The Emerging Problem of Satellite Debris Falls

Honourable senators, we all know that what goes up must come down, and the number of satellite launches have skyrocketed, if you’ll forgive the pun. Today, there are nearly 15,000 active satellites in orbit around our planet. Most of those are in megaconstellations. The challenge there is one of planned obsolescence, where each satellite only has a service life of a few years.

Since operators don’t want to clutter up Earth’s already-crowded low orbits with dead satellites, they de-orbit their old equipment into our upper atmosphere. Here, these “throwaway” satellites are supposed to burn up or break apart into smaller pieces. The trouble is, that doesn’t always happen.

Doctors Wright, Boley and Byers modelled the re-entry of 11 satellite megaconstellations. Their disturbing finding? There is a 40% collective risk of on-ground casualties every five years if satellites do not burn up entirely and a 20% risk from Starlink satellites alone.

When I spoke with Doctors Boley and Byers a few months ago, they highlighted a separate grave risk: the danger of a piece of satellite debris, even a small one, smashing into a passenger plane travelling at jet speeds.

I’m not Chicken Little. I’m not even Henny Penny. I know the sky is not falling, and the risks are still low. But we are filling low Earth orbit with tens of thousands of new satellites without any clear sense of what will happen when, not if, they come down.

Those, of course, are just the physical risks if larger bits survive and smash into things. That doesn’t even begin to deal with the risk we are only now starting to study — the risk of atmospheric pollution when satellites do actually vaporize as planned.

A 2023 study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences used high-altitude air sampling and found tiny particles of things, including aluminum, silicon, copper, lead and lithium. We are now using Earth’s mesosphere and stratosphere as garbage incinerators for space junk with no real idea of the long-term consequences, especially for our ozone layer.

Space may be the final frontier, but it’s not entirely the Wild West. Space is regulated by five international treaties, most of them created during the coolest days of the Cold War. They include the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, the Rescue and Return Agreement of 1968, the Liability Convention of 1972, the Registration Convention of 1975 and the Moon Agreement of 1979. There was also the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs’ Space Debris Mitigation Guidelines of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space in 2010.

But if I may paraphrase Geoffrey Rush in Pirates of the Caribbean, those codes are more what you’d call “guidelines” rather than actual rules since the UN has no method or power of enforcement.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty says that space is free to all and is to be managed for the benefit and interests of all countries, so no nation can make a claim of sovereignty or property rights. But it is the subsequent 1972 treaty on liabilities which may be more important here.

In 1972, you will recall, space was pretty much the preserve of governments, particularly the governments of the United States and the U.S.S.R., and countries were held liable for disasters. In 1978, for example, Kosmos 954, a Soviet nuclear satellite, exploded over northern Canada, spreading radioactive debris across 124,000 square kilometres of the Northwest Territories, Alberta, Saskatchewan and what we now know as Nunavut. The worst of the radiation poisoning affected the Dene people at the eastern end of Great Slave Lake, leading to drastic increases in cancer rates. In 1979, Canada sued for damages, and in 1981, we received $3 million from the Soviet Union, but that was a nation‑to‑nation settlement.

Still, the 1972 Liability Convention did imagine what might happen if private companies started sending stuff into space. Article VI of the treaty requires countries to keep an eye on the things that they launch:

The activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty.

This means that launch states would be technically liable for damage done on re-entry or to airplanes in flight.

So if your barn were damaged by falling Starlink debris, you could, in theory, go to a Canadian or American court to seek redress or even to the International Court of Justice in The Hague. But, in truth, these systems just weren’t designed for a private commercial space race. And what a race it is.

Starlink’s competitors from within the United States and around the world are working on their own satellite launches. The Chinese company G60 is planning for 13,904 new satellites. GuoWang, another Chinese company, has plans to launch almost 13,000 low Earth orbit satellites. Amazon Leo is planning its own 3,000-and-some satellites, and Canada’s own Telesat Lightspeed is getting ready to enter the game with plans for a constellation of 300.

But it’s Elon Musk who has the wildest ambitions. On January 30, 2026, SpaceX filed an application with the United States Federal Communications Commission, or FCC, seeking permission to launch 1 million new low Earth orbit satellites to function as data centres in space. Let me quote from that rather extraordinary FCC filing:

Launching a constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers is a first step towards becoming a Kardashev-II level civilization — one that can harness the Sun’s full power — while supporting AI-driven applications for billions of people today and ensuring humanity’s multi‑planetary future amongst the stars.

As for the risks of putting a million new satellites into the already-crowded low Earth orbit, running the risk of outer space crashes, the SpaceX filing promises that the new satellites will be incredibly maneuverable to avoid space collisions and that they will “. . . pose no calculable risk to humans upon re-entry . . . .”

But a group of North American astronomers critiquing the Musk application calculates that if the 1 million satellites, which, remember, have five-year lifetimes, are disposed of in Earth’s atmosphere in the same way that Starlink satellites are today, there would be one satellite re-entry every three minutes, dramatically increasing the risk of accidents. It could also cause catastrophic changes in the atmosphere, including ozone depletion. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on the issue of light pollution and the potential impact of all those bright little satellites on the careful observational work of professional astronomers.

I launched this inquiry not because I have easy answers to these questions but because I don’t. I want to draw the attention of the chamber to an emerging problem with real potential risks for Canadians. Right now, Canada has no clear response to these risks, with responsibility dispersed among several government departments and agencies, including Global Affairs Canada; National Defence; Transport Canada; Public Safety Canada; Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada; NAV CANADA; and the Canadian Space Agency.

My friends, we need a more co-ordinated, coherent response to the issue of space debris and its literal impact on our country. We can’t begin to address the consequences of satellite pollution until we recognize it as a challenge and start a national and, indeed, an international conversation. We can’t begin to address the issue of space sovereignty without talking about how we support the Canadian Space Agency, Telesat and other players in Canada’s own emerging space economy.

I hope that over the coming weeks and months you will add your voices to this inquiry to help us do just that. Thank you. Hiy hiy.