Navigating the new space age

Human activity in outer space has surged dramatically since 2020, in what some are calling the dawn of a new space age. But how do we make sure this is good for humanity?

Between the 1960s and the early 21^st century, satellites and spacecraft were launched at a rate of just over one hundred per year, a number that barely changed over 50 years. But driven partly by reductions in cost, this figure shot up to the hundreds in the 2010s, and has reached the thousands in the 2020s.

With a focus on harnessing the practical value of space, this space renaissance is helping us to communicate, navigate, and observe the Earth in ever more powerful ways.

It is also opening up brand-new uses of space, such as the high-precision manufacturing of pharmaceuticals and semiconductors, and in turn drawing in industries that were not previously part of the space sector.

But the promise of space as “an area of significance in all of our lives, rather than the preserve of a very small part of society,” as NATO space expert Professor Deeph Chana puts it, presents challenges as well as opportunities.

While space technology is providing scientists with new ways to track and mitigate climate change, for example, fears are growing that the pollution ubiquitous on Earth could soon become a crisis in space.

While governments are starting to use satellites for security applications such as quantum cryptography, our increased dependence on critical infrastructure in space opens up new areas of vulnerability.

And the ageing laws and agencies that regulate space, built partly on principles from electrical telegraphy and seafaring, were not designed to accommodate the increasing variety of actors joining the fray – nor to make up for what some argue is a lack of collaboration within the space sector.

Members of the space community came together in November at an Imperial Space Showcase, supported by the Satellite Applications Catapult, to help kick start renewed collaboration aimed at securing the human and environmental potential of the new space age.

Leading the surge in space activity are commercial satellite constellations such as Eutelsat OneWeb, Starlink, and Iridium, whose huge networks of satellites are providing access to broadband and telephony in the air, sea, and remote regions.

Space technology is also being used for less familiar applications, in some cases to address important societal challenges, for example to monitor crop health, biodiversity, and natural hazards.

A European Space Agency mission, FORUM, is one of many projects aiming to help understand and mitigate climate change. Launching in 2027, FORUM will provide climate scientists with a detailed picture of how much heat is being trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere, helping them to quantify climate feedbacks such as melting ice and water vapour, and more accurately predict their future effects.

The mission will be the first to measure the planet’s thermal radiation spectrum across the far-infrared range. “Fifty per cent of Earth’s outgoing thermal energy occurs in that range, but it has never been measured in its entirety from space before,” says Professor Helen Brindley in Imperial’s Department of Physics, who is helping lead the science behind FORUM.

In another climate change programme, the UK Space Agency and the Satellite Applications Catapult are providing the UK public sector, researchers, and commercial organisations with access to satellite data on harmful methane emissions. “There are over 100 organisations accessing the methane monitoring data, exploring it for operational monitoring and regulatory purposes, and shaping policy implementation to get on top of methane leaks,” says John Abbott, the Catapult’s CEO.

In future, more experimental uses of space could become widely adopted. These include quantum key distribution, a technique for sending ultra-secure communications, and the manufacturing of products such as pharmaceuticals and advanced materials in a low-gravity environment.

The International Space Station is already hosting experiments in the 3D-printing of human organs using patients’ own stem cells, harnessing low gravity to more easily form organs with the complex shapes required.

While space offers incredible opportunities, it also presents several challenges, which mostly come down to the need to co-ordinate activity by actors entering space sometimes from outside the traditional space sector.

“We’re moving beyond nation states, and seeing a rise in private sector actors who are not represented in multilateral agreements,” says Taskeen Ali, Head of Futures at HM Revenue & Customs.

One priority is to protect the space environment from pollution. Collisions between poorly controlled objects are already causing debris to accumulate, and experts are growing increasingly alarmed about the Kessler syndrome, a for-now hypothetical chain reaction of collisions between increasingly small debris that could render the low Earth orbit unusable.

“We need to think about how we’re going be sustainable in space and make sure that it is available to use, not only now, but for generations to come,” Ms Ali says.

Another priority is to protect the security of critical space infrastructure, which is closely integrated into terrestrial infrastructure through cyber-physical systems.

“Even two people in a shed could potentially access assets in space. How will we know who they are? And how do we bring them into the conversation?” asks Ms Ali.

“There are nationalist agendas around wanting to be in space to show supremacy, dominance, advancement in technology,” says Professor Chana, who is managing director NATO's Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) and professor in the Imperial College Business School.

“It’s an emergence of a fundamental aspect of our global critical infrastructure, and lots of new players will therefore now be involved. We have to think very carefully about how we might secure this environment.”

We might look to the law to protect the sustainability and security of space. But the main international laws and agencies that govern space were established a long time ago, and some commentators argue they are poorly equipped for the new era.

One of the main international agencies, the International Telecommunication Union, was founded in 1865 to regulate the telegraph, and now allocates orbital slots and radio frequencies to satellites. Its work is vital for ensuring that all players get equitable access to space with minimal interference and collisions.

But Stuart Martin, a space industry expert and visiting professor at Imperial, says that the UN agency is “very much subject to the influence of the priorities of member states, and not all of those member states are going in the direction we might want as a collective space community. It’s a very political environment.”

The main international law covering space, the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, is also an obstacle, according to Professor Martin. “It's very much related to the principles of the high seas,” he says. “The principle of flag state ownership of assets in space means that the country that launched an object, owns it, and only the laws of that country apply to the object in space. This is one of the reasons why things like cleaning up is so difficult.”

Securing the societal benefits of the new space age will take a mix of new thinking, regulation, policy, and technology, and many of these solutions are expected to emerge from partnerships with universities.

Marco Brancati, Technical Director of Leonardo's new Space Division, highlights academic expertise in areas such as AI, data science, high performance computing, and digitalisation: “These are the competencies that you, in the university environment, feed every day into your research, training and teaching.”

One group in Imperial’s Department of Aeronautics is developing computational techniques for improving space situational awareness, the ability to avoid collisions by understanding and anticipating the movements of objects in orbit.

The researchers plan to feed data from satellites and low-cost telescopes at Imperial’s Silwood Park and South Kensington campuses into computer models to identify whether satellites are operational and where they are headed.

London’s light pollution, unusually, is an advantage in this case: “London is not the most conducive place to do observations – we’re going to have limited observation windows available. This is our driver to simulate what happens when observing satellites that are particularly far away. You expect to lose track of the satellite for certain periods of time,” says principal investigator Dr Davide Amato.

Other groups are aiming both to gather valuable data and improve sustainability by making fuller use of the objects going into orbit.

Professor Mark Sephton in Imperial’s Department of Earth Science and Engineering uses Bayesian statistics to extract the most useful possible insights from the limited data available from expensive space missions analysing rock and soil samples from places such as Mars.

In the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Professor Bruno Clerckx has developed signal processing techniques that have been implemented commercially in 4G and 5G networks to use the spectrum and manage interference more efficiently.

His group is also developing techniques for repurposing communications satellites to perform sensing tasks – in some cases, by designing signal processing strategies that sense and communicate at the same time, and in others by using communications signals opportunistically.

This latter approach showed value when researchers used the Doppler effect, in which waves are distorted by movement, to estimate the flight path of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, after the missing plane continued to exchange handshake signals with the Inmarsat satellite network for some hours after it disappeared.

It is notable that the solutions under development at Imperial and other universities are emerging from a very wide range of disciplines. “We have space research across every faculty and almost every department. It's one of our hidden secrets,” says Professor Jonathan Eastwood, Co-Director (Convener) of Imperial’s School of Convergence Science in Space, Security and Telecommunications.

The new School he is convening will bring this expertise together in a transdisciplinary community that will accelerate real-world problem-solving by integrating research and innovation from across Imperial and its network of partner organisations.

“We aim to drive big, challenge-led, deeply integrated programmes that bring multiple perspectives together,” says Professor Mary Ryan, Imperial’s Vice Provost (Research and Enterprise). “We want to train the next generation of research leaders, and drive innovation. We need partners who are really going to work with us to deliver this mission.”

To bring technological solutions from early technology readiness levels to adoption, government- and university-backed organisations are also offering innovative businesses resources to de-risk and scale.

NATO DIANA, for example, based at Imperial’s White City Deep Tech Campus, is helping nurture dual-use deep technology startups that could help reduce the risk and impact of conflict. The Satellite Applications Catapult, meanwhile, offers an array of technical facilities and business support services to companies in the satellite sector.

And the business community is returning this favour by supporting the research objectives of universities. Dr Martin Archer in Imperial’s Department of Physics, who has already used magnetometer measurements provided by Eutelsat OneWeb to monitor space weather, says there is potential for academics to harness satellite constellations even further in future.

“A lot of companies are already considering their next-generation constellations, which might have 10,000 satellites in low Earth orbit. Academic institutions can work with these operators and start to tell them the scientifically valuable things they could do with the data they might collect, and what benefits to society these might give.”

Air Vice-Marshal (Retired) Chris Moore CBE, Vice President of Defence and Security at Eutelsat-OneWeb, endorses this idea: “We built an incredible data engine that could control our constellations and ground networks in real-time. When we captured the data, we realised it is also useful to other people,” he says. “We’re very interested in ideas and talking to people.”

To bring the mass of space activity together, policy makers and experts are taking up the complex challenge of developing not only regulation but, more actively, space policy.

Dr Christoph Beischl from the London Institute of Space Policy and Law and the Institute for Security Science and Technology highlights the wide range of considerations that effective space policy must draw on:

“Space informs agriculture, transportation, medicine, disaster management,” he says. “And as a policy maker, you have to consider the dual use element – a satellite can be used for remote sensing to benefit agriculture; it can also be used to monitor where my enemies are going. You have to think about environmental risks on Earth and in space. And you have to think about how much autonomy you want to give up to collaborate with others.”

Reflecting on a need for more coherent thinking and better forms of organisation, Ms Ali from HMRC says: “The discourse on space revolves around physics, but it's not just physical technologies that matter to shaping a positive future in space – our cognitive capabilities are likely to play a larger role. The triple helix of academia, industry and government is incredibly important for building our shared thinking.”

Whether exploring technical solutions, technology commercialisation, or improved law and policy, working together is key. “We're really aiming to explore how we can collaborate better, collaborate differently, and not be constrained by the way we've done things before,” says Professor Eastwood.