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Victoria Bela

As Starship, the world’s largest and most powerful rocket, gears up for an attempt to finally reach Earth’s orbit, experts say the risk of an in-flight catastrophe – and a cloud of debris – “needs to be of concern”.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is expected to launch the Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster for the launch system’s 14th test flight and first orbital test flight later this month.
According to one aerospace expert, if the Starship’s upper stage explodes in orbit it could produce debris on a scale larger than previous in-orbit incidents, including an anti-satellite missile test.
During that test, in November 2021, Russia intentionally blew up a defunct Soviet intelligence satellite called Cosmos-1408.
Moriba Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, said the Russian test had detrimental consequences for the operation of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation.
He said if Starship were to explode in orbit, it could create a lot of debris that could become hazards to other objects as well as humans.
“If something like that happened in low-Earth orbit, it would be like the Russian anti-satellite test, but probably a few scales larger in terms of the amount of debris it would generate,” Jah said.


As of the end of August, SpaceX was still awaiting final regulatory approval for the test flight from the US Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates American commercial space launches.
“The FAA is responsible for the safety oversight of licensed commercial space vehicle launch and re-entry operations,” the FAA told the South China Morning Post in August. “Our safety oversight authority does not extend to in-orbit activities.”
The Russian satellite – which had a radius of around 2.5 metres (eight feet) and weighed some two tonnes – produced 1,500 trackable pieces of debris and hundreds of thousands more smaller fragments, according to National Geographic.
The reusable Starship launch system consists of a powerful 72-metre first-stage booster called the Super Heavy, which separates from the upper stage of the rocket after launch and does not reach orbit.
The 52-metre, 100-tonne upper stage of the rocket – known as the Starship – is designed to reach orbit. Both rocket stages are designed to be reusable and to be caught on Earth by a tower with “chopstick” arms.
A variant of the Starship called the human landing system (HLS) was selected to take part in Nasa’s Artemis programme, which aims to bring American astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since the end of the Apollo missions in 1972.
After astronauts launch from Earth aboard the Orion spacecraft, the Starship HLS, or Blue Origin’s Blue Moon landing system, will ferry astronauts to and from the lunar surface.
To escape Earth’s gravity and reach the moon, the Starship HLS will reportedly need to be fuelled with around 1,500 tonnes of liquid oxygen and liquid methane propellant.
This will involve multiple docking missions in low-Earth orbit using depot and fuel tanker variants of the Starship.

SpaceX has had a string of incidents involving the launch system in recent years, including in April 2023 when two rocket stages failed to separate and exploded, and in June last year when a Starship upper stage blew up on a test stand.
Asked if there was any cause for concern given SpaceX’s track record, Jah said: “The fact that we’re launching it, the fact that the thing can explode, makes it a possibility. So, it needs to be of concern.”
An explosion could potentially send a cloud of bullet-like shrapnel into low-Earth orbit.
Jah said rocket bodies owned by the US had previously exploded in higher, geostationary transfer orbits where there was still a debris risk.
SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to the European Space Agency, the main cause of orbital explosions is residual fuel left in tanks and fuel lines or other energy sources. Over time, the mechanical integrity of spacecraft parts can degrade, leading to leaks or fuel mixing that triggers self-ignition.
Starship’s planned test flight – which was originally slated for August and is now expected in mid-September – will be an attempt to launch the spacecraft into orbit. Previous attempts have only reached suborbital trajectories.
According to the FAA website, protecting public safety during launches is central to its licencing and approval process.
The US, China and Russia are all parties to the Outer Space Treaty, a basic framework for international space law that took effect in 1967.
According to Article 7 of the treaty, any state that launches a space object is internationally liable for compensation for any damage the object causes to another state on Earth or in space.
Ella Atkins, a professor of aerospace engineering at Virginia Tech, said the primary Starship explosion risk lay in the booster, which did not enter orbit.
She said that once Starship or any other payload entered low-Earth orbit, there was a risk of collision when its orbit was not coordinated with other space objects or junk. That made it “critical” for launch authorities and companies to coordinate and collaborate.
“All space missions pose a risk of collision. On-orbit testing and refuelling are unlikely to generate anything close to the space junk problem amassed over all objects that persist in orbit today,” Atkins said.
She noted that the high orbiting speeds required for objects to counter Earth’s gravity were dependent on Earth’s mass rather than on spacecraft mass. Because of this speed, every orbiting object posed a risk to other objects.
“It is therefore critical that no orbiting object hit another orbiting object, regardless of the two objects’ mass or relative masses,” she said.
When a debris-generating event occurs in Earth’s orbit, it poses a threat to nearby satellites and spacecraft. Over time, fragments disperse across orbital lanes, with some of the debris being pulled down by atmospheric drag to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Across the history of space travel, thousands of launches have resulted in tens of thousands of tracked objects in orbit, including both spacecraft and debris, according to the European Space Agency.
Many more pieces of space debris are too small to track.
According to a paper published in the peer-reviewed Chinese-language Journal of Astronautics in May, space debris is a big factor in the safety of missions.
Researchers from Sun Yat-sen University and Northwestern Polytechnical University pointed to a 2016 incident where the solar panels of the ESA Sentinel-1A satellite were struck by a centimetre-sized piece of debris, creating a 40cm (16-inch) impact crater.
They also noted an incident in November, when a window of the Shenzhou-20 spacecraft docked at China’s Tiangong space station was struck by a tiny piece of debris, delaying the return of astronauts.

The rapid growth of internet megaconstellations in Earth’s orbit, driven by SpaceX’s Starlink, has added to the issue of debris, according to the paper.
Starlink’s more than 11,000 satellites in orbit have to perform hundreds of thousands of collision-avoidance manoeuvres each year to get out of the path of debris and other spacecraft.
Orbital crowding has meanwhile led to concerns about Kessler Syndrome – a theoretical scenario where the density of objects in orbit becomes so high that collisions could create a chain reaction, making certain orbital regions unusable.
According to Jah, no evidence has led him to believe that an uncontrolled event in space would continue ad infinitum. “Even if cascading does happen, at some point an equilibrium state will be achieved because Mother Nature is always seeking some form of equilibrium,” he said.
Jah said more coordination and planning would be needed as the number of satellite constellations rose.
He said it could be comparable to the International Telecommunication Union’s role in distributing spectrum – the frequencies and wavelengths used for wireless communication between space and ground.
“If something similar could be done for orbital carrying capacity or something like that, I think that could be useful,” Jah said, referring to the maximum number of space objects in a specific orbital region.
“The first come, first served sort of thing is very colonial, very extractive, exploitative,” he said. “SpaceX pretty much has a monopoly in low-Earth orbit. That, and rightfully so, upsets other countries and entities.”
Jah said the incentive for better coordination was long-term sustainability. But in the near term, he said the three powers dominating space traffic – the US, China, and Russia – wanted “unlimited freedom of action” and it was unlikely they would sign a treaty to manage such issues.


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Starship could create more debris than an anti-satellite test if it explodes in orbit

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News

China

As SpaceX prepares for a test of the world’s largest and most powerful rocket, experts note the risk of an in-flight incident


As SpaceX prepares for a test of the world’s largest and most powerful rocket, experts note the risk of an in-flight incident.


United States

Russia

Virginia Tech

SpaceX

Starship could create more debris than an anti-satellite test if it explodes in orbit

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}As SpaceX prepares for a test of the world’s largest and most powerful rocket, experts note the risk of an in-flight incident

As SpaceX prepares for a test of the world’s largest and most powerful rocket, experts note the risk of an in-flight incident