In recent years, many significant commercial space actors have shifted to mission architectures featuring systems of hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Such systems offer the promise of higher bandwidth, ubiquitous global communications, and higher quality more timely Earth Observation. At the same time, these larger constellations make more intensive use of the space environment, with the potential to generate higher levels of various negative externalities to people on Earth and other space users. Orbit use by large constellations is rivalrous, as the presence of a large constellation in a particular altitude range dramatically increases operational complexity and systemic collision risk for other large systems that would seek to operate at that altitude in an uncoordinated manner. For this reason, best practice documents from NASA, leading constellation operators, and industry groups all recommend against the uncoordinated overlap of these systems.
Prior work by the author has proposed technical mechanisms to quantify orbital use for large constellations and efficiently coordinate constellations, as well as mapped these technical capabilities to potential policy objectives and coordination structures. Such coordination is beginning but remains nascent and largely ad hoc. This talk will describe this coordination problem, known as orbit loading, through the lens of viewing LEO orbital volume as a common pool resource system. It will describe efforts to engage with governmental and industry stakeholders to design and seek to operationalize scalable, efficient, and effective coordination structures for LEO orbit loading. Areas of progress and remaining challenges are described.
