Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1493016
46 I-CONNECT007 I REAL TIME WITH... IPC APEX EXPO 2023 SHOW & TELL MAGAZINE this junk is an international problem, it's hard to internationally enforce policies. The United States has the FCC, which regulates the policies around launching into orbit. Other nations have their own legislative bod- ies to handle that. To get the world on the same page about space debris will be a huge international challenge, but it affects us all, so we must do it. I think that any new company can and should make sure they have an end-of-life program in place. Right now, the FCC is proposing a new rule requiring U.S. companies to do this within five years of a satellite's end of life. There are a couple of ways to dispose of your satellite responsibly: Either you use the remaining fuel in that satellite to de-orbit it so that it burns up in the atmosphere, or you bring it up higher to a "garbage orbit." How- ever you choose to dispose of it, you have to make sure it's done pretty quickly. I'd like to see all the satellites we're done working with burn up in the atmosphere like beautiful shooting stars. The goal is to create a sus- tainable space industry. Everybody who puts something up there has to have a plan for bringing it back down. Nguyen: Is there a specific urgency to this kind of problem? Yes, absolutely. As you can imagine, this affects commercial companies, military assets in space, and humans living in space. Just a couple years ago, the astronauts on the International Space Station had to shelter in place because there was a piece of debris heading toward them that had the capac- ity to rupture the space station itself. Even something as small as a tiny paint fleck, when it's moving 17,000 miles per hour (much faster than a bullet), can become a deadly problem. People around the world are start- ing to take this issue seriously, but it's still something we need to keep our eye on. Nguyen: It's easy to take space for granted because we think it's just vast and open. Whatever we put there, we don't have to think about it—but the reality is that this affects everybody. It affects everybody. That stuff we put up there can stay for decades, so we need to be forward-thinking and be aware of how we want to leverage that space. We may not know how we want to use that space yet, but