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On 30 January this year, at 06:09 UTC, a Russian satellite called Luch came apart in orbit.
Luch was not an ordinary spacecraft. For a decade it drifted along the geostationary belt and parked itself beside other people's satellites. In 2015 it sat between two Intelsat satellites, at times within about ten kilometres. In 2017 it crept up on a French-Italian military satellite, and France later called it espionage outright.
Russia retired it last October, pushing it a few hundred kilometres above geostationary orbit into the graveyard, where dead satellites are parked so they stop being a hazard.
Then something hit it. Nobody outside Russia knows what.
The part that stayed with me is not the explosion. It is who noticed. Not NASA. Not the US Space Force. Not ESA. The first telescopes to catch the fragmentation belonged to s2a systems, a small private company in Switzerland.
The numbers that make this uncomfortable
ESA regularly tracks around 47,000 objects in orbit. That sounds reassuring until you see the modelling.
There are roughly 1.5 million pieces of debris between one and ten centimetres across that nobody tracks at all. In the one millimetre to one centimetre range, the estimate is about 230 million.
A one centimetre bolt sounds harmless. On a garage floor it is. Moving at eight kilometres per second, it carries roughly the energy of a hand grenade going off against your spacecraft.
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So we tightly monitor the big, slow, mostly harmless objects. The lethal ones are invisible.
The problem is not the telescopes
People assume this is an engineering gap, and that better sensors will close it. Some of it is physics, which I go through properly in the video.
The deeper issue is that nobody has worked out who pays.
Space situational awareness is about a two billion dollar market, and roughly two thirds of that is defence money. The commercial side has a flaw built into its foundations, known in economics as the free-rider problem.
If one company spends millions putting tracking telescopes into orbit, every competitor sharing that orbital shell gets a safer environment for nothing. They pay no share and still collect the benefit. So nobody wants to fund the infrastructure everyone depends on.
That is not a technology bottleneck. It is a broken market. And until a government fixes it, the safety of orbital infrastructure rests on private firms selling alerts one at a time.
Final thought
The language has already shifted, and it tells you where this is heading.
The US military stopped saying space situational awareness and started saying space domain awareness. Situational awareness sounds like watching the weather. Domain awareness sounds like holding ground.
I have sat in rooms on both sides of this. The technical people talk about sensors and catalogues. The policy people talk about attribution, which means proving who did something, and about what you are allowed to do next.
Luch sits exactly on that line. A satellite broke apart in the blindest band of space we use. Something struck it. No government is obliged to explain, and none has.
If you only take one thing from this issue, make it this. The question is no longer whether we can watch space properly. It is who should be made to pay for it.
Make sure to watch the full video here and I would genuinely like your view on this topic. Reply, or leave a comment on the video.
Till next time!
Ricky
