Company Plans To Track Space Debris

As small as a paint chip and as big as an old rocket booster, junk hurtles through space occupied by satellites that provide television and communications for the modern world.

Though extremely rare, collisions do happen. A rocket booster took out a French satellite. A paint chip the size of a golf ball put a divot in the windshield of a space shuttle.

Companies wanting to protect their pricey satellites ask the government for a warning when their equipment is in danger. But Air Force Space Command at Peterson Air Force Base, which tracks 8,000 pieces of the junk, doesn’t have time to work for the private sector.

The Aerospace Corp. is offering to bridge that gap by establishing a space-debris warning system in Colorado Springs. Aerospace, a nonprofit company that develops and tests satellites for the Air Force, would take information from the Air Force, remove anything classified and sell it to companies operating satellites.

The revenue would be used to operate the center and update Air Force Space Command’s computer programs, said Bill Ailor, director of the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies at Aerospace. The Los Angeles-based company made the proposal to the Air Force in April but hasn’t received a response. Air Force officials would only say the proposal is under review.

The Air Force now tracks space junk as it searches for missiles. It provides the information to NASA to protect manned space flights.

The need for a similar arrangement for commercial interests is growing, Ailor said. In the past 40 years, 500 satellites were launched. From now until 2006, more than 1,700 are expected to go up. The warning system would protect satellites by giving companies time to move them or use a backup unit.

Now is the time to act, Ailor said. A recent satellite malfunction rendered 40 to 45 million pagers useless. The culprit wasn’t space junk, but a collision could have done the same thing, he said.

“This is really a recognition we are going to be taking space a lot more seriously,” Ailor said. “It’s like the ocean used to be. You could dump whatever you wanted because it was infinite. Just like the ocean isn’t infinite, neither is local space.”

Motorola Inc. considered space junk when it built extra-tough satellites for Iridium, a worldwide pager and fax system. But if one of the satellites was knocked out, the network could skip that satellite and continue operating, said Kathi Haas, a Motorola spokeswoman.

Motorola uses the occasional information the Air Force provides, but officials don’t know whether they would buy data from a new system.

But the data is a long way from available. Before the Air Force makes a decision on Aerospace’s proposal, it has to work through issues such as liability, the impact on defense missions, its structure and whether other companies must be allowed to make proposals.