Space insurance

Textbook case: a constellation operator insures the launch of its satellites, then is refused cover for in-orbit collisions, excluded for want of a reliable model of debris risk. Space insurance covers launch failure and in-orbit failure, in a thin premium market, on the order of six hundred million dollars a year, written by a small circle of specialist underwriters. Of some thirteen thousand active satellites, barely three hundred are thought to be insured, and most collision losses are excluded. With so narrow a base, a single lost geostationary satellite weighs on the whole market. What holds capacity back is modeling: a short loss history, a large share of debris too small to track, the non-linearity of the Kessler syndrome, and a reflexive risk, since every insured launch adds objects to the orbit that must then be covered. So the underwriter prices a launcher whose flight record it knows, and leaves aside an orbit it can only partly see.