The Economics of the Control of the Space Debris Environment

It is investigated whether cost estimation can be used as an instrument to support the selection of suitable space debris mitigation or remediation measures. Several long-term simulations of the evolution of the future space debris environment are combined with cost estimation. The costs of damages to satellites are compared to the costs of measures like post mission disposal (PMD) and active debris removal (ADR). As a parameter variation the damage costs are estimated based on two different approaches. It is shown that the cost estimations are in a reasonable order of magnitude which allows cost-benefit comparisons for different scenarios.