Space Debris Affirmative

Brink: ISS

(Reuters) - Six astronauts were forced to take refuge aboard the International Space Station's "lifeboat" crafts on Tuesday, bracing for the threat of a collision with floating space debris, the Russian space agency said. "A situation arose linked to unidentified 'space trash' passing very close to the space station. The crew was told to take their places aboard the Soyuz spacecraft," Roskomos said in a statement. The space junk narrowly missed the vulnerable orbiting station by just 250 meters (820 feet) on Tuesday as astronauts were prepared to jump ship, the RIA Novosti news agency cited an official as saying. It is not the first time space station crews have scrambled for shelter from accumulated space junk. Crews are routinely put on alert to prepare to move out of harm's way. Three crew members were forced briefly to evacuate the space station in an incident in March 2009. The station -- a $100 billion project of 16 nations under construction about 220 miles above the earth since 1998 -- is currently manned by three Russians, two Americans and a Japanese astronaut.

Brink: Other

Current space debris regulations insufficient, immediate action to remove debris needed.

Pearson et.al 10(Jerome Pearson, Ohio Eta ’61, is president of STAR, Inc business that has developed concepts for DOD and NASA; invented the Earth and lunar space elevators, developed multi-winglets for lowered aircraft drag, published engineering solutions to space debris, and conceived spacecraft EDDE., he was an engineer at NASA Langley and Ames research centers and a branch chief for the Air Force Research Laboratory, ACTIVE DEBRIS REMOVAL: EDDE, THE ELECTRODYNAMIC DEBRIS ELIMINATOR, 2010, http://www.star-tech-inc.com/papers/EDDE_IAC_Final_Paper.pdf, rn)

Space debris from discarded upper stages, dead satellites, and assorted pieces from staging and tank explosions has been growing since the beginning of the space age. This has increased the risk to active satellites, and the need for avoidance maneuvering. These thousands of pieces of space junk in Earth orbit pose risks to our space assets such as communication and navigation satellites, environmental monitoring satellites, the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station (ISS)1. More importantly, they pose a risk to the astronauts who work outside the space station or who repair satellites, as the space shuttle Atlantis astronauts did for Hubble last year. In addition to the Hubble’s bad camera and failing gyros, its solar array had a hole in it the size of a .22-caliber bullet. Figure 1 is a depiction of the tracked objects over 2 kg crossing the orbit of a space vehicle in low Earth orbit (LEO). Up until last year, the dangers of space debris were generally ignored under the “big sky” view that space is very empty. But the loss of the operating Iridium 33 satellite changed that. Since then, there have been Congressional hearings and international conferences discussing the problems of space debris, how to reduce the risks, and whether we can afford it. The U. S. Strategic Command keeps track of about 20,000 catalog debris objects and the 800 active satellites, calculates potential collisions, and issues warnings to satellite operators. Each day they produce 800 “conjunction analyses,” about one for every active satellite. Many satellites can maneuver out of the way of debris when a near approach is predicted. However, STRATCOM does not have the resources to predict every potential conjunction, and no warning was issued on the Iridium/Cosmos collision last year. The NASA Orbital Debris Program Office at the Johnson Space Center in Houston studies space debris and formulates rules to limit debris creation. These rules include eliminating throwaway bolts and latches when spacecraft are placed in orbit, venting fluid tanks to prevent explosions, and requiring that satellites re-enter the atmosphere within 25 years after their missions are completed. But the office director, Nicholas Johnson, says that unless we begin removing existing debris from orbit, the inevitable collisions involving objects like 8-ton rocket bodies and 5-ton dead satellites will create tens of thousands of new pieces of debris, resulting in the “debris runaway” or “Kessler Syndrome” that would make LEO unusable for hundreds of years2.
If we don’t act, an economic barrier to space exploration will arise

Broad in 07. (Writer for the NY times, NY times, Orbiting junk in space, once a nuisance, is now a threat - Health & Science, 2-6-7, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/06/health/06iht-web.0206space.4485857.html?pagewanted=2. DT)

If nothing is done, a kind of orbital crisis might ensue that is known as the Kessler Syndrome, after Kessler. A staple of science fiction, it holds that the space around Earth becomes so riddled with junk that launchings are almost impossible. Vehicles that entered space would quickly be destroyed. In an interview, Kessler called the worst-case scenario an exaggeration. "It's been overdone," he said of the syndrome. Still, he warned of an economic barrier to space exploration that could arise. To fight debris, he said, designers will have to give spacecraft more and more shielding, struggling to protect the craft from destruction and making them heavier and more costly in the process. At some point, he said, perhaps centuries from now, the costs will outweigh the benefits. "It gets more and more expensive," he said. "Sooner or later it gets too expensive to do business in space."

The best plan is to take out 3 to 10 pieces of concerning debris per year – without immediate action collisions and debris are bound to increase.

Barbee et. al 11 (Brent William, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, with Elfego Pinon III, Emergent Space Technologies, Inc., Kenn Gold, Emergent Space Technologies, Inc., David Gaylor, Emergent Space Technologies, Inc., and Salvatore Alfano, Center for Space Standards and Innovation, Aerospace Conference 2011 IEEE, Design of spacecraft missions to remove multiple orbital debris objects, March 2011, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5747303&tag=1, SP)

Estimates of Cascading Failure for LEO

Predictions generated by NASA of the orbital debris environ­ ment show that even an immediate halt of all launch activities will still result in an increase in collision events, and thus an increase in the debris environment. The projected mass of collision fragments greater than 10 cm is expected to first exceed those due to end of life explosions or fragmentation events by the year 2040, and to exceed it by a factor of two by the year 2100 [6]. The Need for Active Debris Removal Long term forecasting predicts approximately 20 catastrophic collisions during the next 200 years [7]. In December of 2009, DARPA and NASA held the first International Con­ ference on Orbit Debris Removal. More than 50 papers were presented discussing the technology requirements for removal, as well as legal, economic and policy concerns. The need was recognized at the conference for a service vehi­ cle having adequate maneuverability, rendezvous and dock­ ing capability, and the ability to make a secure attachment to an arbitrarily rotating object. Projections for the future state of orbital debris show that if all launch activity was stopped now, the debris field would continue to grow, with cascad­ ing failures making the space environment essentially unus­ able by 2100. Projections showing the use of active debris removal technology demonstrate that if three to five pieces of the most concerning debris objects were removed per year, this environment could be stabilized, and that the removal of ten or more per year would begin the process of mitigating the problem [5]. Figure 2 shows the predicted effect of ac­ tively removing objects to mitigate the growth of the debris population.

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