Old Satellites and Space Junk: Potentials for Re-Use and Recycling

by

Dr. Bassem Sabra

for

Orbital Index

August 21, 2021

Space around Earth – from the edge of its atmosphere of few hundred kilometers to tens of thousands of kilometers – is teaming with tens of thousands of defunct satellites and spacecraft parts that have outlived their missions. These artificial space objects are basically just orbiting Earth forever, or until their orbits decay to a point where they burn upon their re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. They pose a collision hazard to the other useful satellites out there. The collision threat has a multiplier effect: not only does it damage a functioning satellite, but it also creates further debris that in turn will increase the chance of additional collisions with other satellites. This cascading catastrophe is known as the Kessler effect, in honor of the NASA scientist who first dreamt up this nightmarish scenario. As space waste in low earth orbit (LEO, altitude of about 2000 kilometers) increases, collisions lead to further collisions that lead to more collisions, etc. making outer space inaccessible as early as 2040 should this runaway collision avalanche come to pass!

One possible way to mitigate space debris is to look at it from a profit angle. However, with talk of profit comes legal worries. Is space debris free for all to capture, process, reuse, up-cycle, recycle? Does it have an owner? I attempted to answer these questions by conducting a short legal study (WhoOwns Old Satellites and Space Junk?) In a nutshell, one has to make a distinction between space debris (rocket parts, pieces of metal, etc.) and defunct satellites. Space debris has no owner, and under space law it cannot be reclaimed. However, defunct satellites are free to be reclaimed if one can prove that their original owners abandoned them. Up-dates to the United Nations Outer Space Treaty are needed in order to open up space debris to “prospecting.”

I then searched website for space debris and defunct satellites. A list of all defunct satellites in orbit was taken from celestrak.com. I also built an excel file that contains a list of satsin disposal/graveyard orbits. I took it from the UN Space Object Index https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/osoindex/search-ng.jspx?lf_id= . The celestrak file is more complete than the UNSOI. The celestrak is taken from a much larger file that includes more than 48,000 space objects. It is up-dated daily - most probably it will out-dated by the time I send you this msg. Taking this master file we can sort/search/etc on various columns and rows to answer the questions that might have. For example, we can select defunct sats in LEO. These are truly abandoned by the legal definition. Another useful website is space-track.org. A nice visualization website (that take space-track data) is https://maps.esri.com/rc/sat2/index.html.

I then sorted the defunct sats list on on perigee. Perigees less than 1000km are LEOs. I then created a listof satellites with optics (astro missions or Earth observing missions) and also created another list of communicationsats. I also created a massbudget of typical satellites:

It shows percentages of the sat's mass for each subsystem. Different subsystems are predominantly made up of different raw materials. For example, the structure of any sat is aluminum and titanium alloys. It is about 11-12% of the mass of a satellite. If there are for example about 1000 tons in defunct sats then about 110 tons are in aluminum and titanium alloys. I divided the sats into categories and estimated the average masses of the subsystems. Different subsystems are composed of primarily different raw materials. The thermal foil is NOT gold. It is kind of polyester film (gold-like in color) over a thin aluminum wire mesh. Heat pipes are mostly aluminum.

Further work allowed me to up-date my excel file to include spreadsheetsfor satellites by type. It gives the amount of material in each subsystem for a satellite of a given type (Earth observing, communication satellite, and astronomy satellite). The most common material is metal alloys (alloys of aluminum, titanium), gallium arsenide/etc (solar cells), nickel and lithium (batteries), special plastics, etc. There are a literally thousands upon thousands of materials approved by NASA for use in space.

It is important to keep in mind that the spreadsheets are estimates at best. The situation is even more complicated than finding out the typical materials available in a car - cars are mass produced. On the other hand, each and every satellite is one of a kind! Communication satellites are the closest thing that come to mass production. The only way to know exactly the ingredients in a given satellite is to first identify that particular satellite and then get subsystem info from the manufacturer, who will have to track down the sub manufacturers, etc. In my humble opinion, recycling satellites should focus on relatively one-type subsystem (the structure itself), solar cells, batteries, antennas, thermal insulation (aluminum and mylar), thrusters (high temperature resistant material) and payloads (cameras, spectrographs, sciency stuff that could be re-used). All the rest should be ground up and used for 3D printing or used as reaction mass in some novel propulsion system.

My hunch is that it is still not economically viable to recycles space debris and abandoned sats. However, upcycling (refurbishing and giving it a new mission) is definitely viable. A numerical model will help shed light on all of the relevant questions in your original description. One big unknown to keep in mind is in-space recycling. This so far is not existent and consequently there is not data on its economics. The difficulty is putting an estimate on on-orbit recycling. I contacted Neumann Space to inquire about cost of recycling into fuel. Unfortunately, the company didn't reply back. I put my own guesses and calculated accordingly.

The result is a spreadsheet that shows the evolution of the cost of launching in 1 kg to LEO versus the cost of recycling 1 kg in LEO (processing metal alloys to fuel rods, for example), all in 2020 US dollars. I assumed that the cost of recycling now is about 36 times that cost of launch and the recycling cost drops by 20% every year. With costs decreasing at their current rates recycling should become more profitable after 2050. My recycling estimates are based on my various readings and the hunches I developed while reading, and I read a LOT. Kindly note, as I stated previously, as off yet there is no real recycling in orbit and therefore there are no real cost estimate for that. Neumann Space did not respond. The following are the papers that I relied on the most:

1. "On-Orbit Manufacturing and Assembly of Spacecraft," Boyd et al. (2017), Institute of Defense Analysis paper.
   2) "The Economics of the Control of the Space Debris Environment," Wiedemann et al. (2013), in Proc. of the 6th European Conference on Space Debris
   3) "Theoretical Studies on Space Debris Recycling and Energy Conversion Systems in the ISS," Mariappan et al (2020), Engineering Reports
   4) "The Economics of the Space Debris: Estimating the Costs and Benefits of Debris Mitigation," Macauly (2015), Astronautica

Re-use of communication satellites in GEO is already being pursued (MEV missions) and there is already an economic case for giving communication sats a new lease on life: Intelsat (owner of Intelsat 901) will pay Northup Grumman 13 million USD/year for 5 years to have MEV-1 attached to Intelsat 901. This comm sat would have cost 500 million USD to replace.

The space waste (defunct satellites and space debris) as a resource requires work on all fronts: legal, technological, and financial. International treaties and laws have to be up-dated in order to set standards for work in orbit. Technological advances must be achieved in order to create recycling plants in orbit. And, of course, all this requires initial financial investments. Governments could provide incentives, seed money, and the legal grease, but this activity is best carried out by private actors bent on profit. That is the only way to get things done: done fast and properly.

The Birth of a (Stellar) Blackhole

Blackholes are exotic objects that exist in Nature. Astronomers have found and measured the masses of many of them in our Galaxy and beyond. A blackhole is essentially and literarily a hole in space. Blackholes come in 3 broad classes: 1) Planck-size blackholes with a mass of 21 milligrams, and these may form in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), 2) stellar-mass blackholes with masses of a few times the mass our Sun, and 3) supermassive blackholes with masses greater than millions of times the mass of the Sun. We are going to discuss here the birth of stellar-mass blackholes. To do that we will need to understand something about the evolution of stars. 

All stars, our Sun included, generate their light through nuclear reactions in their cores. The nuclear reactions fuse 4 hydrogen atoms to create a single helium atom. The process creates high-energy radiation. This radiation is transformed to optical light as it traverses the body a star. The radiation also provides supports star against collapsing on itself due to its own gravity. One thing to keep in mind here is that nuclear reactions in the core of a star keeping a star from imploding on itself. The nuclear reactions proceed in the core as long as there is hydrogen. As the star ages, its hydrogen supply in the core dries up. The core contracts to a point where it starts fusing helium to make carbon. The cycle continues with the fusion of further elements, and if the star is massive enough (greater than 3 times the mass of the Sun) the star keeps fusing elements until it reaches a core of pure iron. Iron is different than the other elements in that the energy one gets by fusing iron is less than the energy one needs to put to make the iron atoms fuse. Therefore, nuclear reactions involving iron do not generate energy. The star is then left without any power source to support it against collapse.

The core and the rest of the star, the envelope, will collapse leading to a rapid increase in the density of the iron core. However, the increase in the density cannot go on forever. There will come a time when the density of the iron core becomes comparable to that of atomic nuclei. At this stage, the core cannot contract any longer. The envelope, however, keeps falling and hits the now stationary core like a speeding truck hitting a wall of rocks. The result is one of the biggest explosions in the Universe, a supernova. The explosion may result in a bare dense core made up of neutrons known as a neutron star. However, if the leftover core is massive enough so that not even the highest densities can stop its collapse then it will keep on collapsing to form a stellar-mass blackhole with a mass greater than double that of the Sun. Basically, the core will tear a hole in space.

The birth of a stellar-mass blackhole is one of the most fantastic events in the Universe. It involves nuclear reactions that dwarf all nuclear bombs and reactors here on Earth. It also involves the most spectacular of explosions of all: a supernova explosion in which the equivalent of the light output of an entire galaxy is given off by a single star. The supernova explosion scatters the created elements into space enriching clouds that later collapse and form stars and planets and, possibly, life. The formation of a stellar-mass blackhole is a story of death that signals a new birth.

I will discuss in a future blog the birth of supermassive blackholes. 

The Music of the Universe

Listen to the Universe:

Do you want to listen to the Universe? Just turn on your radio - but have it tuned out of any station. A small fraction of the static that you hear is radiation released by the Universe when it was only 380,000 years old, i.e., about 13.7 billion years ago.  The ingredients, along with the story of the early evolution, of the Universe are literally written  in this cosmic radiation which scientists call the cosmic microwave background radation (CMBR). NASA and ESA, the European Space Agency, have put out two satellites, WMAP and Planck,  to read the history book of the Universe as told by the CMBR. These satellites are the latest   in about a dozen probes - ground-based, upper atmosphere balloons, and satellites - that have studied the CMBR since the mid-1960s. So why is this radiation coming from the Universe's childhood so important to warrant such intensive studies? This blog will answer this question by showing how the ingredients of the Universe can be determined by analyzing the CMBR, only possible with WMAP and Planck.

Origins:

The best way to appreciate the importance of the CMBR is to first understand its origin. In the few years after the Big Bang, 13.73 billions year ago, the Universe was a thick soup of subatomic particles and radiation. Radiation couldn't travel far before hitting a particle and getting scattered. Particles want to stick together whereas radiation being radiation wants to roam free. Radiation and matter interacted strongly with the intense radiation blowing up particles that tended to stick to each other. Remember, all of this tug of war is happening while the Universe continued to expand. The expansion makes the radiation cooler and cooler. The cooler the radiation the less it is able to blow stuff up. 

Now you can see where this is heading. The simplest atom, Hydrogen, which is made up of a single electron orbiting a single proton couldn't form till the Universe became cool enough, “only” 3000K which is about 3273 centrigrade!,  so that radiation wouldn't blow it up. This happened at 380,000 years after the Big Bang when the electrons got locked up in Hydrogen atoms thus leaving radiation free to travel unhindered throughout the Universe to become what we observe today as the CMBR. An interesting point to keep in mind is that hydrogen and the CMBR where born together. The date of birth of the CMBR and hydrogen is called the time of decoupling. The CMBR that we observe today is a lot cooler, about 2.7 Kelvins or -271 centigrade, than when it decoupled from matter. This is due to the expansion of the Universe.

Discovery:

George Gamow, a brilliant Russian astrophysicist living in the USA during the 1940s,  was the first to predict the existence of the CMBR. However, since the wavelength of the CMBR is in the microwave regime (the cousins of the waves that heat your food in a microwave oven), the existing technology at the time didn't allow the detection of the CMBR. Radar and  telecommunication devices were just being developed for military purposes. So Gamow's prediction had to sit in the shadows for 20 years.

In 1964, the CMBR was discovered accidentally when two scientists were tuning up a microwave antenna for a telephone company in New Jersey, USA. The antenna seemed to pick a continuous static regardless of the efforts of the scientists. A group of physicists was working unsuccessfully in nearby Princeton University to design an antenna to detect the CMBR. Eventually, those involved realized that the annoying hiss in the telephone company's antenna is nothing else but the CMBR. Guess who won the Nobel Prize? Gamow? No. The Princeton group? No. It was the telephone scientists, the ones who stumbled upon the CMBR by accident without even knowing it!

Decoding:

After the discovery it was quickly realized the temperature of the CMBR is about 2.7 Kelvins and that it contains a Universe's worth, literally, of information about the Universe. If you still remember from above, prior to the formation of the CMBR, matter and radiation were strongly coupled.  This means that the whatever matter is doing the radiation will always carry the mark. Hence, when matter and radiation parted ways at the moment of decoupling, radiation was left bearing the mark of the matter. The CMBR carries the signature of the matter distribution at the time of decoupling. The distribution depends in subtle ways on the kinds of matter and energy that make up the Universe. The content of the Universe controls  how it evolves. The information about all of this is written in the CMBR.

To decipher the story written in the CMBR one needs better and better detectors, detectors that are sharp enough and sensitive enough to look at the CMBR very closely. It's like needing a lens that allows you to read the inscriptions written on a very small coin to read the year and who was king at the time. The best device to study the CMBR would be an antenna that divides the sky into very small pixels, i.e., has very sharp vision, and be able to measure the temperature of each and every pixel very accurately:  big pixels will give you a blurry view, inaccurate temperature measurements, well let's just say that anything inaccurate is useless. All information lies in the small pixels and their temperature so you want to make your pixels as small as possible and your measurements as accurate as possible, and this depends on the available technology: big enough antennas, the ability to have at small pixels, and a good thermometer to measure accurate temperatures. 

Fingerprints:

Let's fast-forward to 1993 when NASA sent the Cosmic Microwave Background Explorer, COBE, into orbit. COBE measured the temperature of the CMBR to be on average about 2.71 Kelvin. The temperature anisotropies, i.e., the pixel-to-pixel temperature variation or the difference between hot and cold pixels, is 1 part per 100,000. This might seem very small, which it truly is. But such minute temperature differences are the origin of today's galaxies! The Universe is almost completely uniform on cosmological scales, scales larger than galaxies and groups of galaxies (billions of light years). It is almost so but not quite. Lucky for us. If it were completely uniform then no galaxies, and stars and planets, could form. It is this 1 part in 100,000 anisotropy that makes us possible.

The question that presents itself now is from where does this very, very small anisotropy come from. Well, if you still remember, before decoupling matter wanted to cling together and the radiation kept on blowing it up. This tug of war sets up acoustic oscillations, sort of sound waves,  in the whole Universe. These cosmic sound waves lead to compression, regions of high matter density, and rarefaction, regions of low matter density. That's the advantage that gravity wants; regions of high matter density will attract more matter due to gravity which increases their mass and thus their gravity that in turn attracts more matter. The positive feedback, when it operates over billions of years, leads to the growth of structure: galaxies and cluster of galaxies. The low density regions become the empty spaces in between. The really amazing part of the story is that the pixel-to-pixel temperature variations in the CMBR, the anisotropies, are the progenitors of the galaxies and galaxy clusters of today! By studying them really close, scientists can determine the types and amounts of matter and energy present in the Universe. The CMBR carries the fingerprints of the Universe and you really need excellent instruments to read them.

WMAP and Planck:

WMAP and Planck are very sophisticated satellites to study the CMBR. One can describe them as  highly trained musical ears, or a DJ's sound analyzers, that can pick out individual musical notes in a rich intricate tune. The rationale behind this analogy will become clear shortly. WMAP was launched by NASA in 2001 and has been operating successfully since then. Planck was launched in May 2009.  

Let's recall it one more time. Before decoupling, before matter and radiation split, matter in the Universe underwent acoustic oscillations due to the tug of war between matter that wants to clump and radiation that wants to break free. Since matter and radiation were strongly coupled, the acoustic oscillations are imprinted on the radiation. These fingerprints are in the form of cold and hot spots in the CMBR, i.e. the observed temperature anisotropies. CMBR analysis relies on studying the correlations between the cold and hot spots on the sky, since these anisotropies are signatures of the acoustic oscillations. So by studying the CMBR cold and hot spots on the sky, scientists are able to calculate how much of each oscillation is there. It is like listening to a symphony and then saying how loud is a particular musical note compared to another different note. WMAP & Planck do exactly this.

The Ingredients:

OK. So how can these acoustic oscillations, that reveal their presence as anisotropies in the CMBR,  tell us about the matter/energy content of the Universe? Let's consider the following analogy. If you pluck a guitar string then the string will start to vibrate at many frequencies or notes. The dominant note with which it will vibrate is related to the length of the string. The volume of the dominant note is related to how hard you plucked the string. Now think of the Universe as a guitar string whose length is increasing.  Gravity makes matter compress and radiation blows it up, so that's your initial pluck that sets the Universe ringing.

CMBR analysis made possible with WMAP and Planck amounts to studying the vibration pattern of the Universe by looking at the pattern of hot and cold pixels in the CMBR and determining the notes and their strength. The dominant note is related to the total matter/energy content of the Universe at the time of decoupling, since the total matter/energy content controls the expansion rate of the Universe and hence its size at the time of decoupling. The strength of the dominant note is related to the amount of gravitating matter since that what is lead to the compression in the first place. After the first compression, radiation has it way and blows up the matter leading to a secondary note. The strength of the secondary note is related to amount of ordinary matter, stuff like protons, neutrons, electron, etc., present since ordinary matter wants to cling.

So now we have measured three quantities: total matter/energy content, amount of gravitating matter, and amount of ordinary matter. If we express things as percentages, then the percentage of total matter/energy is 100%. The percentage of gravitating matter, including ordinary matter, is 30%. The percentage of ordinary matter alone is 4%. Therefore, 26% of the gravitating matter in the Universe is what scientists call Dark Matter. Dark Matter neither emits nor absorbs any radiation. It is a mysterious form of matter that scientists know nothing about except that it follows the known laws of Newton when it comes to gravitational interaction, just like the ordinary matter. Is there something missing? Yes, what is the remaining 70%? It is Dark Energy. A very mysterious form of energy that permeates all space and leads the expansion of the Universe to speed up. It gave an additional kick to the Universe and affected the secondary note. All of these are very reliable measurements and what is more amazing is that they are corroborated by other independent observations of distant supernovae and how galaxies cluster, may be the subject of a future article ...

The CMBR is an amazing musical concert. Listening to its music allows scientist to answer very deep and profound questions about what is the Universe made up of. But what is even more fantastic than the music is the answer. The answer shows us that there is more to the Universe than what we are familiar with, 96% of the Universe is Dark Matter and Dark Energy, of which we still know nothing about. Solving their riddles will be the science of the 21st century and make the discovers Nobel prize winners. So get to work!