In 2009 an active American satellite collided with a defunct Russian one at 22,300 miles per hour. The resulting debris field created over 150,000 pieces of space junk that won't decay for a century. Nobody paid for it. Nobody cleaned it up... because nobody had to.

That is the tragedy of the commons in orbit, and it is getting worse. 

Conjunctions, the close-passing events that require satellites to burn fuel to avoid collision, grew from 1.7 million in 2020 to 4 million in 2022. Elon Musk has applied for a licence for a million objects. 

This episode covers: 

• Kessler syndrome: the tipping point where collisions become unstoppable, and how close we are
• Why the insurance market is not pricing orbital collision risk
• Astroscale: the company using magnetic docking to clean up space junk, and the Siberian rocket explosion that nearly ended them
• Why the economic solution to the tragedy of the commons breaks down completely in orbit
• NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine on SpaceX: "there is only one thing worse than a government monopoly"
• Whether a mission-driven monopoly plays by different rules

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Timestamps

(00:00) How 150,000 pieces of space junk ended up in orbit and why nobody cleaned them up

(06:21) Kessler syndrome explained: the tipping point where collisions become unstoppable

(10:57) Why the insurance market is not pricing orbital collision risk

(13:50) Government intervention, the Moon Treaty and the five-year deorbit rule

(20:26) Active debris removal: magnets, robots and who is building the solutions

(22:37) Astroscale: how one company is trying to clean up space junk commercially

(24:53) Who pays to clean up orbit when the market has no incentive to

(26:26) Is SpaceX a monopoly and does that matter for the space industry

(29:08) NASA Administrator: there is only one thing worse than a government monopoly

(33:04) Space governance, coordination and whether the tragedy of the commons can be solved in orbit