NASA makes progress on space sustainability strategy

TOKYO — Three months after unveiling a new space sustainability strategy, NASA’s deputy administrator says the agency is making good progress on implementing key aspects of it.

Speaking at the Secure World Foundation’s Summit for Space Sustainability here July 12, NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy outlined the progress the agency is making on the Space Sustainability Strategy it announced in April.  That strategy includes several lines of work to better understand growing risks in Earth orbit from debris and ways to mitigate them.

One element of that strategy is to develop a “widely accepted framework” for assessing space sustainability. “Since April, we’ve been surveying recent frameworks. We’ve been gathering and collecting information on metrics and models,” she said, such as looking at other frameworks for “incredibly complex environments” in Earth science and heliophysics. That work is ongoing, she said, with a draft of the framework slated for November.

While the strategy identified the framework as its first goal, Melroy said the agency has been working on other aspects of the strategy at the same time. That includes an analysis of uncertainties in collision risk assessments. NASA also polled its workforce on how to make missions more sustainable and published a report on an economic analysis of debris tracking remediation.

Melroy emphasized when the agency rolled out is strategy in April that NASA wanted to complete both the framework and analysis of uncertainties before investing in any debris removal technologies, what she called an “investment portfolio” in her speech. That is still the case, but she said NASA did a review as part of a broader technology shortfall analysis.

“I expect that our investments are going to include a lot of early-stage orbital debris management, enhanced space situation awareness and traffic coordination, and, of course, environmental understanding,” she said.

A key element of those efforts is determining how NASA will transfer the capabilities it develops to other users. “Everything that we do has to have a transition partner,” she said. “We have to understand that this isn’t something that we’re going to do in an ivory tower. We have to make sure that we understand how it will be used.”

Melroy said that NASA has been working on interagency and international coordination to satisfy other goals of the strategy.  The agency is also in the process of hiring a director of space sustainability to lead implementation of the strategy. She announced in the speech that Trudy Kortes, an official in 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 while we’re going through a very broad search,” Melroy said of Kortes, noting “great interest” in the position from inside and outside NASA.

The strategy that NASA released in April is a first volume focused on Earth orbit. Melroy said that NASA has started work on a second volume of the strategy that will be devoted to cislunar space. “There are a lot of unknowns, and I think that’s probably one of the things that is hardest about cislunar,” she said. “Unlike the well-studied Earth environment, there’s a lot we’re still wrestling with.”

There are links, she said, between the agency’s space sustainability efforts and the Artemis Accords, which includes provisions on orbital debris mitigation and deconfliction of space activities. “We are talking about what does non-interference really mean and what does space sustainability really mean,” she said of discussions among signatories of the Accords. “That consultation will directly feed into the cislunar volume.”

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