In the second part of Barry Stevens’ conversation with international law expert Michael Byers, the focus shifts to the “tragedy of the commons” unfolding above our heads. As thousands of satellites are launched by companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and millions of pieces of debris accumulate in orbit, the risk grows of a collisional cascade—known as the Kessler Syndrome—that could render parts of near-Earth space unusable for generations. Byers says that the rapid commercialization of space is linked to US military priorities and great power competition, as satellite networks sold as civilian infrastructure become essential tools of modern warfare and domination. The pace of expansion is outstripping the ability of international institutions to protect and govern the orbital environment. In the process, the spirit of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty is being steadily eroded. Space was envisioned as a realm of peaceful cooperation and a province of all humankind. This analysis shows how one of its last great global commons is being stolen and squandered.
Barry Stevens
Welcome to theAnalysis. I’m Barry Stevens. I’m joined again today by international law expert Michael Byers in the second of a two-part conversation.
Michael Byers is Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia and co-author of Who Owns Outer Space?, which I would recommend. I just finished it last night. Please don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube and, of course, on theAnalysis.news website where, if you like this kind of content, you can contribute if you feel inclined. We’ll see you in a moment.
Hi, I’m back with Michael Byers for the second part of a two-part conversation. If you want to see the first part, it’s up on the site where we talk about the Golden Dome, Donald Trump, and space.
Michael Byers
What I want to get people excited about is the fact that we already have a tragedy of the commons in low Earth orbit. It’s not created by military activity. It’s created by companies like SpaceX launching thousands of satellites. It’s created by the proliferation of debris. We may already be seeing chemical changes to the upper atmosphere as a result of thousands of these satellites reentering the atmosphere at the end of their operational lives and burning up into billions of particles of things like aluminum.
Barry Stevens
How many are there up there right now?
Michael Byers
Well, I haven’t counted in the last month or so, but in terms of—
Barry Stevens
Approximately, was it 10,000? Is it 20,00?
Michael Byers
No, it’s more than that. We’re up around 14,000 operational satellites now. But then, you know, in addition to that, literally millions of pieces of space debris in orbit. Some of the pieces are really small but still potentially lethal, and some of the pieces of space debris are very large. There are more than 2,000 abandoned rocket bodies in low Earth orbit. Some of them are up to 10 tons of metal.
There’s a lot of junk in low Earth orbit that has accumulated over the past 70 years, and that’s a problem because it creates collision risks for operational satellites. It’s a problem in terms of all of this debris. Some of it creates reflections that interfere with ground-based astronomy and with just the average person’s ability to enjoy the night sky. The night sky is getting brighter because of all this debris, and then you can sometimes see actual satellites, visible crossing your field of vision to the point where it’s becoming difficult to tell what’s a satellite and what is a star. Then you have the issue that this debris comes down over time, and so we’re seeing more pieces of debris impacting the surface of the planet. It doesn’t all burn up. And so there’s now a casualty risk, which extends to a risk to airplanes in flight.
Barry Stevens
So you’re saying that a satellite could come down and hit a plane that was flying here on Earth, a piece of a satellite?
Michael Byers
Yeah. So a satellite or a rocket body that was reentering Earth’s orbit did not burn up entirely. There could be surviving pieces, and as they came down to the surface of the planet, one of them could strike an airplane in flight. Engineers have told me that as little as 300 grams of space debris impacting a Boeing or an Airbus could cause a catastrophic accident. The probability of this is really, really small. Let me be clear.
Barry Stevens
Yeah, that’s what I was going to say.
Michael Byers
Yeah, statistically, you’re much more likely to be struck by lightning. But the point is that this very, very low risk is increasing as more and more objects go into space, more and more debris is created, and more and more objects start to reenter the atmosphere. We’re already at the point where, in November 2022, France and Spain closed areas of their airspace because of a re-entering Chinese rocket body. So those two countries deemed that the risk to aviation was high enough to actually close airspace, which interfered with 600 commercial flights.
So this is the new reality. You know, space is not out there. Space is starting to come here. Whether it’s light pollution, whether it’s reentering space debris creating casualty risks, whether it’s changes to the upper atmosphere caused by all the stuff that does burn up and injects billions of particles into the upper atmosphere, potentially affecting climate change or the ozone layer. So the new reality is that Earth and space are the same environment. And we are loading up space with stuff that is going to affect the upper atmosphere and is going to affect the surface of the planet.
That’s just a consequence of this exponential growth driven first and foremost by SpaceX, which, because of their reusable rockets, which they developed 11 years ago, 12 years ago, now gives them the capacity to launch thousands of satellites each year, and have plans to launch, you mentioned 70,000. SpaceX has filed for permission to launch one million satellites as space-based data centers for artificial intelligence.
Barry Stevens
Well, just hold for a second. Like Elon Musk, the boss of SpaceX, I saw somewhere he said that you could have a billion satellites out there, and there wouldn’t be a problem because how many cars are there on the surface of Earth? Occasionally, there’ll be a crash, but there are far more layers in space. So he seemed to suggest it was safe. But you’re saying that these satellites can bump into each other?
Michael Byers
Elon Musk is supremely confident of his own knowledge, and we’ve seen his knowledge fail in many domains. He has changed the paradigm. I give him some credit. He drove the electrification of the automobile market worldwide with Tesla, and the reusable rockets are exciting, and they’ve lowered the cost of spaceflight. But on stuff like this, he’s dreaming. He’s not taking into account those millions of pieces of debris that are too small to be tracked and therefore too small to be avoided. He’s basing this assumption on the fact that you can do collision avoidance maneuvers with all of these satellites. He’s also ignoring the risk from solar storms, which can raise the atmosphere and create additional drag for satellites, therefore pulling them out of their orbital shells and complicating that whole collision avoidance situation.
So if I were the President of the United States and had a united Congress behind me, I’d be cracking down on Elon Musk and saying, “You don’t need a million satellites. You don’t need 70,000 satellites. You’ve got the best engineers in the world. Build your system with 5,000 satellites. That’s all you get.” And they’ll do it.
I mean, the reason they’re going for tens of thousands or even a million satellites is because they’ve adopted the consumer electronic model of rapid disposal and replacement. They take the view that space is so big that it doesn’t matter, and if you can launch thousands of satellites every year, then why not avoid the redundancies, to do cheap mass-produced satellites, use them for four years, and throw them away, and it doesn’t work.
I mean, I’m old enough to remember when we thought the oceans were so big that garbage in the ocean didn’t matter. We now have a plastics crisis in the ocean. I’m old enough to remember when the atmosphere was so big that it didn’t matter how many smokestacks you had, how much carbon you were throwing into the atmosphere. It was big. It would absorb it all. Now we know that we’ve created climate change. This triumph of optimism, of entrepreneurship, over a careful assessment of risk and a failure to recognize that the idea of precaution is important. If you don’t know whether something could be insanely dangerous, perhaps you should stop and figure out whether it’s going to be insanely dangerous before you start to do it. That’s the precautionary principle.
Barry Stevens
Precautionary principle, absolutely, and the ocean metaphor is a really good one. You talked about stuff falling down out of space and causing danger to the Earth. In fact, I think in your book there was a photo of a Chinese bit of a rocket which fell in India. But there’s also this matter of things crashing into one another in space. I don’t know if viewers will remember the movie Gravity, where a cascade of collisions was caused. And it has a name, right? The Kessler Syndrome, or [crosstalk 00:10:06]—
Michael Byers
Yes, the Kessler syndrome. It’s a collisional cascade. So every time you have a collision, you increase the surface area of the material. Like, if you take two objects and you break them into 20 objects, you’re going to have a much larger surface area collectively. And surface area is what creates collision risk in a place where objects are moving at 17 kilometers a second in different directions, which is the situation in low Earth orbit. Everything’s moving at 17 kilometers per second, and it’s all moving in different directions. So the impacts are very high energy and create a lot of fragmentation, increasing a lot of surface area. Now, the thing I need to say—
Barry Stevens
I’m reading that a couple of satellites have already collided, Iridium and Cosmos, I think.
Michael Byers
Oh, yeah. There have been a number of collisions and an awful lot of close calls. Now I need to say, about the movie Gravity, that they dramatically sped up the process for the purpose of entertainment. We weren’t prepared to sit in the cinema for 10 years to watch the process unfold, so they sped it up into just a couple of minutes, but the risk is real that you could get a collisional cascade. In fact, we might already be in the early stages of this.
There are different ways to respond to this risk of a collisional cascade. One is to actively deorbit your satellites at the end of their lives. Now, we realize that this then creates further problems, like possible changes to the upper atmosphere, but that’s the approach that SpaceX has been taking to actively deorbit at the end of operational lives. There are others who want to go up and actually grab a hold of large objects in low Earth orbit, and bring them back into an atmospheric reentry to get them out of space. That’s really an expensive thing to do and very challenging from an engineering perspective, but it might be a partial solution if we got some of the really big objects out of orbit that might help.
Barry Stevens
But the little ones you’re talking about, they’re still flying 17 kilometers a second. Even something the size of a fingernail could certainly do some damage.
Michael Byers
Yes, and that leads me to the final sort of mitigation option, which is to stop putting so much junk up there. If you want to solve the ocean plastics problem, the first thing you should do is stop putting plastic in the ocean, stop adding to the problem. So we need to find a way of agreeing on some limits on the amount of stuff we’re putting into low Earth orbit. As I’ve said, one thing that governments could do is tell satellite companies, you can’t have 20,000 satellites, you can’t have 100,000 satellites. You have to get your engineers to make do and build your system with a smaller number, and that smaller number can have redundancies. They can have longer lifespans. They can have higher capacities. But you have to limit the number of things that you put up. And we do this.
Barry Stevens
And a Kessler syndrome would also knock out all of our communication— I mean, if it was huge, it could knock out all of our communication or knock out GPS, knock out— you were talking about the search and rescue operations.
Michael Byers
Yeah. Now, GPS is higher up. It’s in mid-Earth orbit.
Barry Stevens
Right. Geostationary. Right.
Michael Byers
But the areas that we’re talking about— so SpaceX’s Starlink at the moment is at 550 kilometers. It’s really busy between about 350 kilometers up to around 900 kilometers, and that’s where we’re getting into a debris crisis. That’s where we’re starting to see a lot of collision avoidance to try to avoid these problems, and that’s where a lot of these companies want to build additional constellations.
There are two Chinese companies that are beginning to construct so-called megaconstellations of communication satellites, and they’re putting them up around 800, 850 kilometers above the surface. They’re also just dumping the rocket bodies in low Earth orbit, adding to the problem. They’re not even bringing the rocket bodies back at the end of the mission in a controlled manner, which is the best practice today.
So the simple thing here is that we’re approaching a tragedy of the commons. Governments so far are letting companies put up as much stuff as they want. They’re doing so based mostly on the desire to support their domestic space economies. They’re also doing so because a lot of these satellites are so-called dual-use satellites. They’re also useful for military communications or military surveillance. And yeah, we’re operating in a domain where there are, at the moment, very few limits.
The only effective organization of any kind is something called the International Telecommunication Union, which coordinates the use of the radio spectrum, and every spacecraft needs radio spectrum. But even that mechanism is having challenges keeping up with the pace of what’s happening and keeping up with governments that are just 100% behind these companies as they expand into space.
Barry Stevens
That’s very interesting. They’re 100% behind the companies. But why— you mentioned that they have dual use, military and commercial, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX is involved, both in commercial operations with Starlink and also military. He’s part of the Golden Dome, which we talked about in the last episode. Isn’t that a violation of the Outer Space Treaty that all this militarization combined with commercialization isn’t that, if not the letter, the spirit?
Michael Byers
Arguably, it is contrary to the original spirit of the Outer Space Treaty. But since, certainly, the early 1960s, the use of satellites to support military operations on the ground has been treated as legal, as permitted. And satellites are incredibly useful for surveillance, for arms control verification, and not just for food production or search and rescue. Communication satellites are enormously important. There are lots of remote communities, for instance, in the Arctic that are entirely reliant on satellites for communication. There are no cables going to any of the 28 communities in the Canadian territory of Nunavut. There are 28 communities in Nunavut, and none of them has a cable going to them. It’s all satellites. So—
Barry Stevens
Is it fair to say that the great expansion of the number of satellites, both by China and the United States, is motivated in part by, in the case of the United States and the Golden Dome, or am I exaggerating that? I mean, 70,000 satellites plus data centers and so forth, and Elon Musk’s company being so bankrolled by the United States government.
Michael Byers
Yeah, so it’s interesting when SpaceX went to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission initially for permission to launch the first Starlink satellites; the business model was to provide communications to rural and remote communities, and Starlink is really good at doing that. But then in February 2022, Russia launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and on the day of the invasion, someone, probably Russia, conducted a cyber attack against the American company Viasat that was providing satellite communications for the Ukrainian military, and so that company, it’s services went down on the day of the invasion. And Elon Musk stepped up and said, “It’s okay. I’ve turned on Starlink coverage over Ukraine, and I’m shipping thousands of these pizza box-sized ground stations to Ukraine, like right away.” And within about 48 hours, the Ukrainian military was using Starlink, and Starlink proved resistant to Russian attempts at jamming and became the communications backbone for the Ukrainian military effort. Were it not for Starlink, there’s a very good chance that Ukraine would have been overwhelmed. But all of a sudden, they had reliable real-time communications.
So, just to give you an example, you could have a drone operator on the front line with a GoPro camera on his drone and line-of-sight communication with the drone that’s scoping out where the Russian tanks are a couple of kilometers ahead. He gets his line-of-sight video feedback from the front line and transmits it instantly on a small Starlink terminal. The signal bounces down to the artillery unit that’s 30 kilometers behind the front line, and all of a sudden, they’ve got a real-time video feed of the Russian tank with the GPS coordinates. So all of a sudden, you’ve changed the balance of power because you have this real-time communication.
Now, I have a lot of problems with Elon Musk, but it was still, in terms of helping the Ukrainian military, it was an important and, I think, laudable thing. But the problem with it then is that every country in the world looked at this and said, “Oh my God, these like communications constellations are very powerful military tools. We want this capability too.” And all of a sudden, overnight, SpaceX’s business model changed, and the primary customers for Starlink are now militaries because their budgets are huge.
The small Inuit community in the Canadian Arctic isn’t a big customer. It doesn’t compare with the Pentagon, the government of the United Kingdom, or the government of Israel, which wants to have this as a military tool. And so that’s where the change occurred. It was driven by people realizing the incredible power of this technology. It’s still a dual-use technology. I’m still happy that my friends in Arctic Canada can have the same quality of broadband that I do, but it’s a changing landscape, and Elon Musk, unfortunately, is an unreliable partner in all of this.
Shortly after these developments happened in Ukraine, he was persuaded by the Russian ambassador to Washington that he needed to limit the extent of Starlink coverage because the Ukrainians were being too effective in its use. He stopped coverage over the Black Sea, where the Ukrainian military was using Starlink terminals on small unmanned Zodiac boats to go hunting Russian warships. Elon Musk was persuaded that this was destabilizing, so he cut the Ukrainians off.
Barry Stevens
Behind that conflict, of course, is the very real possibility of a global thermonuclear war. And it’s not—
Michael Byers
And behind that is— yes, and that was what Elon Musk said he was worried about, and I don’t know. I mean, people who say that we don’t want to be pushing back too hard on Russia because they have nuclear weapons sometimes forget that it was Russia that invaded Ukraine. Balancing that situation is difficult. All I’m saying is that commercial space-based assets are part of the picture.
Another thing that’s important to mention here is that by using these commercial satellites to support the Ukrainian military in frontline operations and things like targeting, these Western companies have made their commercial satellites legitimate targets under the laws of war. And so now we’re into a very confusing situation where we have literally thousands of satellites that, under the laws of war at least, could be legitimately targeted by Russia. Russia has shown restraint in this respect. It clearly doesn’t want to escalate into a direct armed conflict with NATO countries, but it’s a precarious situation. And again, it’s driven by the technological change, and it’s driven to a disturbing degree by one individual, one unpredictable individual named Donald Trump, in collusion with another unpredictable individual named Elon Musk.
Barry Stevens
If you’re going to start attacking commercial/military satellites with what, anti-satellite weapons in space or an anti-satellite weapon from Earth? And is anybody planning that? Is anybody practicing that?
Michael Byers
There have been a number of tests over the years of ground-based missiles against satellites owned by the same company or country that’s conducting the test. So yes, India has—
Barry Stevens
They’re shooting at their own satellites?
Michael Byers
Shooting their own satellite as a test, usually a defunct satellite. So the United States has done it, China’s done it, India’s done it, and Russia did so as recently as November 2021. They create debris. It’s not a great thing to do. But they are restrained to some degree by the fact that a collisional cascade would take out everyone’s satellite. So, you would lose from your own action if you started to use ground-based missiles to target more than one or two other satellites.
Barry Stevens
But since there’s so little cooperation and so much hostility between great powers at this point, I was wondering, like, isn’t there any world governance organization that can manage or have rules about this? And does the United Nations administer or have something to do with the Outer Space Treaty of 1967?
Michael Byers
It does. There are—
Barry Stevens
The Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, I think.
Michael Byers
The United Nations General Assembly created a committee of the General Assembly in 1958 called the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. That’s where the multilateral space treaties were negotiated in the 1960s and early ‘70s, and this body is still functional. I attend meetings in Vienna at the United Nations complex there, and the Russian, Chinese, American, and Indian delegations are present and engaged. It’s called the Spirit of Vienna. Progress is very slow, but there is progress, and it’s always better to jaw-jaw than it is to war-war. They don’t deal with security issues. That’s part of the reason that the dialogue continues. The security issues are supposed to be dealt with at the Conference on Disarmament, which is a permanent body based in Geneva. And like the committee in Vienna, the Conference on Disarmament uses consensus decision-making, and that has resulted in essentially a number of vetoes or blocking of progress in the Conference on Disarmament.
Barry Stevens
And that’s where Russia and China have proposed banning all weapons in space, and the United States vetoed that.
Michael Byers
Yes, and there are competing visions for what arms control should look like in space. The Russian and Chinese proposal, which has been around for well over a decade now, on its face looks perfectly reasonable. The problem isn’t so much the content of the proposal. The problem for many people is whether there’s actual goodwill behind it or whether this is a bit of a ruse. But the American proposal isn’t all that attractive either. They basically say you have to deal with the ground-based missiles; you can’t just deal with what’s in space. So they’ve created a kind of false dichotomy where they’re not really moving forward together on space security.
But the good news is that when the Conference on Disarmament becomes blocked, as it became blocked on, for instance, anti-personnel landmines or on cluster munitions, then people move the negotiations elsewhere. I mean, we got a landmines convention, we got a cluster munitions convention, because countries said, “Look, you know, the Conference on Disarmament is not working. Let’s try something else.”
Barry Stevens
Well, then perhaps there’s a role for middle powers, as they call themselves, such as Canada or, I don’t know, Indonesia, to put together some rules of the road, to put some brakes on this militarization in space or other problems? Is that a possibility?
Michael Byers
Yeah. We have to try, right? And even if you—
Barry Stevens
Are we trying?
Michael Byers
There are efforts being made. There was, for instance, a British diplomatic initiative roughly six or seven years ago now that resulted in the creation of an open-ended working group under the United Nations General Assembly to try to shift the conversation away from weapons to threats and behavior in space. That started a new conversation. It hasn’t resulted in a treaty, but again, this is the realistic international lawyer speaking here: a treaty is a means to an end, but it’s not the only means of getting to coordinated action. Sometimes you can have de facto agreements, implicit agreements. You can get simply restrained behavior across different countries. And again, I point to the fact that no country has, in the entire history of human activity in space, struck another country’s satellite.
Barry Stevens
So far.
Michael Byers
So far. But isn’t that amazing?
Barry Stevens
Yes.
Michael Byers
Is my point, right? And so far, we still have the International Telecommunication Union, the world’s oldest international organization, founded in 1865 as the International Telegraph Union, still coordinating the use of radio spectrum in Earth orbit. We have some mechanisms in place. We still have cooperative institutions like the International Space Station or the Cospas-Sarsat satellite system. Compare—
Barry Stevens
Yeah, I’m sorry, I take your point that there are some really positive cooperative things, but it raises the question for me. I’m not actually clear who’s managing, who’s the traffic cop, because you’ve got all these satellites moving around very rapidly, 17 kilometers a second. I read somewhere that the kind of wonderfully named 18th Space Defense Squadron of Space Force at Space Base Vandenberg is managing 50,000 things flying around and telling them when they’re going to bump into each other. That’s what I imagine anyway, crudely.
Michael Byers
But yeah, no, it really is—
Barry Stevens
And if it’s a unit of the U.S. military, doesn’t that itself raise some problems?
Michael Byers
Well, it’s interesting that you mention this because, yes, the U.S. military has been sharing information about collision risks with satellite operators from a wide variety of countries for a long time. It’s a little bit like GPS, right? The GPS satellites are owned by the U.S. military, but we use them for a whole range of civilian purposes, including the timing of banking transactions. It’s not just navigation. It’s easy to look at the U.S. military as simply a large, threatening, warfighting machine. But from time to time, they actually do some stuff that’s positive from a civilian perspective. And sharing this information to help others avoid collisions is in everyone’s interest.
Barry Stevens
But is it sufficient? Is it—
Michael Byers
Oh, it’s—
Barry Stevens
Is this Space Defense Squadron in California sufficient to manage this proliferation?
Michael Byers
It’s not sufficient, but it’s a heck of a lot better than the situation would be in its absence. This is where I want to come to. Perhaps the most important point I can make in this conversation is that space is far from perfect, and we are entering a phase where one country in particular, under Donald Trump, is changing the paradigm, talking about a warfighting domain, and investing up to a trillion dollars and potentially putting missile interceptors in low Earth orbit. That’s a big concern, and the fact that other countries now feel they have to respond to this is an equally big concern.
But overall, there is more cooperation and coordination in space than in any other domain of human activity. So it’s not all bad. It’s not all threatening. We get trapped into a way of thinking that’s been conditioned by science fiction, of wars in space, of conflict, to think that this is an entirely pessimistic situation. It’s not. We have functioning treaties, we have functioning bodies, we have a lot of coordination, we still do things together, and that creates opportunity. So yes, it’s going in a negative direction right now, but it’s not catastrophic, not yet.
So part of the reason that I’m attracted to space, coming with my skill set as someone who works on international cooperation and international law and the intersection of those things with technology and science, is that this is something we can turn around. We can maintain, \Earth orbit that’s accessible to everyone, that doesn’t have a collisional cascade that results in a loss of access for good things as well as bad things. We can actually promote cooperation with China to build that radio telescope facility on the far side of the Moon. The idea of doing missions together with the Soviets in the 1960s and 1970s was an idea that deserves to be revived today with the Chinese.
So I’m actually, you know, the glass is one quarter full, right, but the point is there’s still some water in it. And you can look at it in an entirely cynical way, and it’s really tempting to look at it in an entirely cynical way given the catastrophe that occupies the Oval Office at the moment. And given—
Barry Stevens
And, it should be said also that Congress, because Congress has banned NASA from cooperating with the Chinese Space Agency.
Michael Byers
They have, but they’ve also, over the years, given a number of waivers that have allowed some cooperation to happen. But my point is that, yeah, the glass is only one quarter full, but let’s work to make it a little bit fuller. Let’s not throw it away. How we talk about it affects the future. If we’re entirely pessimistic, entirely cynical, then we undermine the possibility of good stuff happening.
So let’s be realistic. Let’s talk about the threat of weaponization. Let’s talk about the Golden Dome as a really dangerous thing. Let’s talk about all of the risks associated with having a commercial monopoly in space run by Elon Musk. That’s a really bad thing, but then let’s find the cracks in all this. “Let’s find where the light can still come in,” to paraphrase Leonard Cohen. There’s still reason for hope, and myself and literally tens of thousands of other people around the world are trying to make those good things happen in space.
Barry Stevens
Yeah. Thank you, Michael. It was a very, very good conversation, and I look forward to speaking again, maybe in a year or two, when hopefully there’ll be a little more light that’s moved through those cracks. Thank you.
Michael Byers
Well, thank you. Thank you for the great conversation. Thank you for doing your homework. You’ve clearly learned a lot about outer space, and I’m very appreciative of that.
Barry Stevens
I was up late last night.
