4 ms·

OK, asking from total ignorance here, shouldnt the companies putting these things in orbit (and benefiting from it) be responsible for safely decommissioning th

• nickik 6y ago
  They are. Every sat launched needs to have a plan for decommissioning. You need to have enough fuel at to de-orbit the sat at the end of life. The problem is what happens if your sat breaks and you can't de-orbit it. I'm not sure if a company could held liable or get fined unless they ignored the rules. I don't think currently you are held liable if its an accident. Thankfully once we have Starship, the cost of taking space garage should start to be reasonable.
• wmf 6y ago
  For most conventional satellites (and let's not forget second stages), the cost of deorbiting it if it fails is immense because it essentially requires launching a "tug" which didn't even exist until recently. Because it was so exepensive, people were allowed to ignore it. We'll probably eventually look back on this attitude the same way we view 1970s cars that didn't use known safety features. SpaceX is being forced to innovate in this area because everybody realized the YOLO attitude towards space junk doesn't scale to thousands of satellites.