Space is quite cluttered with satellites, I presume. The folks in India just sent a probe to mars for less than the cost of a hollywood movie about mars. We have quite a few GPS satellites flying above our heads. But… there must be some order. Is there an ATC for space? Who tells where the satellites can and can not go? Who controls air space in space?
U.N. Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space
(such as it is…)
I’d say they’re doing a pretty piss-poor job of controlling things.
There is no actual over arching organization. People have been talking about the idea for years - Nothing has gotten done at this stage
Well that must have been a mess. Attach an old can of aerosol hairspray to each satellite so you can deorbit the thing. Can’t believe there isn’t international cooperation about this.
There is some cooperation. And more all the time.
But it isn’t 100%, and it certainly doesn’t rise to the level of fail-safe, where the single most important design consideration for a launch vehicle and payload becomes “Can we deorbit all the parts safely no matter what goes wrong?” and “Can we always detect traffic conflicts and always maneuver away from them even after our vehicle or the conflicting vehicle are dormant or debris?”
Nor does current cooperation do anything about the existing debris dating as far back as from the 1960s.
Not to belittle the very real problem of debris tracking, collision avoidance, etc.
But satellites are really small and the space around the Earth is actually bigger than the area of the surface of the Earth itself…
Yeah, but you also get into this issue: the chance of any ONE satellite getting struck by debris is small. But the chance of ANY satellite getting struck can be rather large.
Consider this situation (illustrated by my Statistics 101 teacher, oh so many moons ago): In a class room, the odds of any other student having the same birthday as me is about 1/365. But the chance of any 2 people having the same birthday, in a class with about 30 students (or so. I forget the exact cut off number) is GREATER than 50 / 50. And in our class of about 30 students, we did have a pair with the same birthdays.
Getting back to space, the chance of collisions may be larger than the image of “orbital space is very large” brings up. There is also the additional complication that any debris collision can (if the debris is large enough) itself generate many more pieces of debris, further complicating the issue.
J.
Just to nitpick: The producers spent their entire budget simulating conditions a few hundred miles above Earth surface. They didn’t get anywhere near the moon, much less Mars. 
There is no air traffic control that tells where satellites may and may not go, but there are clearing houses for where satellites are and where they are heading. The U.S. Air Force operates the Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg AFB which uses a variety of sensors (mostly radars, but other stuff too) to predict if satellites are supposed to run into each other. They also give commercial operators a heads up if they find that satellites are drifting toward each other.
Closest thing I can find is this treaty signed by the US and USSR (and subsequently others) in 1967. It however doesn’t seem to contain any exact details regarding the altitude at which a country’s sovereign air space ends (this was probably deliberately avoided due to the Cold War).
Geostationary orbit allocation is quasi-formally handled by the International Telecommunication Union. It’s a somewhat voluntary system. Some equatorial nations have claimed the geostationary spot overhead but no one pays them any mind.
So let’s say I want to send up my own satellite, is there anyone or organization or anything that can say “No, you can’t”? How do I know that the orbit I give the satellite isn’t one already used, or just in a really bad place in terms of traffic and likely collisions?
If the situation is roughly analogous to the one on the high seas, your airspace is the area over which you can exercise control. Theoretically, the US (for example) could claim virtually the entire area above its borders if it had some superweapon effective at extremely long range and could utilize that space for things like commerce and settlement.
Obviously, we’re nowhere near that level of development, and we’ll probably arrive at some sort of international treaty on the issue long before we do.
Where are you going to launch it from? Will you be able to secure the necessary infrastructure? Is the satellite going to violate some nation’s airspace before it enters orbit (and gets shot down)? Is there anything to prevent the government from stepping in and shutting you down in the interests of “public safety” or “national security”?
There are a lot of factors to be considered. The movie Destination: Moon (1950!) addressed the same issue of legality when “sinister forces” (i.e., Red sympathizers) tried to block the launch of an American rocket: “The government can’t stop it! It’s never been done before, so there’s no law against it!” Plucky lads that they were, the scientists went right ahead and launched it anyway, just as the first jeeps started to roll up.
I once had a telephone interview for a satellite “air” traffic control job. All I remember was it was a EU-based organization, located in Germany.
Did I receive a phonecall from the future?
You need 23 people to reach 50% probability.
Satellite mission ops is a legitimate endeavor. If you put up a satellite, most times you must make provision for monitoring it (receiving telemetry), maneuvering it (for instance, avoiding a predicted collision or boosting it to preserve orbit), controlling any on-board systems (like weather sensors or data transmitters), and (if you’re not a raging prick) getting rid of it safely and sanely at the end of its mission life.
Hundreds of people world-wide are “flying” satellite missions every day. Nowadays, you don’t just put a satellite on station and cheer while it orbits broadcasting an omnidirectional “beep beep” until it falls out of the sky.
It doesn’t look to me like tracking satellites is all that hard. I was able to Google up websites that do it in real time for free.
One thing you can be sure of… the companies that do this sort of thing commercially don’t just randomly pick an orbit and hope for the best. They pay people to figure out their best shot. Everything is always a crap shoot, but knowledge is power and satellite orbital knowledge is readily available to those who know how to use it.
There’s a rough rule of thumb for situations like this. You start with the number of possible answers (366 days), take the square root (19.13) and then add 20% (final answer 23). Another example: if a manufacturer sell door locks which have 6,000 different keys, there’s a 50-50 chance that one of your neighbors has the exact same key as another neighbor after they’ve installed just sqrt(6,000) x 1.2 = 93 locks.
Applying that rule to outer space, my WAG is there are 10 billion separate locations where a satellite could be without hitting another satellite. sqrt(10 billion) x 1.2 = 120,000 therefore if you put up 120,000 satellites there’s a 50-50 chance that two will end up in the same location.
Bottom line, if you rely on luck, it will run out sooner than you think.