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Commercialization

Dealing With Orbital Traffic

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
December 29, 2016
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Dealing With Orbital Traffic

Orbital Traffic Report Released
“The current Framework does not provide a holistic approach by leading in the combined development of technically informed “rules of the road” and the provision of value-driven, safety-based products and services used during spacecraft operations. Such “rules of the road”, based on space traffic safety concerns, could lead to the maturation of international norms of behavior, which would greatly enhance the strategic stability of the space domain. Objectives for any space traffic safety governance framework were created by the study team that focus on mitigating space traffic safety-related risks, protecting and enhancing national security interests, and ensuring the economic vitality of the space domain and industry. Five Frameworks were created for consideration. Each Framework exists at a distinct point on a continuous spectrum of space traffic safety governance options in which the USG’s prescriptive role ranges from low to high.”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

23 responses to “Dealing With Orbital Traffic”

  1. Al Vacado says:
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    I’m pretty sure we are not on Coruscant. Is this really expected to be a problem in the next couple decades?

    • Daniel Woodard says:
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      It’s already a problem, but the report is pretty voluminous and its hard to see what it is actually recommending. I feel the term framework is overused.

      Relevant collaboration models to me are the International Telecommunications Union strategy for assignment of orbital communications satellite locations and frequencies, and the FAA/ICAO approach to real-time international air traffic control. Rules of the road are important, but the spacefaring nations have to agree to a voluntary but authoritative and rapid decision-making process to quickly resolve disagreements.

      And hey – let’s everybody stick to the metric system this time, OK?

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        Sure. As long as Siri is in my pocket 🙂

        • fcrary says:
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          Does that mean I could talk you into giving up those old units, with factors of 12 and 60, which actually date from ancient Babylonian astrology? A kilosecond is quite convenient, between 15 and 20 minutes, and 100 ks is just 16% longer than a day.

          • Michael Spencer says:
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            For whatever reason- and it’s not because I lack a scientific bent (though not deep training like you)- I simply cannot visualize cm, constantly converting to inches. Meters are easy because a yard is close enough. KM pretty simple because the speedometer in my car shows 62 mph = 100 kph.

            Crazy, I know.

            I did study a fair amount of science as an undergraduate, but of course metrics wasn’t much more than a game in those days.

            Time? Years as an amateur radio operator has helped me think of the 24 hour clock.

            My life tends to go from October to October- that’s the month/ 6 weeks my wife spends in India. I’m constantly subtracting 9.5hrs from EST to get IST.

            Or wait! It’s the other way around! But the time I get it straight, around the middle of October, she’s almost home.

            Oh. And 16%, you say? That’s nearly 4 hours, any way you slice it.

            Siri! What time is it!?

          • Daniel Woodard says:
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            I don’t claim anything deep, least of all training. However the only metric unit I object to is the pascal. The “nonstandard” metric unit of pressure, the bar, is 10 newtons per square centimeter, and (by coincidence) so close to one standard atmosphere that it makes no practical difference. Mars surface pressure is 10 millibars, pressure at the Earth’s core is 3.3 megabars, Shuttle main engine chamber pressure is 200 bars.

          • Paul451 says:
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            A pascal is 1 Newton per square metre.

            1:1 ratio between pressure and two other base metric units.

            Not ten newtons per square one-hundredth of a metre.

            It’s a shame that “bar” got created under the short-lived gcs standard, it’s the reason we have “hectapascals”, in order to be compatible with the short-lived “millibars”, instead of just using kilopascals.

            Mars surface pressure is 10 millibars, pressure at the Earth’s core is 3.3 megabars, Shuttle main engine chamber pressure is 200 bars.

            Since “bar” is close to an atmosphere, why not just say “atmospheres”?

            Mars surface pressure is around 1% of Earth’s. The SSME chamber pressure is around 200 atmospheres. Etc.

            (“Bar” is one of the dumber units I’ve encountered.)

            Mars surface pressure is 10 millibars

            Which is just 1kpa. How is “1 kpa” harder than “10 mbar”?

            And for the record, mean surface pressure is actually closer to 6 mbar, or 600pa, or 0.6% of an atmosphere.

            It doesn’t reach close to 10mbar/1kpa except at extremely low altitude sites like Hellas Basin.

          • Daniel Woodard says:
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            Thanks for pointing out my error on the pressure. As a former human factors engineer, however, I must respectfully disagree.

            Using bar rather than atmospheres simplifies actual calculations involving forces. While I agree that there is elegance to the fundamental equation with just one of each primary unit, it would be unusual in a practical problem. In return for a different exponent, the bar is intuitive as a base unit (how much is a pascal, really?), easy for kids to understand, and saves at least a syllable every time. One hundred kilopascals is seven syllables, one bar only two.

          • Paul451 says:
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            he bar is intuitive

            {Laughs} “Intuitive”? It’s just the system that you learnt.

            That’s the problem with baby boomers, everything they grew up with is “tradition” and mustn’t be changed, even if it only came into existence five minutes before they were born.

            The only redeeming feature of “bar”, or rather millibars, is that it’s not “inches of mercury”.

            One hundred kilopascals is seven syllables, one bar only two.

            That’s silly. (And besides, they never said “one bar”, even for atmospheric pressure. They always said “one thousand millibars.” Six syllables.)

          • Daniel Woodard says:
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            True, but an atmospheric pressure of exactly one thousand millibars would be unusual.

          • fcrary says:
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            I’m not sure making the base unit intuitive is critical. One gram (0.0353 oz) is small enough that it isn’t all that intuitive. But people who grew up with kilograms find them quite intuitive and aren’t too concerned by it not being the base unit of mass.

            Intuition or convenience can also backfire. My favorite example is the Jansky (1e-26 W/m^2/Hz). Radio astronomers adopted it as a standard unit of flux density in, if memory serves, the 1950s. Why the factor of ten to the twenty three? Well, at the time, the weakest signal they could measure was a fraction of a Jansky, and they were typically talking about signals of 1-1000 Jy. Very convenient and intuitive. But technology has improved, and now they are stuck talking about milijanskies and microjanskies.

          • jimlux says:
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            the somewhat oddball hPa unit gets used because they’re 3-4 digits just like mbar, so all the weather reporting and mapping stuff “just works”.

            The “bar” was invented by a Norwegian meteorologist as a unit that was metric based (100 kPa) that was close to 1 atmosphere so that surface pressures would be around 1000. 1000 because small (but forecast significant) changes don’t require fractions or decimals, as would be needed if you used some other fraction (and called it something odd, like “degrees”). milli is also a standard prefix. AND, mbar are about the same precision as the other barometric pressure reporting units: torr (mm Hg) and inches of Hg, both of which are 3-4 digits in usual form.

            1000 hPa is exactly 1000 mbar

          • Paul451 says:
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            If you were going to eliminate the hour/minute, then you should also get rid of the second and change the metric time unit to a standard “day”, and use decimal fractions of a day for sub-day intervals. With millidays and microdays for smaller units.

            But base 12 isn’t so bad. Lots of factors: 2, 3, 4, 6. Probably better than base 10, with just 2 & 5.

            The problem with changing clock/calendar units is that we are measuring against an actual system that we can’t arbitrarily redefine to fit the chosen metric. The clock is to measure the day, which we can’t change. (We just “paused” our official measure of time for 1sec in order to stay in sync with the inconvenient rotation of the actual world.) Likewise, the calendar is to track days in the year, and there isn’t a nice multiple of days in a year, hell there isn’t even a whole number, so a calendar will never be neat.

          • Daniel Woodard says:
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            You have a point, but the fundamental motivation for the metric system was standardization, not the use of factors of ten per se. It’s a historical accident but the units of time are already standardized, except for Daylight Saving Time, which causes me to tear out my hair.

          • Paul451 says:
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            but the fundamental motivation for the metric system was standardization

            Not quite. The core of the system is based around a single metric unit for each type of measurement.

            It’s not enough to have (as with time) a “standard” hour, minute and second. If that was enough, we’d have just standardised the inch, feet, yards and miles; the ounce, pound and ton.

            No, the idea is to have one unit for distance. One for time. One for mass.

            That was my point. To create a “metric” clock, the metric would need to be changed from the second to the day. Day is the only unit you can’t eliminate, because it’s the reason we use clocks.

            (I mentioned decimal fractions specifically to object to the creation of, as many people have suggested, “metric hours” and “metric minutes”, by which they mean, 10 or 100. That’s a misunderstanding of “metric”. SI only uses base-ten prefixes because we count in base-ten, but it has created a lot of confusion about the metric system, particularly for Americans. It’s the use of seemingly arbitrary units like centimetres and hectares that causes the confusion, IMO. It’s not like it’s hard to say “hundred”. So we’d be better off sticking to the thousands prefixes, kilo/milli/etc.)

            ((We’d also have been better off renaming the kilogram when we switched from gcs to kms. Then the tonne would be 1 kilo-(massunit), the gram would be 1 milli-(massunit).))

          • Daniel Woodard says:
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            Assuming SI should be based on fundamental units, 1 gram should be the mass of one cubic meter of water. Basing mass on one cc of water, or one cubic decimeter of water, is no more rational than… basing pressure on units of 10N/cm^2, one “metric atmosphere”.

            The SI unit of time is the second, not the minute, hour, day, or eon, and Unix computer systems traditionally even measure time as the number of seconds since 1900.01.01 00:00:00, though this is translated into more common terminology for the user. Despite the insidious use of zero as an ordinal in several programming languages, there is still no zeroth of January, nor is January the zeroth month. However 2000 was the first year of the new millennium, even though there was no year zero, 1 BC being followed directly by 1 AD.

            The next time I buy a beer, I am going to ask for a cubic meter.

          • fcrary says:
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            And miss teleconference. Hawaii and Arizona don’t use savings time, and Europe switches on a different day. If your job involves weekly teleconference with people in those places, you can count on twice-yearly confusion.

          • fcrary says:
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            I was actually joking. I talk about kiloseconds and call hours a holdover from Babylonian astrology when someone gets a little to emphatic about pure metric units.

            But dropping the second is even crazier. It’s built into everything else. (The meter is defined by the wavelength of a specific frequency of light. Watts are kg-m^2/s^2. Etc.) We’ve just had a leap second, since the solar day’s length isn’t exactly constant. The idea of a 11.6 microday leap-whatever just make my head hurt.

            Anyway, I actually find some non-metric units quite useful. When I move furniture around, I measure things in cubits. A tape measure may not be available, but my forearm and fist are always, ah, handy.

            And, if you want a base with convenient prime factors, let’s just go to binary, octal or hex.

          • Paul451 says:
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            We’ve just had a leap second, since the solar day’s length isn’t exactly constant. The idea of a 11.6 microday leap-whatever just make my head hurt.

            The actual lag wasn’t actually a whole second. They rounded off. So they would have had an even 10 microday leap-pause-thing. It would just occur in different years when the error adds up to a full 10.

            As for other combination units, remember they would have been based around the metric-day from the creation of the metric system. There would have been no metric-second watt, it would have been the metric-day “watt” all along. A better watt for a better time.

            Remember, before the watt, you were using things like horse-power, foot-points-per-minute, Btu/h, etc, depending on what you were measuring.

            Likewise, the metre was coined first. The standard (in wavelengths) was added afterwards. Just as the second was defined after-the-fact as the number of cycles of vibration of a caesium atom.

            Anyway, I actually find some non-metric units quite useful. When I move furniture around, I measure things in cubits.

            Metric cubits or imperial?

            And, if you want a base with convenient prime factors, let’s just go to binary, octal or hex.

            Actually, base-16 has fewer factors (2,4,8) than base-12 (2,3,4,6), but more digits to memorise. Octal’s has fewer (2,4).

            That’s why base-12 would be so perfect. Largest number of usable factors for the smallest number of digits to memorise. It’s a shame the Babylonians didn’t have a proper base-12 system, we’d probably still be using it.

            (I’m not concerned about prime-factors, just whole-factors. Being able to halve, third and quarter, based on need-of-the-moment, is a handy trait for a quantity.)

            Oh if only Napoleon had been polydactyl and a fan of Babylonian maths.

            I was actually joking.

            I have more fun taking a premise and running with it until I fall over and hurt myself.

          • fcrary says:
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            I guess I use presidential cubits. It’s based on my arm, and I’m a former President of SPACE (the UC Berkeley undergraduate organization, Students Promoting Aerospace Careers and Education.)

          • Michael Spencer says:
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            Funny. I’m constantly measuring things outdoors; those who think that paces are consistent are, well, wrong. But I am blessed with 12″ feet! Close enough for planting trees, I suppose.

  2. Michael Spencer says:
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    Oh, dear. This mice around here need some new posts to chew on…

  3. Daniel Woodard says:
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    Right now most of the problem is not active traffic but small pieces of junk tracked for the most part only by the extraordinarily powerful (and classified) DOD radar on Kwajelein. For this to be an international effort we need multiple sources and an international database. Maybe radar hitchhiker payloads on comsats? Small aperture but with thier accurate clocks the Iridium and GPS constellations could serve as a single phased array.