ESA: Satellite operators are breaking de-orbit rules
July 23, 2024
By Chris Forrester

The European Space Agency’s 2024 Space Environment Report has some hard-hitting criticism of certain satellite operators. The ESA said some satellite orbits “are getting crowded and increasingly churning with deadly, fast-moving pieces of defunct satellites and rockets that threaten our future in space.”
The ESA added: “Without further change, the collective behaviour of space-faring entities (private companies and national agencies) is unsustainable in the long term.”
Since 2016, the ESA has issued an annual Space Environment Report and is now highlighting the progress – or lack of – and where satellite operators are supposed to employ debris mitigation actions to de-orbit craft once their missions are over.
The existing guidelines ask that operators take their satellite out of orbit within 25 years of the craft’s retirement. However, the FCC has reduced that 25-year requirement to five years for US-licensed networks and in particular focusing on low-Earth orbiting fleets.
ESA states that between 30 per cent and 60 per cent are ignoring the de-orbit guidelines.
“The number and scale of commercial satellite constellations in certain low-Earth orbits continue to increase. Not enough satellites leave these heavily congested orbits at the end of their lives. Satellites that remain in their operational orbit at the end of their mission are at risk of fragmenting into dangerous clouds of debris that linger in orbit for many years,” said the report.
While the adoption of space debris mitigation measures is slowly improving it is still not enough to stop the increase of the amount of space debris. Some 35,000 objects are now tracked by space surveillance networks. About 9,100 of these are active payloads, the other 26,000 are pieces of debris that are larger than 10cm in size. However, the actual number of space debris objects larger than 1cm in size – large enough to be capable of causing catastrophic damage – is over one million.
Last year, payload launch traffic was again the highest ever, with most satellites becoming part of large commercial communication constellations. Two-thirds of all active satellites, over 6,000, are currently located between altitudes of 500 and 600 km. This trend will continue as most newly launched satellites in 2023 were also heading to these orbits.
ESA added that across low-Earth orbits, the number of events triggering collision avoidance procedures is increasing, partly because of the growing traffic congestion, partly because of the increasing amount of debris.
Despite the improvement in mitigation efforts, ESA says a lack of compliance and remediation meant that 2023 still saw a net growth of the space debris population. “If we extrapolate current trends into the future, as before, catastrophic collision numbers could rise significantly.”
This could lead to ‘Kessler syndrome’, which could see certain orbits become unsafe and unusable over time as debris continues to collide and fragment, creating a cascading effect, said the report.