docking adapter for that purpose and Northrop Grumman has a vehicle that was able to dock to the engine of another satellite to serve as a life extension vehicle, so assuming that can be easily adapted to other satellites, they too can provide a deorbiting service.

Clearing out several satellites with one vehicle is not practical though, would need too much fuel. At best one might launch several such vehicles on one launch, or if orbital fuel depots really take off soon, it may be possible to have depots in convenient locations such that deorbiting vehicles can always make a relatively cheap visit to a depot to refuel and wait for another deorbiting target. In such a setup the deorbiter would just lower one end of the orbit to speed up decay rather than dragging it all the way down to Earth.

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