session 10-E9.4

Title

Space Carrying Capacity Assessment and Allocation

type

oral

Description

Space in Earth’s orbit has a finite capacity and, due to the boosting of space activities, the space orbital system is slowly overloading. Assessing and managing orbital carrying capacity requires an international and interdisciplinary approach that embrace space engineering, policy, and economy. This session covers the theoretical approaches, computational tools, and techniques to measure space environment thresholds and overall carrying capacity of space. It will discuss proxies for monitoring boundaries for the maximum capacity, such as space debris metrics. The application of these metrics to space debris evolution scenarios and their role in the definition of debris mitigation guidelines will be discussed. This session will also address the legal and policy implications, including relevance to regulation and licensing, the needed steps to enforce the implementation of capacity thresholds evaluation, and correlation with space debris mitigation measures. Finally, economic incentives or payments systems for ensuring sustainable space activities will be discussed. This is a frontier topic in the space debris field: modelling and simulations of the debris environment are applied to the definition of indicators for the management of the space traffic and links with space law and policy. This topic is one example of Space Science Diplomacy.

Date

2025-10-03

Time

13:45

Room

Room C2.5

IPC members

• Co-Chair: Prof. Camilla Colombo, Politecnico di Milano, Italy;

• Co-Chair: Mr. Didier Alary, International Academy of Astronautics (IAA), France;

• Rapporteur: Dr. Peter Martinez, Secure World Foundation, United States;

• Rapporteur: Dr. Alessandro Rossi, IFAC-CNR, Italy;