A Viable Commercial Model Dealing with Space Debris

Abstract

The problem of space debris has already been discussed for many years. How to deal with debris and create a viable commercial opportunity for removing debris has become a universal concern nowadays. First of all, our team builds a global fund model that offers a commercial opportunity and assists with orbital debris removal. The fund could be established basing on the simple economic approach to address the problem of space debris. Fund could be collected from any countries involved with the spacecraft launch, prior to all launches for 25 years. Five percentage of the total cost of various space-related missions, which include space activities both in the past and future, are given to the foundation. Approximately half of the payments into the fund would be distributed to those entities devoted in removing space debris, including private firms interested in entering the debris removal market. An attractive market would exist with the policy’s support, assuming that the orbital debris removal could be accomplished with low risk technically. Secondly, the situation about the main countries’ space-related missions is analyzed, and a total cost of each country spent on spaceflight in the past years is estimated. Utilizing the estimated data, the amount of credit that private firm gets from the fund could be derived. At the same time, we create a time-dependent function to predict the budgets for launching satellites in the coming years. Thirdly, the comparison of the different options of removing debris is done and our team chooses the proper methods for cleaning debris objects in varied size according to existed technologies. Right after that the cost taken to do the removal job is derived. Next, the risk is analyzed and the benefit could be predicted. Our model’s dependence on the policy or objective environment makes our result full of uncertainty. Finally, we come to a conclusion that by using our model there would be an economically attractive opportunity for removing space debris with the support of relative policy or international organizations.