Space Junk

Sam, I want to start with you because my interest in this whole topic started because I follow you on Mastodon and I saw your posts about satellite debris landing in a farmer's field in Saskatchewan.

So I wondered if you could set the scene for us and explain to us how you first became interested in this whole issue of satellite debris landing in Canada.

Yeah, so I study the Kuiper Belt, small distant bodies in the outer edges of the solar system, and I moved to a farm in Saskatchewan in 2019, which was right when the first Starlink satellites started launching.

I could see these satellites changing the night sky because I suddenly had access to beautiful dark prairie night skies.

And I could also see them changing my telescope images and just wondering about how much the night sky would change.

led me to write a paper predicting how much the night sky would change along with Dr. Boley.

And then satellite debris fell right near my house in Saskatchewan twice in 2024 from two different SpaceX spacecraft.

So yeah, and then being faced with the problems of what do you do when you find debris on your property? And that's where we are today.

Now, Erin, I don't want to sound like Chicken Little yelling that the sky is falling.

So put it into context for us.

How much of a danger does falling satellite debris pose for people on Earth, for airplanes up in the sky? And how big are those risks for Canada in particular?

Yeah, thank you for that question, Senator.

So it's important to contextualize these risks.

And one of the things that we have to keep in mind is that your individual risk is very, very low.

So it's not something that you as an individual should be concerned about.

However, the risk that an event will happen that will cause damage or a casualty somewhere around the world is not a negligible risk.

And so that is now at a few percent and rising per year.

And that can be approaching very large percentages, about 50% or so, depending on how satellites themselves are designed for their end of life.

At the moment, they're designed to ablate or burn up entirely in the upper atmosphere.

And if that's correct, then they are able to remove that particular risk.

It causes other problems, but it removes this casualty risk.

However, we see that satellites that are being designed for this complete demisability are failing in that and material is reaching the surface.

And so that's creating then an additional casualty risk to what I had described there with that few percent.

In terms of risk to aircraft, even small pieces of debris can be a substantial problem for an aircraft.

And so the most likely scenario for disruption to aviation is that an incoming event is gonna be known and that there's gonna be decisions that'll be disrupting flights, rerouting things, closing airspace, sometimes very immediately as we saw in Europe in, I think, 2022.

Sam, I want to start with you because my interest in this whole topic started because I follow you on Mastodon and I saw your posts about satellite debris landing in a farmer's field in Saskatchewan.

So I wondered if you could set the scene for us and explain to us how you first became interested in this whole issue of satellite debris landing in Canada.

Yeah, so I study the Kuiper Belt, small distant bodies in the outer edges of the solar system, and I moved to a farm in Saskatchewan in 2019, which was right when the first Starlink satellites started launching.

I could see these satellites changing the night sky because I suddenly had access to beautiful dark prairie night skies.

And I could also see them changing my telescope images and just wondering about how much the night sky would change.

led me to write a paper predicting how much the night sky would change along with Dr. Boley.

And then satellite debris fell right near my house in Saskatchewan twice in 2024 from two different SpaceX spacecraft.

So yeah, and then being faced with the problems of what do you do when you find debris on your property? And that's where we are today.

Now, Erin, I don't want to sound like Chicken Little yelling that the sky is falling.

So put it into context for us.

How much of a danger does falling satellite debris pose for people on Earth, for airplanes up in the sky? And how big are those risks for Canada in particular?

Yeah, thank you for that question, Senator.

So it's important to contextualize these risks.

And one of the things that we have to keep in mind is that your individual risk is very, very low.

So it's not something that you as an individual should be concerned about.

However, the risk that an event will happen that will cause damage or a casualty somewhere around the world is not a negligible risk.

And so that is now at a few percent and rising per year.

And that can be approaching very large percentages, about 50% or so, depending on how satellites themselves are designed for their end of life.

At the moment, they're designed to ablate or burn up entirely in the upper atmosphere.

And if that's correct, then they are able to remove that particular risk.

It causes other problems, but it removes this casualty risk.

However, we see that satellites that are being designed for this complete demisability are failing in that and material is reaching the surface.

And so that's creating then an additional casualty risk to what I had described there with that few percent.

In terms of risk to aircraft, even small pieces of debris can be a substantial problem for an aircraft.

And so the most likely scenario for disruption to aviation is that an incoming event is gonna be known and that there's gonna be decisions that'll be disrupting flights, rerouting things, closing airspace, sometimes very immediately as we saw in Europe in, I think, 2022.