Would policies to manage orbital space debris be a good candidate for short-term work in this area, particularly if they can be directed at preventing the tail risk scenarios such as run-away collision cascades (Kurzgesagt has a cute video on this)? Although larger pieces of space debris are tracked and there are some efforts currently being taken to test debris removal methods, it seems like this could be suffer from free-rider problem in the same way international climate change policy does (i.e. a lot countries are scaling up their space programs, but most may rely on the US to take the lead on debris management).
In the event that there is a collision cascade it also seems like it could create a weak form of the future trajectory lock-in scenario that Ord describes in the Precipice, in that humanity would be ‘locked-out’ of spacefaring (and satellite usage) for as long as it took to clean up the junk or until enough of it naturally fell out of orbit (possibly centuries).
Would policies to manage orbital space debris be a good candidate for short-term work in this area, particularly if they can be directed at preventing the tail risk scenarios such as run-away collision cascades (Kurzgesagt has a cute video on this)? Although larger pieces of space debris are tracked and there are some efforts currently being taken to test debris removal methods, it seems like this could be suffer from free-rider problem in the same way international climate change policy does (i.e. a lot countries are scaling up their space programs, but most may rely on the US to take the lead on debris management).
In the event that there is a collision cascade it also seems like it could create a weak form of the future trajectory lock-in scenario that Ord describes in the Precipice, in that humanity would be ‘locked-out’ of spacefaring (and satellite usage) for as long as it took to clean up the junk or until enough of it naturally fell out of orbit (possibly centuries).