UNTIL recently, space was the exclusive domain of few nations.

However, after two decades of increasing consumer demands, the industry is fast expanding worldwide. With ambitious plans under way in the Scottish Highlands, Europe will soon have its first and only vertical space launch capability.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has rightly made economic investment in this growing sector a key objective for her government. Scotland already produces more small satellites than anywhere else in Europe, with globally known companies such as Spire, but its geography also allows efficient access to unique Earth orbits from northern latitudes.

The timing of Scotland’s spaceport development could not be better. The Information Age has arrived and the lives of every person, no matter where they reside, are dependent on space. From simple communications and navigation to farming and pharmacology, the issue is not solely about what occurs above our atmosphere but how space effects life down here.

For example, the challenges confronting climate observation would be piecemeal without the massive availability of multispectral imagery collected in low-Earth orbit. Commercial satellites 400km upwards have even become an essential tool to thwart illegal fishing, over-mining, and capturing the horrors of war crimes in remote Ukranian villages.

Despite this shared dependency among all nations, the space domain remains loosely governed and leadership is necessary to ensure its use for future generations. Sadly, after only 65 years of spaceflight, pollution is rampant in Earth’s orbit with a half-a-million fragments of old rockets and satellites circling our planet that are larger than one centimetre in size. These bits of debris can cause critical damage and anything larger than 10 centimetres could be catastrophic upon impact.

Moreover, every collision creates more fragments which further exacerbate the environmental degradation of space. The sheer volume of existing debris coupled with the surge in satellite deployments make urgent the need for new approaches. The growing risks of collisions in low-Earth orbit will soon exceed the mitigation procedures currently in place. Beyond the physical risk of collisions, the increasing number of objects in orbit can disable a functional spacecraft by causing radio frequency interference triggering dangerous lack of communication, positional awareness, and telemetry loss.

Co-operation among nations is imperative to improve safety of operations and allow for sustained economic use of the space domain.

FOR its part, the US government has a plan to transfer its role of space object tracking to a civilian agency to better integrate with commercial companies and other countries. But even when fully under way, the US programme will be modest in capability and potentially inadequate to support the anticipated growth of the space sector.

While commercial systems currently provide precision situational tracking of orbital objects, without a standard common operational picture and set of norms the utility of such data is limited.

Co-ordination is key to mitigate risks for all users, and only a governmentally endorsed approach for co-ordination can accomplish that. As Earth’s orbit is a shared environmental domain, every country has similar interest in space stewardship. Thus, an internationally structured framework for space situational awareness is necessary.

Collective effort is needed to avoid over pollution and to increase safety of space operations. Emerging space nations such as Scotland can lead the way in ensuring proper and sustainable use of the domain.

At the core of any proposed solutions, information sharing is essential. Most importantly, transparency is foundational for the space economy to grow and mature for the benefit of all – citizens, countries, and companies alike.

Christian Zur and Scott Kordella are members of the Commercial Space Initiative (CSI), a US-based non-profit organization dedicated to predictable and sustainable uses of outer space

Scott Kordella is vice-president for program Analytics, Commercial Space Initiative. He is a systems engineer specialising in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems engineering, with more than 40 years of experience in radio frequency system design and operations. He works across the national security, civil, commercial, and international space sectors to develop and implement solutions for successful space operations.

Kordella holds a BS in physics from the University of Maryland and Doctor of Science from George Washington University and is currently an adjunct professor at Piedmont Virginia Community College.

Christian Zur is vice-president for policy, Commercial Space Initiative. Prior to joining CSI, he led the US Chamber of Commerce policy formulation and advocacy on civilian, commercial, and national security space programs.

In 2020-21, Zur served on Nasa’s independent review team of the operations and management of the International Space Station (ISS) U. National Laboratory.

Zur also spent 12 years working on House and Senate staffs including six years on the House Armed Services Committee. Subsequently, he served as counsel to the chair of the Defense Policy Board as well as the Commission on the Future of the US Aerospace Industry.