The world's first crowdsourced space traffic monitoring system

"Most of what we send into outer space never comes back," says astrodynamicist and TED Fellow Moriba Jah. In this forward-thinking talk, Jah describes the space highways orbiting earth and how they're mostly populated by space junk. Learn more about his quest to develop and scale the world's first crowdsourced space traffic monitoring system -- and how it could help solve the debris problem in near-earth space.

I am an astrodynamicist --

you know, like that guy Rich Purnell
in the movie "The Martian."

And it's my job to study and predict
motion of objects in space.

Currently we track about one percent
of hazardous objects on orbit --

hazardous to services like location,

agriculture, banking,

television and communications,

and soon -- very soon --

even the internet itself.

Now these services are not protected
from, roughly, half a million objects

the size of a speck of paint

all the way to a school bus in size.

A speck of paint,

traveling at the right speed,

impacting one of these objects,

could render it absolutely useless.

But we can't track things
as small as a speck of paint.

We can only track things
as small as say, a smartphone.

So of this half million objects
that we should be concerned about,

we can only track
about 26,000 of these objects.

And of these 26,000,
only 2,000 actually work.

Everything else

is garbage.

That's a lot of garbage.

To make things a little bit worse,

most of what we launch into orbit
never comes back.

We send the satellite in orbit,

it stops working, it runs out of fuel,

and we send something else up ...

and then we send up something else ...

and then something else.

And every once in a while,

two of these things
will collide with each other

or one of these things will explode,

or even worse,

somebody might just happen to destroy
one of their satellites on orbit,

and this generates many, many more pieces,

most of which also never come back.

Now these things are not
just randomly scattered in orbit.

It turns out that given
the curvature of space-time,

there are ideal locations

where we put some of these satellites --

think of these as space highways.

Very much like highways on earth,

these space highways can only take up
a maximum capacity of traffic

to sustain space-safe operations.

Unlike highways on earth,

there are actually no space traffic rules.

None whatsoever, OK?

Wow.

What could possibly go wrong with that?

(Laughter)

Now, what would be really nice

is if we had something
like a space traffic map,

like a Waze for space that I could look up

and see what the current
traffic conditions are in space,

maybe even predict these.

The problem with that, however,

is that ask five different people,

"What's going on in orbit?

Where are things going?"

and you're probably going to get
10 different answers.

Why is that?

It's because information about things
on orbit is not commonly shared either.

So what if we had a globally accessible,

open and transparent
space traffic information system

that can inform the public
of where everything is located

to try to keep space safe and sustainable?

And what if the system could be used

to form evidence-based
norms of behavior --

these space traffic rules?

So I developed ASTRIAGraph,

the world's first crowdsourced,
space traffic monitoring system

at the University of Texas at Austin.

ASTRIAGraph combines multiple sources
of information from around the globe --

government, industry and academia --

and represents this in a common framework
that anybody can access today.

Here, you can see 26,000 objects
orbiting the earth,

multiple opinions,

and it gets updated in near real time.

But back to my problem
of space traffic map:

What if you only had information
from the US government?

Well, in that case, that's what
your space traffic map would look like.

But what do the Russians think?

That looks significantly different.

Who's right? Who's wrong?

What should I believe?

What could I trust?

This is part of the issue.

In the absence of this framework
to monitor space-actor behavior,

to monitor activity in space --

where these objects are located --

to reconcile these inconsistencies

and make this knowledge commonplace,

we actually risk losing the ability

to use space for humanity's benefit.

Thank you very much.

(Applause and cheers)