The first asteroid mining missions may not happen for a decade or more, but government agencies and private companies are steadily working towards making it a reality. As some groups work the engineering and business challenges, others are looking at the scientific and legal challenges. One such challenge is dealing with debris in a microgravity environment.

According to most interpretations of the current domestic legal frameworks adopted by the United States and Luxembourg, citizens may possess and sell space resources. However, there’s currently a gap in addressing the potential unintended consequences from asteroid mining.

A team from the University of British Columbia (Fladeland, Boley, and Byers) modeled the effect of debris generated from hypothetical mining operations on a handful of NEOs. Their goal was to determine whether this debris would pose a near-term risk to Earth satellites in the form of meteoroids. They will present their study and findings at the 1st International Orbital Debris Conference in Sugar Land, TX, USA that will be held December 9-12, 2019.

The impact of such a study highlights the value of regulatory oversight. Meteroids are already a background level threat that could cause a major malfunction or disable a satellite in Earth orbit. As the number of satellites increases, any uncontrollable debris exacerbates the hazard for remaining assets. For perspective, over a third of the $360 billion satellite industry is revenue generated by commercial satellites operators providing vital services such as global telecommunications, weather forecasting, GPS, and much more. There’s a great necessity to prevent a “tragedy of commons” (like making Earth orbit unusable for future generations) while not impeding the commercial development of outer space.

According to co-author Dr. Aaron Boley, “Engaging in this sort of interdisciplinary work is exciting. The translation between different [academic] worlds is sometimes difficult, but if you’re open to learning new things, that sort of struggle can be transformative.”

Any reasonable legal frameworks built to address space activities should be rooted in a firm understanding of science and the physics-driven environment of deep space.