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13-02-09 Space:Insurance's New Frontier

Satellite collision highlights risks in a sector that currently has little financial risk protection.Imagine an object the size of a pea with the potential to destroy a satellite, and you'll get a sense of the potential new risks posed by Wednesday's collision of an Iridium satellite with an inactive Russian military satellite.The scale of the damage is still being assessed,but so far the U.S. Joint Space Operations Center has identified 600 pieces of debris greater than the size of a tennis ball that were thrown off in the crash (pieces smaller than that are untrackable).Traveling at around 5.0 miles a second,an object much smaller could do a lot of damage,particularly when colliding with one coming from the opposite direction at a similar speed."The issue of debris has been hugely underestimated for a long time," said Sima Adhya,senior technical officer at risk analysis firm Sciemus."It’s a massive problem that the space industry needs to get a grip on."There was an incident where a speck of paint chipped the windscreen of a spacecraft," David Wade,space underwriter at Atrium Space Insurance in London,told Forbes