Sustainability in space calls for innovation and regulation
Khaled Abou Zahr
Debris traveling at high velocities pose significant risks to active satellites and space missions. (Shutterstock illustration)
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On Aug. 7, a Chinese Long March 6A rocket disintegrated in low-Earth orbit, creating a debris cloud made up of hundreds of fragments.
The rocket, launched from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, was carrying 18 G60 satellites for the Thousand Sails constellation, which is intended to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink.
The incident has highlighted growing concerns over the issue of space debris and the threat it poses to other low-orbit objects and future space missions.
It has also underscored the urgent need for better debris mitigation strategies to ensure the sustainability of space activities.
According to the European Space Agency, as of 2024, there are in Earth’s orbit approximately 40,500 space debris objects larger than 10 centimeters, 1.1 million objects between 1 centimeter and 10 centimeters, and 130 million objects between 1 millimeter and 1 centimeter.
These objects, traveling at high velocities, pose significant risks to active satellites and space missions.
Initiatives such as the Space Sustainability Rating, developed by the World Economic Forum and other leading institutions, aim to promote sustainable practices in space missions by evaluating aspects like mission design, collision avoidance, and data sharing.
Additionally, the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs has been instrumental in developing guidelines for space debris mitigation, endorsed by the UN General Assembly in 2007, although enforcement remains a challenge.
Innovative solutions, such as active debris removal, laser ablation, and drag augmentation devices, are being developed to tackle the issue of space debris.
Companies including CleanSpace and Astroscale, for instance, are working on the means to capture and remove large pieces of debris using robotic arms or nets.
Laser ablation uses ground- or space-based lasers to gently push debris into lower orbits, which will eventually burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere.
With the number of new satellites expected to reach 20,000 or more in the next decade, it is crucial to establish enforceable international norms and guidelines to prevent the addition of more debris.
Khaled Abou Zahr
Drag augmentation devices, such as drag sails, can be attached to satellites at the end of their missions to increase atmospheric drag and hasten their re-entry and burn-up.
On-orbit servicing, which includes refueling, repairing, or upgrading existing satellites, is also seen as a potential solution to reduce the need for new satellite launches.
These solutions are crucial for supporting a sustainable space environment and ensuring the safety of future space missions.
However, financing these efforts remains a critical challenge.
Currently, government grants, private investments, and international collaborations support space debris removal initiatives.
For instance, the European Space Agency has fully funded the next phase of the ClearSpace-1 mission, which aims to remove large debris objects from orbit.
Some analysts have proposed including debris removal costs in mandatory insurance for stakeholders, though this could further increase the already high costs of space missions.
With the number of new satellites expected to reach 20,000 or more in the next decade, it is crucial to establish enforceable international norms and guidelines to prevent the addition of more debris.
Before long, we will also have to consider guidelines to prevent pollution on future lunar settlements.
• Khaled Abou Zahr is the founder of SpaceQuest Ventures, CEO of EurabiaMedia, and editor of Al-Watan Al-Arabi.
Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect Arab News' point of view
The notice recommended Chinese citizens to leave via the land crossing toward Jordan
Updated 5 min 44 sec ago
Reuters
BEIJING: The Chinese embassy in Israel has urged Chinese citizens to return home or leave the country via land border crossings as soon as possible, on grounds that the security situation has deteriorated and Israeli airspace remained closed.
“At present, the Israeli-Iranian conflict continues to escalate, with civilian facilities damaged and civilian casualties increasing, making the security situation even more severe,” the embassy warned in a Tuesday notice on WeChat.
The notice recommended Chinese citizens to leave via the land crossing toward Jordan.
Macron urges end to strikes against civilians, warns against Iran regime change
Macron called on both Israel and Iran to “end” strikes against civilians and warned that aiming to overthrow Tehran’s clerical state would be a “strategic error”
Updated 11 min 14 sec ago
AFP
KANANASKIS, Canada: French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday called for strikes against civilians in Iran and Israel to end, as he warned against forcing regime change in Tehran.
“If the United States can achieve a ceasefire, that’s a very good thing,” Macron told reporters at a G7 summit in Canada, just as the White House announced President Donald Trump would leave the event early due the escalating crisis in the Middle East.
Macron called on both Israel and Iran to “end” strikes against civilians and warned that aiming to overthrow Tehran’s clerical state would be a “strategic error.”
“All who have thought that by bombing from the outside you can save a country in spite of itself have always been mistaken,” he said.
US official says Trump not signing G7 statement on Israel-Iran de-escalation
Canadian and European diplomats said G7 attendees are continuing discussions on the conflict at the summit in Canada, which ends on Tuesday
Updated 51 min 16 sec ago
Reuters
CALGARY, Alberta: A US official said on Monday that President Donald Trump would not sign a draft statement from Group of Seven leaders calling for de-escalation of the Israel-Iran conflict.
The draft statement, seen by Reuters, also commits to safeguarding market stability, including energy markets, says Iran must never have a nuclear weapon, and that Israel has the right to defend itself.
Canadian and European diplomats said G7 attendees are continuing discussions on the conflict at the summit in Canada, which ends on Tuesday.
Anti-domestic violence groups are suing over the Trump administration’s grant requirements
The groups say the requirements, which Trump ushered in with executive orders, put them in “an impossible position”
Updated 17 June 2025
AP
Seventeen statewide anti-domestic and sexual violence coalitions are suing President Donald Trump’s administration over requirements in grant applications that they don’t promote “gender ideology” or run diversity, equity and inclusion programs or prioritize people in the country illegally.
The groups say the requirements, which Trump ushered in with executive orders, put them in “an impossible position.”
If they don’t apply for federal money allocated under the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, they might not be able to provide rape crisis centers, battered women’s shelters and other programs to support victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. But if the groups do apply, they said in the lawsuit, they would have to make statements they called “antithetical to their core values” — and take on legal risk.
In the lawsuit filed in US District Court in Rhode Island on Monday, the coalitions said that agreeing to the terms of grants could open them to federal investigations and enforcement actions as well as lawsuits from private parties.
The groups suing include some from Democratic-controlled states, such as the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence, and in GOP-dominated ones, including the Idaho Coalition against Sexual and Domestic Violence.
The groups say the requirements are at odds with federal laws that require them not to discriminate on the basis of gender identity, to aid underserved racial and ethnic groups, and to emphasize immigrants with some programs and not to discriminate based on legal status.
The US Department of Justice, which is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, did not respond to a request for comment.
The suit is one of more than 200 filed since January to challenge President Donald Trump’s executive orders. There were similar claims in a suit over anti-DEI requirements in grants for groups that serve LGBTQ+ communities. A judge last week blocked the administration from enforcing those orders in context of those programs, for now.
Why attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities have placed Israel’s own secret arsenal in the spotlight
Estimates suggest Israel possesses at least 90 nuclear warheads, deliverable by aircraft, land-based missiles,
Israel has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and refuses to place its facilities under international safeguards
Updated 17 June 2025
Jonathan Gornall
LONDON: To this day, Israel maintains a policy of deliberate ambiguity in regard to its nuclear capabilities, but it is a fact accepted by experts worldwide that Israel has had the bomb since just before the Six Day War in 1967.
And not just one bomb. Recent estimates by the independent Stockholm International Peace Institute, which has kept tabs on the world’s nuclear weapons and the states that possess them since 1966, suggest Israel has at least 90 nuclear warheads.
SIPRI believes that these warheads are capable of being delivered anywhere within a maximum radius of 4,500 km by its F-15, F-161, and F-35I “Adir” aircraft, its 50 land-based Jericho II and III missiles, and by about 20 Popeye Turbo cruise missiles, launched from submarines.
A woman looks at a wall decorated with national flags during the IAEA's Board of Governors meeting at the agency's headquarters in Vienna, Austria on June 3, 2024. (AFP)
While Iran is a signatory to the international nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Israel is not, which begs the question: while Israel is wreaking havoc in Iran, with the declared aim of crippling a nuclear development program, which the International Atomic Energy Authority says is about energy, not weaponry, why is the international community not questioning Israel’s?
In March, during a meeting of the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Jassim Yacoub Al-Hammadi, Qatar’s ambassador to Austria, announced that Qatar was calling for “intensified international efforts” to bring all Israeli nuclear facilities “under the safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency and for Israel to join the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as a non-nuclear state.”
Israel refuses to sign up to the NPT or cooperate with the IAEA. Furthermore, it is a little remembered fact that since 1981 Israel has been in breach of UN Resolution 487.
This was prompted by an attack on a nuclear research facility in Iraq by Israel on June 7, 1981, which was condemned by the UN Security Council as a “clear violation of the Charter of the UN and the norms of international conduct.”
Iraq, as the Security Council pointed out, had been a party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty since it came into force in 1970.
Like all states, especially those developing, Iraq had the “inalienable sovereign right … to establish programmes of technological and nuclear development to develop their economy and industry for peaceful purposes in accordance with their present and future needs and consistent with the internationally accepted objectives of preventing nuclear-weapons proliferation.”
Iran won’t permit the blood of its martyrs to go unavenged, nor ignore violation of its airspace, says Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader
The resolution, which remains in force, called on Israel “urgently to place its nuclear facilities under the safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency.”
Israel has never complied with Resolution 487.
That ambiguity extends to Israel’s only officially stated position on nuclear weapons, which it has repeated since the 1960s, that it “won’t be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East.”
A picture shows the unrecognised Bedouin village of Ras Jrabah, east of Dimona city (background) in southern Israel, on May 29, 2024. (AFP)
Israeli policymakers, SIPRI says, “have previously interpreted ‘introduce nuclear weapons’ as publicly declaring, testing or actually using the nuclear capability, which Israel says it has not yet done.”
In November 2023, about a month after the Hamas-led attack on Israel triggered the war in Gaza, Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, a member of the ultra-nationalist Jewish Power party, said Israel should drop “some kind of atomic bomb” on Gaza, “to kill everyone.”
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly suspended Eliyahu from the cabinet. Eliyahu’s statements “were not based in reality,” Netanyahu said, while Eliyah himself took to X to say that it was “clear to all sensible people” that his statement was “metaphorical.”
Buildings of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) headquarters reflect in doors with the agency's logo during the IAEA’s Board of Governors meeting in Vienna, Austria on June 13, 2025. (AFP)
Arsen Ostrovsky, an international human rights lawyer who on X describes himself as a “proud Zionist,” replied: “It is clear to all sensible people that you are a stupid idiot. Even if metaphorical, it was inexcusable. You need to know when to keep your mouth shut.”
Israel has no nuclear electricity generating plants, but it does have what experts agree is a vast nuclear facility.
The Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center — built in the late 1950s and early 1960s, allegedly with French assistance, and renamed for the former Israeli prime minister following his death in 2016 — is a heavily guarded complex in the Negev Desert barely 70 km from the border with Egypt.
Iran has ballistic missiles that are capable of reaching the Negev Nuclear Research Center, approximately 1,500 km from Tehran. Why is Tehran hitting Israeli cities in retaliation to Israel’s attempt to destroy Iran’s nuclear industry, when it could attack Israel’s nuclear facility?
The answer, most likely, comes down to the “Samson Option.”
The Samson Option is a protocol for mutual destruction, the existence of which Israel has never admitted, but has never denied.
As Arab News reported in March, Israel is believed to have twice come close to using its nuclear weaponry.
In 2017, a claim emerged that on the eve of the Arab-Israeli war in 1967 Israel had been on the cusp of unleashing a “demonstration” nuclear blast designed to intimidate its enemies.
The plan was revealed in interviews with retired general Itzhak Yaakov, conducted by Avner Cohen, an Israeli-American historian and leading scholar of Israel’s nuclear history, and published only after Yaakov’s death.
In 2003, Cohen revealed that during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when it again appeared that Israeli forces were about to be overrun, then Prime Minister Golda Meir had authorized the use of nuclear bombs and missiles as a last-stand defense.
This doomsday plan, codenamed Samson, was named for the Israelite strongman who, captured by the Philistines, pulled down the pillars of their temple, destroying himself along with his enemies.
Mordecha Vanunu, an Israeli nuclear technician and peace activist, revealed Israel’s nuclear secrets back in 1986.
Ensnared in the UK by a female Israeli agent, Mordechai was lured to Rome, where he was kidnapped by Mossad agents and taken back to Israel on an Israeli navy ship.
Vanunu, charged with treason, was sentenced to 18 years in prison, much of which he spent in solitary confinement. Released in April 2004, he remains under a series of strictly enforced restrictions, which prevent him from leaving Israel or even speaking to any foreigner.
“We all believe that Israel has a nuclear capability,” Ahron Bregman, a senior teaching fellow in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London’s Institute of Middle East Studies, told Arab News in March.
“The fact that Israel found it necessary to catch Vanunu and put him in jail, and continues to impose strict limitations on him, just proves that it has probably got it.”
The emergence of another Vanunu, especially in the current climate, is highly unlikely.
“Israelis are scared,” said Bregman, who served in the Israeli army for six years in the 1980s.
“Even if you believe it is a good idea to restrict Israel’s behavior and make sure it doesn’t do anything stupid, you are scared to act because you know they will abduct you and put you in jail.
“Israel is very tough on those who reveal its secrets.”
