TOKYO — Three months after unveiling a new space sustainability strategy, NASA’s deputy administrator says the agency is making good progress implementing key aspects of it.
Speaking at the Secure World Foundation’s Space Resilience Summit on July 12, NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy outlined the progress the agency is making on the space resiliency strategy it announced in April. This strategy includes several lines of work to better understand the increasing risks in Earth orbit from debris and ways to mitigate them.
One element of this strategy is to develop a “widely accepted framework” for assessing space sustainability. “Since April, we have been exploring recent frameworks. We’ve been gathering and gathering information on metrics and models,” she said, such as looking at other frameworks for “incredibly complex environments” in Earth science and heliophysics. That work continues, she said, with the framework project slated for November.
While the strategy identifies the framework as its first goal, Melroy said the agency is working on other aspects of the strategy simultaneously. This includes an analysis of the uncertainties in collision risk estimates. NASA also surveyed its workforce on how to make missions more sustainable and released a report on the economic analysis of debris tracking recovery.
Melroy emphasized when the agency rolled out its strategy in April that NASA wanted to complete both the framework and the analysis of uncertainties before investing in any debris removal technologies, which she called an “investment portfolio” in her speech. That’s still the case, but she said NASA did the review as part of a broader analysis of the technology deficit.
“I expect that our investments will include very early stage orbital debris management, improved space situational awareness and traffic coordination and, of course, environmental understanding,” she said.
A key element of this effort is determining how NASA will transfer the capabilities it develops to other users. “Everything we do has to have a transition partner,” she said. “We have to understand that this is not something we are going to do in an ivory tower. We need to make sure we understand how it will be used.”
Melroy said NASA is working on interagency and international coordination to satisfy other strategy goals. The agency is also in the process of hiring a director of space sustainability to lead the implementation of the strategy. She announced in her speech that Trudy Cortez, an employee of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, will serve as director of space sustainability on an interim basis.
“She’s just going to help take those initial steps as we go through a very broad search,” Melroy said of Cortes, noting “a lot of interest” in the position from inside and outside of NASA.
The strategy, which NASA published in April, is the first volume focused on Earth orbit. Melroy said NASA has begun work on a second volume of the strategy, which will be devoted to cislunar space. “There are a lot of unknowns, and I think that’s probably one of the hardest things about cislunar,” she said. “Unlike the well-studied Earth environment, there’s a lot we’re still struggling with.”
There are connections, she said, between the agency’s space sustainability efforts and the Artemis Agreements, which include provisions to mitigate orbital debris and deconflict space activities. “We’re talking about what non-intervention really means and what space sustainability really means,” she said of discussions among the Accords’ signatories. “This consultation will feed directly into the cislunar volume.”
