October 2021
Congested, contested... under-regulated and unplanned
... as Starlink and Kuiper). This sort of physical congestion is dangerous, as it risks collisions of the sort that afflicted the Iridium constellation in 2009, and which has subsequently forced the ISS to make evasive manoeuvres to avoid the debris...
October 2015
Down to Earth: how to deorbit satellites and save money
... to perform a direct re-entry, which in many cases is required by international regulations and national laws. One of the Iridium satellites was destroyed in 2009 when it was hit by another defunct satellite A satellite equipped with an independent...
January 2021
Safeguarding space - lessons from decommissioning in the energy industry
... space community? A well-documented collision between the Iridium communications satellite and a defunct Russian military spacecraft in...seen what a collision in space looks like with the Iridium-Cosmos event. Now is the optimal time for all ...
July 2014
Space 1.0 to Space 3.0: from Gagarin to market growth
... the spacecraft when it is in orbit. For example, there are four operating systems for personal satellite communications: Iridium, GlobalStar, Thuraya and Orbcomm. This equals 140 satellites in orbit at an investment cost of $15bn. There are about...
July 2014
Beware the situation: how JSpOC tracks space debris
... against their spacecraft known as Fengyun 1C. Two years later, there was a collision between two spacecraft known as Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251. And in 2012 the upper stage of a Russian BRIZ-M rocket exploded. Together, these events...
March 2015
Congested, contested, and invested: of space debris, risky launches and private initiative
... were created by just two events: an anti-satellite test conducted by China in 2007, and the 2009 Iridium-Cosmos collision between a functioning U.S. telecommunications satellite and an inactive Russian military satellite. The consequences of those...
