Economic risk model for space debris

Satellites provide services that are used by an increasingly wide and diverse range of users throughout the UK economy but they occupy an environment that is becoming more congested and contested. These threats and the growth of the space debris population are having an increasing influence on the safety and sustainability of spaceflight. Within this context, national regulators must ensure that new space systems will not interfere with other space users or cause harm to the space environment, in order to comply with obligations under international treaties and conventions. Typically, the regulator will evaluate all proposals for new space systems to verify that space debris mitigation measures are included, to assess the potential for interference with other space users, and to determine appropriate limits for liability insurance. Whilst considerable research has been undertaken to understand the effectiveness of space debris mitigation measures, and to determine on-orbit collision probability, only a limited amount of research has focused on the estimation of liability in this domain. Here, liability is equivalent to risk, which is the product of the probability of an event (e.g. a collision) and the consequences (e.g. the loss of a spacecraft and the services it provides). The level of liability insurance needed should be commensurate with the risk resulting from the launch, operation, disposal and re-entry of a proposed space system. If an incident involving such a system was found to be likely, or if the losses arising from the incident were high, then the level of liability insurance required by the regulator should ideally be set at a relatively high level, and vice versa. Future space systems that will need to be evaluated by regulators include proposals for large constellations, active debris removal, and on-orbit servicing, and these present unique challenges in the context of risk estimation, because of their unprecedented nature.
This project will develop new economic and socio-economic models of space systems, and the services they provide, and integrate these with an evolutionary space debris model. This integrated model will then be used to perform risk assessments of future space systems, with the aim of identifying a suitable approach for establishing liability insurance limits. Within this framework, there is scope for some novel and meaningful contributions towards the safe and sustainable use of space.