I was nine when I watched a man die. I didn’t look away, not even when his eyes stopped moving. The weapon wasn’t a gun or a knife; it was a piece of trash the size of a coin. I was sealed in a darkened fourth-grade classroom that was trying its best to be a movie theater. Black butcher paper smothered the windows so completely that only hairline cracks of Texas sunlight leaked in, like light trying to escape a locked coffin. The overheads were off. A single projector beam carved a pale tunnel through the dusty air, where specks of it drifted like tiny, indifferent planets. Desks creaked, sneakers squealed against the tile, and then quickly stilled as the movie Gravity bloomed across the wall.
At first, space in the movie looked exactly the way my textbooks had promised. Earth floated below like a glass ornament you’d often be afraid to drop: clouds whipped into white spirals, oceans a velvet blue that looked almost soft. The astronauts drifted with slow, underwater grace, their tethers curling and uncurling like lazy jellyfish tentacles, fixing parts of the space station. Their white suits glowed against the ink of space, thin chalk marks on an endless blackboard. It felt calm, almost gentle: a lullaby sung in orbit. Then, suddenly, a single word bent the entire mood: debris.
On a screen inside the movie’s space station, red dots began to bloom around Earth: a spreading rash. Voices sharpened, the music pulled into a high, wire-thin note, and my stomach dropped as if an invisible elevator cable had snapped. The debris didn’t glide in like dust; it attacked. Gray streaks knifed across the black: splintered panels, twisted metal, stray bolts, moving not like objects but like a horizontal hailstorm. Each impact landed with a brutal “thud” that shook the speakers. Solar arrays snapped like dry bones; beams wrenched free and spun away like severed limbs. The tidy, controlled station tore apart in seconds, becoming a tumbling skeleton.
Then came the moment that rewired how I saw the sky.
The camera zoomed in on an astronaut’s helmet floating in the endless space until it filled the entire screen. The visor curved smoothly, reflecting the blue marble of Earth in a soft halo.
Behind the glass, his face floated: steady eyes, set mouth, breath fogging the inside in faint, ghostly circles. For one heartbeat, he looked untouchable, sealed in his own tiny universe.
A dark speck sliced into the frame. The sound was impossibly small: a crystalline tink.
The visor didn’t shatter; it yielded a perfect circle punched open in the center, obscene in its neatness, as if space itself had drawn a bullseye. Behind it, his face collapsed inward, his eyes froze wide, turning into two vacant marbles. A red cloud unfurled inside the helmet, blooming like ink in water, clinging to the glass in weightless petals. The spotless white of his suit became a backdrop for that silent, drifting stain.
My lungs forgot how to work. My fingers dug crescents into the edge of my desk.
Around me, someone whispered, “Whoa,” and another kid laughed too loudly, but their voices sounded far away, like echoes trapped behind a wall. All I could think was: He died because of trash. Not an alien. Not a meteor. A single shard.
When the lights snapped back on, the posters of smiling cartoon planets looked like propaganda. On the bus ride home, the afternoon sky was a calm, innocent blue, but I couldn’t see it as empty anymore. In my mind, an invisible ring of junk wrapped the planet: screws spinning like thrown daggers, paint flecks racing faster than bullets, broken panels tumbling like jagged ghosts. That night, still shaken, I searched: “Is the movie Gravity true?”
Diagrams showed Earth wrapped in a glittering shell of dots. Articles explained that even a paint chip at orbital speeds can puncture metal, and there are no major solutions to this issue.
The horror sequence I’d watched wasn’t just Hollywood: it was a warning dressed as fiction. My childhood fear hardened into a question that has followed me ever since to ensure this Hollywood nightmare doesn’t become a terrestrial reality, to ensure no one gets a piercing hole in their face from trash. That memory of a face erased by a sliver of junk continues to make me wonder: How can a multi-disciplinary approach be developed and effectively implemented for a sustainable framework for long-term remediation strategies for orbital space debris?
Most people still imagine outer space as a clean, silent vacuum, but the orbital zones wrapped around Earth, especially low Earth orbit (LEO), are now dense, messy, and quietly dangerous. Since the launch of Sputnik in 1957, governments and private companies have put thousands of satellites and rocket bodies into orbit without consistently planning what to do with them at the end of their missions (Grosselin and Hughes 84). As a result, orbital space debris has formed: a sprawling population of “defunct satellites, broken satellite pieces, and collisions with other debris,” plus fragments shed from the upper stages of launch vehicles (Nomura et al.
18-19). These are not harmless scraps, as these objects in orbit travel at several kilometers per second, so even a ten-centimeter piece of aluminum is expected to generate about 449 large
pieces of debris if it collides with a 386‑kilogram derelict satellite (Grosselin and Hughes 89). As
more satellites are launched, the odds of these kinds of collisions rise, and each impact has the potential to seed a cascading chain of further breakups.
The region most at risk is low Earth orbit, the band from Earth’s surface up to about 2,000 kilometers in altitude (Nomura et al. 18). This is where communication, navigation, weather, military satellite operations, television, and many other vital life essentials occur due to low-latency connections. LEO is already heavily polluted with bands of tens of thousands of trackable, destructive debris pieces (Kisiel 225). This poses a severe collision threat to space assets, and without a safe, stable LEO environment, all of that infrastructure becomes more expensive, more fragile, and, in the worst case, impossible to sustain.
Scientists and policymakers describe one of the most serious long-term risks as Kessler Syndrome, which states that once debris in orbit reaches a certain density, “collision frequency” among artificial objects could trigger the creation of a persistent debris belt, making a feedback loop of continual debris fragmentation, making some orbits unusable and extremely hazardous to navigate (Nomura et al. 18). Based on Space Agency data, the system may appear manageable for decades, but then it could suddenly tip into a regime where debris grows explosively, even if launches slow down, requiring a long-term remediation that actively pushes the system away from that tipping point (Nomura et al. 24-25).
Another concept that is not immediately intuitive to many is the idea of orbital space as a global commons. Drawing on commons theory, LEO is “a limited natural resource under an open‑access regime,” emphasizing that it is both exhaustible, as one user’s satellite and debris deteriorate usable space available for others (Nomura et al. 19), and is non-excludable, as it is difficult and politically costly to keep new actors out (Kisiel 230). At the same time, the legal history of space governance has failed to keep up with this reality. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty and the 1972 Liability Convention were drafted when “virtually all of the actors in space were governmental,” and they channel remedies through states rather than the private companies that now own and fly many satellites (Kisiel 231). Under the Liability Convention, only parties to the treaty can bring claims, and even then, proving “fault” for damage in space requires reconstructing negligence under customary international tort law, often using non-binding debris-mitigation guidelines (Kisiel 232). This means that while the orbital environment is shared, the current rules do not strongly compel any actor to pay for cleaning it up and ensuring further prevention measures.
Recent modeling of proliferated LEO (pLEO) constellations includes post-mission disposal (PMD) reliability, the chance that a satellite successfully executes its end-of-life maneuver, usually lowering its orbital so that atmospheric drag eventually burns it up, rather than dying in place (Grosselin and Hughes 89-90). Every satellite that fails before disposal persists; it remains a serious collision hazard, hastening the accumulation of large and hidden (1-10 cm) debris fragments that operational satellites cannot always avoid (Grosselin and Hughes 91).
According to pLEO models, only 90% of space assets are successfully disposed of, leading to approximately 21 dead satellites per year in the operational shell, steadily raising collision risk and declining constellation availability (Grosselin and Hughes 92). If left unchecked, the cascading orbital environment faces a permanent “lockout” that would dismantle the modern digital age on which humans survive and render space exploration a relic of the past.
Orbital debris is upheld and amplified in multiple, overlapping ways. Some of these drivers are technical and built into satellite design, while others are systemic and rooted in space modeling and regulations. Taken together, the long-term debris problem is directly and indirectly shaped by design decisions that concentrate satellites in already polluted shells (Grosselin and Hughes 88), by system-level debris dynamics that can quietly push LEO toward unstable regimes (Nomura et al. 25), and by legal structures that dilute responsibility in a shared orbital commons (Kisiel 233-234). Together, these three forces explain why the problem is so hard to stop multiplying once it exists, and why any remediation has to address engineering, system behavior, and law at the same time.
Shell Congestion
Concerns about remediation begin with how space industries choose to populate different orbital neighborhoods, not just how much hardware they launch overall. Grosselin and Hughes divide LEO into 35 spherical shells starting at 300 kilometers, each 50 kilometers thick, and track four populations: operational spacecraft, derelicts, large debris, and hidden debris in every shell (90). This structure reveals that not all altitude bands behave the same. Lower-altitude shells, especially around 600-800 kilometers, are already “heavily polluted with debris” before any new pLEO constellations are added (Grosselin and Hughes 92). When simulating new pLEO architectures in these shells, it is found that background congestion amplifies every other risk: more launches in an already dirty band create more opportunities for collisions, which then feed more debris back into the same limited volume.
Furthermore, the contrast with higher shells is striking. In medium-high and high designs at 1,000 and 1,200 kilometers, comparable coverage can be achieved with fewer satellites, with those satellites spread through a larger volume (Nomura et al. 90). In these clearer shells, the same basic maintenance pattern, regular replenishment, and planned end-of-life, doesn’t produce the same rapid collapse in the constellation’s health compared to lower bands. This comparison turns “shell choice” into a factor for future remediation: building a large constellation in a shell that is already debris-rich leads to the deliberate stacking of new, fragile architecture on top of an unstable foundation. This makes lower-altitude bands unsuitable for auxiliary-role satellites in the long term, as they make them more vulnerable while offering only a small coverage range.
Moreover, adding dense, short-lived fleets to shells that are already debris-rich changes the baseline required to repair them later. Grosselin and Hughes’s shell-by-shell modeling identifies a spatial logic that remediation in a highly congested shell is fundamentally harder because the collision “background” is already elevated before any new space assets arrive, so new constellations are effectively volunteering to operate inside a minefield.
Design Tradeoffs
Another way technical choices silently shape future remediation is through the tradeoffs in constellation design. Within pLEO simulations by Grosselin and Hughes, they keep their total Earth coverage roughly constant for fair constellation comparison (90). This means the
low-altitude and high-altitude designs are modeled to achieve the same number of combined satellites in the area, just dispersed equally throughout regions. On the surface, this looks like an operational advantage due to more nodes, more redundancy, and tighter coverage, but their results show a deeper cost (Nomura et al. 92). This leads many companies to advocate for this type of constellation and push for altered satellite positions in the modern day (Nomura et al.
91-92). However, every additional satellite is a potential derelict and collision body, and many of those failures occur in shells that already contain legacy debris at lower altitudes. Furthermore, the interconnectedness between satellites from equal distances leads to more diffuse collisions throughout the exosphere.
Grosselin and Hughes also examine how design life interacts with replenishment rates. A four-year design life implies that a quarter of a constellation turns over each year (Grosselin and Hughes 90). Shorter design lives support faster technology refreshes, which explains why many new satellites have shorter design lives. However, this creates a higher cadence of launches and retirements. That cadence matters for remediation because each retirement is a decision point: either the spacecraft is successfully removed from the sensitive shell, or it becomes a persistent derelict embedded in the region. When the design life is short, and satellites are clustered in polluted shells, operators commit themselves to a kind of treadmill where they must execute successful end-of-life operations again and again at high tempo just to avoid falling behind the debris curve. This means that, indirectly, the debris problem is partly “designed in” from the start as space industries choose low altitudes, very large fleets, and quick refresh cycles, creating an environment where even small disposal failures quickly add up into a long-term remediation burden. This suggests that remediation isn’t just about cleaning up what is there; it’s about acknowledging that certain attractive design choices lock us into or out of sustainable behavior for decades, before removal missions even occur.
System Behavior
If Grosselin and Hughes zoom in on shells and constellations, Nomura and her colleagues zoom out to ask how the debris system behaves as a whole. They intentionally simplify and treat “space debris as a single dynamic variable,” then calibrate that variable against the European Space Agency collision and fragmentation records (Nomura et al. 24–27). This simplification does cost detail, but it reveals something easy to miss: depending on parameter values, the same system can sit in qualitatively different regimes over time. The model helps explore how different combinations of launch behavior, mitigation effort, and removal effort impact on
long-term trajectories (Nomura et al. 27). In some of the simulations, the debris population rises and then levels off at a manageable balance while in others, especially when mitigation is weak and removal is absent, the debris curve bends upward more sharply, signaling that internal collision production is outpacing natural and engineered losses (Nomura et al. 24–27). This system-level picture connects individual design choices and their impacts on the overall direction of the orbital environment.
For remediation, this means the strategy has to be dynamic. It is not enough to react to current counts; policymakers need to understand which region of the model we currently are in, and how closely behavior is pushing us to thresholds beyond which debris growth becomes extremely hard to reverse, making long-term remediation a balancing act against these invisible thresholds. It gives an effect-based understanding of the impacts of many of the irresponsible space decisions industries are taking, and helps look at minor aspects that account for the massive change in space debris, along with an approximate time frame from when the debris problem becomes completely self-perpetuating. This gives the understanding that if the constellations are continued to be designed in ways that nudge the parameters toward the runaway regime, then even ambitious future clean-up efforts may not be able to preclude the runaway regime, regardless of effort, giving a rough time estimate until near-impossibility for prevention.
Governance Gaps
Alongside technical and dynamic causes, Kisiel shows that the legal framework governing space quietly shapes how much debris we will eventually have to remediate (231). In a typical modern scenario, one company may own the satellite, another may operate it, a third may have launched it from a different state’s territory, and the satellite itself may be registered under another flag (Kisiel 230-231). Under the Liability Convention, the “launching state” carries liability, but if the “company that owns the satellite has no assets located in the registry country, then it would be difficult to enforce compensation” when something goes wrong (Kisiel 230-231). Remediation costs can easily fall into the cracks between jurisdictions. Kisiel also points out that even when a state asserts a claim, proving fault for damage in space is complicated (231-32). Because absolute liability does not apply in orbit, tribunals would have to reconstruct negligence using “customary international tort law” and nonbinding mitigation standards. Guidelines from the U.N. and national agencies “are not legally binding under international law,” but at best serve as evidence of an evolving standard of care (Kisiel 232). On top of this, the Claims Commission’s awards are “recommendatory,” and enforcing an International Court of Justice decision depends on a Security Council that has almost never exercised that power (Kisiel 232-233). All of these factors weaken the link between debris-creating behavior and real consequences.
This matters regarding long-term remediation as it shows why the burden of cleanup drifts toward being a shared, underfunded problem: the system does not reliably push environmental costs back onto the actors whose designs and operations generate long-lived junk. This leads to the physics and the law of orbital space debris reinforcing each other: shell choices and design tradeoffs set the stage for more debris, system dynamics make that debris self-sustaining, and the governance gaps Kisiel describes make it rational for powerful actors to keep playing this risky game. Any remediation plan that ignores these governance gaps risks fighting an uphill battle against the economic logic they create.
Competing Perspectives
Admittedly, one could argue that as long as space-faring states and companies tighten their technical standards (by improving post-mission disposal, collision avoidance, and on-orbit design), legal and system-level analysis may not be necessary. In this view, smarter engineering and better traffic management could gradually reduce collision risk and make remediation more of a technical challenge than a structural one. Certain simulations for high-altitude constellations, where availability stays relatively high over decades, also support this hope (Grosselin and Hughes 92).
However, this prevention-focused approach is incomplete. Grosselin and Hughes demonstrate that in the shells where demand is currently highest, historical behaviors already pushed constellations towards unusable availability levels, even when they follow nominal technical guidelines (92). Additionally, debris dynamics can cross into regimes where internal collisions dominate, meaning that past accumulation continues to matter even if present behavior becomes ideal (Nomura et al. 24-27). Kisiel finally reveals that under current law, many private actors have little to fear in terms of being forced to pay for environmental damage, especially if their registry footprints are spread across multiple states (230-233), giving them no reason, except for the moral perspective, for why they would adopt tightened technical standards that essentially give them a capital loss due to further expensive precautions. Together, these reveal that long-term remediation is not just about preventing or cleaning up physical fragments, but rather it is about understanding how design choices cluster risk, how system dynamics entrench that risk, and how legal structures reinforce or counteract the incentives that keep debris production growing.
Overall, orbital debris is best understood as the product of a three-way feedback loop between constellation design, debris dynamics, and governance, so any serious plan to protect future astronauts from orbital debris has to work on all three loops at once, not just on the visible fragments.
Newly Gained Observations:
The most unexpected realization outside the scope of this research was not technical at all. It was that for most people on Earth, the orbital debris crisis effectively does not exist: socially, politically, or emotionally, and the way our systems are currently set up almost encourages companies to keep it that way. Throughout the research, multiple papers describe a serious, quantifiable problem, but at the same time, each of them quietly explains why almost no one outside a small expert community feels any pressure to solve it.
Grosselin and Hughes talk about very alarming numbers; in their model, a low pLEO constellation at 600 km needs 210 new satellites every year, and even with 90% post-mission disposal reliability, constellation availability in that shell falls to 0.768 after 25 years (90-92). They also point out that if just 10% of satellites fail before disposal, this one system alone would maroon 21 dead satellites per year in its operational band (Grosselin and Hughes 92). Though these are just data points, it describes the slow degradation of an invisible infrastructure that supports navigation, communication, and military warning. And while humans are willing to accept that kind of creeping failure because no one experiences it directly, no phone suddenly says, “Service lost to debris.” Nomura et al. reinforce this sense that the danger is both real and easy to ignore, as, using ESA and DISCOS statistics, they estimate that an average fragmentation event creates about 40 pieces of debris and that, at recent rates, around 400 new debris objects are generated every year (21). Their model shows that, without significantly stronger cleanup, “space congestion” defined as at least one serious collision per year could be reached within 100-200 years (Nomura et al. 23-26). Yet they are very clear that debris grows exponentially: the system can look stable for a long time and then curve upwards quickly (Nomura et al. 24-25).
From a public-awareness perspective, that is the perfect recipe for denial. For decades, nothing obviously disastrous has happened, satellites appear to work, launches keep going up, and people’s daily lives remain uninterrupted, even though the risk is silently increasing, resulting in the issue being largely disregarded by the public due to a lack of current devastating impact.
Furthermore, Kisiel’s legal analysis also helped me understand why companies, in particular, have so little reason to disturb that comfortable ignorance. Under the Liability Convention, there is “no mandatory adjudicatory mechanism” with laws being recommendatory (Kisiel 231-32). Additionally, while a party might recover damages for a destroyed satellite, “there would not likely be a way to recover environmental damages for costs to remediate the orbital debris created by the collision” (Kisiel 231). Thus, if a company’s satellite helps create a long-lived cloud of fragments, there is almost no chance that the company will ever be forced to pay the real cost of cleaning those fragments up. The damage becomes a shared, long-term risk for the orbital commons, not an immediate bill for the decision-maker.
Seen together, these details reveal something unintended to find. It adds a third barrier to this problem: social invisibility plus weak incentives. Most people do not know how many dead satellites are quietly accumulating in space shells (Grosselin and Hughes 90-92), they do not see the graphs of orbital debris added per year, and they have never heard about the treaties that barely recognize environmental cleanup costs. Because the public does not see or feel the problem, there is very little political pressure on companies or governments to change their behavior. This realization matters because it connects directly back to the heart of the research question, regardless of the fact that it sits outside of its original scope of engineering, system dynamics, and law. The byproduct insight here is that none of the fixes in the original scope will be pursued seriously unless the invisible risk becomes visible enough to create real consequences for ignoring it. Right now, the situation is almost the opposite: orbit is physically crowded but socially empty. Companies enjoy all the benefits of cheap, short-lived constellations and rapid launch cycles, while the costs are pushed into a future that most voters and customers never think about. The companies get the willingness to keep stacking critical systems in a risky environment because the danger is out of sight and out of mind, with no one to forcefully stop them. Thus, the solution for orbital space debris must also include ways to break this silence, as only when people on the ground understand what is at stake will companies finally face accountability for their externalities and be, in a way, motivated to care about the debris they leave behind.
Proposed Solutions/Future Responses:
The best solutions to the orbital debris crisis must be proactive. A serious solution must therefore change how satellites are built, where they are placed, who pays for long-term cleanup, and how orbit is understood by the people who depend on it in order to ensure that the solution addresses the main causes of space debris discussed. Thus, the solution would have four main portions:
First, there should be a binding international reliability and disposal standard.
Post-mission disposal should move from recommendation to requirement. The U.N. should be included to act as the role of an international orbital environment authority. Under a U.N. international treaty, making all countries abide by it, any satellite licensed by a member state would need to meet a minimum design life and demonstrate a highly probable end-of-life plan reviewed by international boards, with heavy financial penalties for non-compliance, along with a flight ban for unregulated satellites. However, critics will argue that this raises costs and creates barriers for smaller actors, but the alternative is to normalize a constant trickle of derelicts that quietly destabilize the orbital commons. For the space community (engineers, operators, and regulators), this standard would redefine excellence: a “good” mission becomes one that ends cleanly, not just one that launched successfully. That cultural shift matters because it embeds care for the shared environment into more dependable GPS, weather prediction, emergency communications, and financial networks, all of which structure how people move through their cities, farms, and schools. In that way, a design rule in orbit becomes a safety net for the physical spaces people inhabit, allowing for some potential drawbacks to occur.
Secondly, there should be a law that not all orbital shells can be used in the same way.
Since research shows an increased shell congestion in low-altitude bands, the U.N. should further implement zoning rules that classify shells by congestion and fragility. The most polluted and sensitive low-altitude shells should be reserved for functions that genuinely require low latency and serve clear public interests, such as emergency communications, under strict population caps and disposal requirements. Less time-sensitive or purely commercial services should be zoned to higher shells, where similar coverage is possible with fewer satellites and larger physical volume. This will disrupt some existing business models, but it prevents a far more damaging outcome: the permanent loss of key orbital neighborhoods that entire societies rely on. For communities on the ground, it protects the continuities on the ground for essential services, such as local emergency managers, to access accurate satellite data.
Third, because debris growth is systemic and long-lived, cleanup cannot depend on scattered voluntary projects. A standing International Debris Mitigation Corps should be established, compulsorily funded by states and private operators in proportion to their use and profit from orbit. States would contribute based on launch histories and fleet size; companies should be subject to a modest levy on space-derived revenue. This corps would focus on developing and researching the technology needed to remove space debris and to maintain a transparent, global risk map. Some will describe this as a “space tax,” but the current arrangement of no dedicated institution for a shared hazard guarantees chronic underinvestment. For the space community, a Mitigation Corps would create a professional ecosystem around stewardship, shared tools, and a common standard, instead of leaving each actor to improvise.
For smaller spacefaring nations and new companies, it lowers the barriers to responsible participation by providing access to cleanup capacity that would otherwise be unreachable. For everyday communities, from coastal towns to inland regions vulnerable to storms and fires, a managed debris environment means fewer sudden losses of satellites that deliver climate data, evacuation alerts, and communication links, making more resilient and better-protected places on Earth.
Finally, because the orbital crisis is sustained by social invisibility, there should be an annual Orbital Commons Day, coordinated by space agencies, schools, museums, and media, which could share updated debris visualizations, explain how satellites underwrite daily services, and highlight the mitigation process. This cultural work doesn’t require everyone to learn orbital mechanics; it gives communities a language to understand that the sky above them is infrastructure as well as scenery. Because satellites support climate monitoring, disaster prediction, global communication, and even navigation to school or work, seeing orbit as part of the inhabited world strengthens broader environmental responsibility. In a classroom, for example, the kind of space where this research first began, students who learn that their phones, maps, and weather apps depend on a fragile orbital shell may grow up expecting the space community and their own governments to protect it. That expectation is itself a form of making space better; it reshaped civic conversations, voting behavior, and professional norms in favor of long-term care for orbital debris.
Taken together, these four responses form a coherent framework. A reliability standard changes how objects are built; zoning changes where they are placed; a Mitigation Corps changes who manages long-term risk; and public visibility changes whose values shape these rules. Each gains a safer operating environment and a culture that prizes responsibility.
Policymakers gain tools to close liability gaps and fund shared cleanup. The broader public gains more reliable infrastructures that support daily life in their own neighborhoods. In this sense, treating orbit as a cared-for commons is not an abstract technical preference; it is a concrete way of making the spaces humans inhabit, on the ground and just above it, more secure, more just, and more capable of supporting the futures that today’s students, engineers, and citizens hope to live in.
Work Cited
Grosselin, Kenny, and Zach Hughes. “Sick-Bird Syndrome: The Operational Imperative for pLEO Debris Mitigation.” Military Operations Research, vol. 27, no. 2, 2022, pp. 83–98.
JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27140357. Accessed 2 Feb. 2026.
Kisiel, Edwin. “Law as an Instrument to Solve the Orbital Debris Problem.” Environmental Law, vol. 51, no. 1, 2021, pp. 223–39. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27027138.
Accessed 22 Jan. 2026
Nomura, Keiko, et al. “Tipping Points of Space Debris in Low Earth Orbit.” International Journal of the Commons, vol. 18, no. 1, 2024, pp. 17–31. JSTOR,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/48807661. Accessed 3 Feb. 2026.
