Space Policy

Recent Articles

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  Tracking Satellites and Space Debris Using Radio Antennae

  By Carolyn Collins Petersen - July 30, 2026

  Every year, thousands and thousands of satellites get launched into orbit around our planet. The result is an increasingly congested "space" above Earth populated by equipment that provides services to the surface. At the same time, these satellites affect ground-based astronomy research and create potential for damage when they eventually fall through Earth's atmosphere to the ground. In addition, near-Earth space hosts old rocket bodies and other materials left in space by past missions.

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  Should Scientists Have Research "Reserves" on the Moon?

  By Carolyn Collins Petersen - July 24, 2026

  The worlds of the Solar System offer up exciting and (so far) mostly pristine places for planetary scientists to study. As space missions continue to travel to Mars, Europa, asteroids, and other worlds, questions keep coming up about keeping them safe for continued exploration and observations.

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  FCC Approves First Launch for Space Reflector Constellation

  By David Dickinson - July 17, 2026

  The United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently approved the first test launch of Reflect Orbital’s Eärendil-1 satellite. Sporting an 18 by 18 meter-wide reflector once unfurled, the satellite will test the ability to reflect sunlight back to Earth, on demand. The company envisions more than 50,000 reflectors girding the Earth in low Earth orbit by 2035, while many in the astronomical community have raised concerns on the project's impact.

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  Are Satellite Megaconstellations Accidentally Geoengineering the Earth?

  By Andy Tomaswick - May 26, 2026

  We’ve been reporting a lot lately on the negative impacts of satellite constellations. And unfortunately it’s time for another article about a paper pointing out the potential hazards of them. This one, by lead author Conner Barker of University College London, focuses on the pollution caused by rocket launches - and admittedly contains some good news, but also a cautionary tale that policy makers should be aware of.

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  Pentagon Releases UFO Files That Go Back to the Apollo Moon Missions

  By Alan Boyle - May 08, 2026

  The Department of Defense has released a fresh batch of images and transcripts relating to reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, formerly known as UFOs, including pictures and descriptions from NASA's Apollo missions to the moon.

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  Why NASA’s Cheapest Missions Produce the Least Science

  By Andy Tomaswick - April 16, 2026

  To say NASA has been undergoing some massive administrative changes lately is a huge understatement. One of the more concerning ones, according to a new paper at the 57th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference by Ari Koeppel and Casey Dreier of the Planetary Society, is the trend towards the Silicon Valley mindset of “move fast and break things” - which they argue doesn’t work very well when it comes to producing valuable science.

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  Are We About to Permanently Scar the Night Sky With One Million AI Satellite and 50,000 Space Mirrors?

  By Andy Tomaswick - March 31, 2026

  If you thought the current crop of satellite megaconstellations was bad, you’re going to be horribly disappointed by new proposals from both SpaceX and a company called Reflect Orbital. Their combined plans would fundamentally alter the night sky as we know it, and the global astronomical community is sounding the alarm - most notably letters from the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), the European Southern Observatory (ESO), and the International Astronomical Union (IAU) strongly opposing the plan, which currently sits with America’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for approval.

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  The Moon's Going To Get Crowded - We Should Protect Our Heritage On It While We Still Can

  By Andy Tomaswick - March 19, 2026

  In 1959, the Luna 2 probe from the Soviet Union became the very first human-made object to reach our closest celestial neighbor. In the decades since, we have been leaving footprints - both literally and figuratively - all over the Moon. Today, there are over 100 metric tons of human-made material resting on the Moon’s surface - everything from advanced cameras and sensors to literal human waste. But that’s nothing compared to what’s to come. NASA predicts the next decade will see over 100 new lunar missions, equaling or exceeding all the missions previously flown. Which brings up a pressing question about all the stuff that’s already there - how do we protect that history? A new paper by Teasel Muir-Harmony, the Curator of the Space History Department of the Smithsonian and Todd Mosher, a Scholar in Residence at University of Colorado, Boulder, reports on a Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Summit on Outer Space Heritage that dives into the legal, scientific, and engineering hurdles of preserving these historic sites.

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  The Legal Void of the Asteroid Gold Rush

  By Andy Tomaswick - February 24, 2026

  Asteroid mining companies are finally getting off the ground, and that is raising some concerns about the impact those activities will have on the space environment. A new paper published in Acta Astronautica from Anna Marie Brenna of the University of Waikato in New Zealand discusses a framework that she thinks might work to solve the legal challenges facing those who want to protect the space environment and those who want to exploit it.

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  Decoding China’s New Space Philosophy

  By Andy Tomaswick - February 09, 2026

  A major theme in communist governments is the idea of central planning. Every five years, the central authorities in communist countries lay out their goals for the country over the course of the next five years, which can range from limiting infant mortality to increasing agricultural yield. China, the largest current polity ruled by communists, recently released its fifteenth five-year plan, which lays out its priorities for 2026-2030. This one, accompanied by a press release of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the country’s state-owned giant aerospace corporation, has plenty of ambitious goals for its space sector.

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  The Dirty Afterlife of a Dead Satellite

  By Andy Tomaswick - February 06, 2026

  Sometimes humans get ahead of ourselves. We embark on grand engineering experiments without really understanding what the long-term implications of such projects are. Climate change itself it a perfect example of that - no one in the early industrial revolution realized that, more than 100 years later, the emissions from their combustion engines would increase the overall global temperature and risk millions of people's lives and livelihoods, let alone the impact it would have on the species we share the world with. According to a new release from the Salata Institute at Harvard, we seem to be going down the same blind path with a different engineering challenge in this century - satellite megaconstellations.

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  Elon Musk Lays Out a New Vision of AI Satellites as SpaceX Acquires xAI

  By Alan Boyle - February 03, 2026

  SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says he’s making space-based artificial intelligence the “immediate focus” of a newly expanded company that not only builds rockets and satellites, but also controls xAI’s generative-AI software and the X social-media platform. That’s the upshot of Musk's announcement that SpaceX has acquired xAI.

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  The 2030 Race for a Moon Reactor

  By Andy Tomaswick - January 20, 2026

  The US’s federally funded space program has been struggling of late. With the recent cancellation of the Mars Sample Return mission, and mass layoffs / resignations taking place at NASA, the general sense of a lack of morale at the agency is palpable, even from a distance. Jared Isaacman, the billionaire software entrepreneur and rocket enthusiast who was recently confirmed as NASA administrator during his second confirmation hearing, hopes to change that, and one of his priorities is pushing the Artemis missions for a permanent human presence on the Moon. However, at least one big technical hurdle remains before being able to do so - how to power a base during the two week long lunar night. A recent press release describes how NASA, and another branch of the federal government (the Department of Energy - DoE) hope to solve that problem - with a lunar-ready nuclear fission reactor

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  Rethinking How We End A Satellite's Mission

  By Andy Tomaswick - December 28, 2025

  At the end of their lives, most satellites fall to their death. Many of the smaller ones, including most of those going up as part of the “mega-constellations” currently under construction, are intended to burn up in the atmosphere. This Design for Demise (D4D) principle has unintended consequences, according to a paper by Antoinette Ott and Christophe Bonnal, both of whom work for MaiaSpace, a company designing reusable launch vehicles for the small satellite market.

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  2.8 Days to Disaster - Why We Are Running Out of Time in Low Earth Orbit

  By Andy Tomaswick - December 15, 2025

  A “House of Cards” is a wonderful English phrase that it seems is now primarily associated with a Netflix political drama. However, its original meaning is of a system that is fundamentally unstable. It’s also the term Sarah Thiele, originally a PhD student at the University of British Columbia, and now at Princeton, and her co-authors used to describe our current satellite mega-constellation system in a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv.

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  Asteroid 2024 YR4 Was Earth's First Real-Life Defense Test

  By Andy Tomaswick - November 17, 2025

  At this point in history, astronomers and engineers who grew up watching Deep Impact and Armageddon, two movies about the destructive power of asteroid impacts, are likely in relatively high ranking positions at space agencies. Don’t Look Up also provided a more modern, though more pessimistic (or, unfortunately, realistic?), look at what might potentially happen if a “killer” asteroid is found on approach to Earth. So far, life hasn’t imitated art when it comes to potentially one of the most catastrophic events in human history, but most space enthusiasts agree that it's worth preparing for when it will. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, from Maxime Devogèle of ESA’s Near Earth Object (NEO) Coordination Centre and his colleagues analyzes a dry run that happened around a year ago with the discovery of asteroid 2024 YR4.

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  We're Putting Lots Of Transition Metals Into The Stratosphere. That's Not Good.

  By Andy Tomaswick - October 30, 2025

  We successfully plugged the hole in the ozone layer that was discovered in the 1980s by banning ozone depleting substances such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). But, it seems we might be unintentionally creating another potential atmospheric calamity by using the upper atmosphere to destroy huge constellations of satellites after a very short (i.e. 5 year) lifetime. According to a new paper by Leonard Schulz of the Technical University of Braunschweig and his co-authors, material from satellites that burn up in the atmosphere, especially transition metals, could have unforeseen consequences on atmospheric chemistry - and we’re now the biggest contributor of some of those elements.

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  Acting NASA Chief Announces More "Shakeups"

  By Matthew Williams - October 23, 2025

  Acting NASA chief Sean Duffy announces that NASA's plan to land astronauts on the Moon by 2027 is no longer achievable and announces new competitions to develop a lunar lander.

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  What Do We Do If SETI Is Successful?

  By Andy Tomaswick - October 20, 2025

  The Search For Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is evolving. We’ve moved on from the limited thinking of monitoring radio waves to checking for interstellar pushing lasers or even budding Dyson swarms around stars. To match our increased understanding of the ways we might find intelligence elsewhere in the galaxy, the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) is working through an update to its protocols for what researchers should do after a confirmed detection of intelligence outside of Earth. Their new suggestions are available in a pre-print paper on arXiv, but were also voted on at the 2025 International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Sydney, with potential full adoption early next year.

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  Open Source Mega-Constellations Could Solve Overcrowding

  By Andy Tomaswick - October 08, 2025

  Duplicating expensive resources is expensive and wasteful, and most people would agree it's unnecessary. However, the planned increase in major satellite constellations is currently causing a massive duplication of resources as individual companies and even countries try to set up their own infrastructure in space. What’s more, there is a relatively limited amount of space in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), where many of these satellites are supposed to go - any more than that and a single collision could cause Kessler Syndrome, where many of the ones already in orbit would be destroyed and we wouldn’t be able to launch any more for a long time. A new paper from researchers at the National University of Defense Technology in China suggests an alternative to these multiple megaconstellations - a single, modular system similar to how cloud computing works on the current internet.