A specialised line covering the launch and operation of satellites, whose lock is not the danger but the impossibility of modelling it.
Space insurance covers assets placed in orbit, mainly against launch failure and in-orbit failure, on a modest premium market, of the order of six hundred million dollars a year, carried by a narrow circle of specialised insurers. Its paradox is that, of around thirteen thousand active satellites, barely three hundred are actually insured, most collision losses being excluded. The true lock is not the dangerousness of space but the impossibility of modelling the risk reliably, for want of sufficient history, owing to the invisibility of a large share of debris, to the non-linearity of the Kessler syndrome and to the reflexivity of a risk that the insured activity itself creates. The frontier of space insurability thus coincides with the frontier of knowledge.
A constellation operator insures the launch of its satellites but is refused cover for in-orbit collisions, excluded for want of a reliable model of debris risk.
assurance des satellites, space insurance