Integrating Climate Policy Across Space and Terrestrial Doughnut Economic Models
- Paper number
GLOC-2023,T,IP,x75433
- Author
Mr. Aiden O'Leary, United States
- Coauthor
Ms. Camille Bergin, United States
- Coauthor
Mr. Zachary Burkhardt, Orbit Fab, United States
- Coauthor
Mr. James Bultitude, Orbit Fab, United States
- Coauthor
Mr. Connor Geiman, Orbit Fab, United States
- Coauthor
Mr. Jerry McIntyre, Orbit Fab, United States
- Coauthor
Mr. Daniel Faber, Orbit Fab, United States
- Year
2023
- Abstract
Rapid growth in terrestrial markets often comes at the cost of the climate, environment, and the needs of people around the world. The space domain, despite its decades of history, is young in the context of commercial markets but could be at risk of repeating the same mistakes. For example, the use of space for immediately profitable market segments such as telecommunications mega-constellations is happening without fully considering the impact it will have on being able to use the limited space environment for addressing global challenges like climate change. Nor is the climate impact of building and launching such a large number of spacecraft considered. Missions that seek to mitigate climate challenges are inherently much less profitable, so companies are not incentivized to use their orbital allocations and assets for these purposes. The global space community must establish a framework for determining and incentivizing the best uses of the space environment to support climate science, meet the needs of the global population, and develop the space economy in a sustainable way. The authors recommend using the “Space Doughnut Model” to inform this framework. The Space Doughnut Model, which was first proposed by the authors within the work “An Examination of Incentives for Information Sharing to Accomplish Transparent Space Activities and Responsible Conjunction Avoidance” presented at IAC 2022, seeks to help shape policy, including incentive structures, that could maximize the benefit of the space domain today without compromising its long term use. It was developed based on the Doughnut Economic Model, hereinafter referred to as the Terrestrial Doughnut Model, which visually depicts the safe and just space for humanity to thrive where the needs of society are being met without overextending the ecological limitations of Earth, such as climate change. This paper builds on the previous work by focusing on the co-variability between the Terrestrial Doughnut Model and the Space Doughnut Model to grade the net benefit of today’s and tomorrow’s space markets to climate monitoring and action. To accomplish this, quantitative measures will be implemented within the Space Doughnut Model to visually display the current state, growth trajectory, and long term potential of these markets to meet climate and social goals. These quantitative measures will build upon the previous work on sustainability incentive frameworks to explore the feasibility of policy-backed dynamically-rebalanced incentives that will enable the space industry to best support the global effort to combat climate change.
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
(absent)