Review - HR 8787 Introduced – Orbital Sustainability

Back in June, Rep Neguse (D,CO) introduced HR 8787, the Orbital Sustainability (ORBITS) Act of 2024. The bill would require the Department of Commerce to “publish a list of select identified orbital debris that may be remediated to improve the safety and sustainability of orbiting satellites and on-orbit activities.” It would also require NASA to “establish a demonstration project to make competitive awards for the research, development, and demonstration of technologies leading to the remediation of selected orbital debris”. The legislation would authorize $150 million per year through 2023 to carry out these activities.

Moving Forward

While Neguse is not a member of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee to which this bill was assigned for consideration, but one of his six cosponsors {Rep Caraveo (D,CO)} is a member. That means that there may be sufficient influence to see the bill considered in Committee. While the Committee is more likely to be willing to spend money on worthwhile projects, there are certainly be some in the Republican leadership that would object to spending an additional $150 million per year on space projects. I do not expect this bill to move forward in this session.

Commentary

This is another area of space operations where the United States is beginning to fall behind their foreign competitors. The Japanese equivalent of NASA is already funding a debris removal pilot program and there is a demonstration flight in progress by the Japanese satellite technology company, Astroscale.

 

For more details about the provisions of this bill, see my article at CFSN Detailed Analysis - https://patrickcoyle.substack.com/p/hr-8787-introduced - subscription required.

Editorial Note:

Sharp eyed readers will have noticed that I have expanded this blog to include some coverage of ‘Space Geek’ issues in my ‘Short Takes’ posts. With this post, I suppose that I am extending that expansion to includes some legislative analysis. I have long been something of a space geek myself, partly as a result of my Dad’s influence. When I was growing up, he was working at Lockheed Missile and Space in Sunnyvale, CA and he enjoyed talking about his work at the dinner table. I watched a lot of NASA TV during the building of the ISS and a lot of my early blogs on MySpace and AOL were about those Space Shuttle missions. Anyway, I will be looking at some space related legislation in this blog.