Kessler syndrome
A chain reaction in which an orbital collision generates debris that causes new collisions, rendering certain orbits unusable.
On February 10, 2009, about 790 km above Siberia, Iridium 33, a working commercial satellite, struck Cosmos 2251, a defunct Russian satellite. It was the first accidental collision between two intact satellites, and more than two thousand debris pieces were cataloged in the following years. That is the first step of the scenario Donald Kessler and Burton Cour-Palais described in 1978. A collision throws off a debris cloud, the cloud causes further collisions, and the reaction feeds itself. Past a certain orbital density, the number of collisions grows nonlinearly. For a space underwriter it is the worst case there is. It breaks the assumption that risks are independent: one correlated event hits thousands of satellites and thousands of policies at once, and diversification vanishes. On an estimate attributed to the OECD, a cascade could disable around 20% of low-orbit satellites within months. Immediate losses would come close to 191 billion dollars, well beyond market capacity.
The mechanism, described by Donald Kessler in 1978, is simple. A single major collision in low orbit could set off a Kessler syndrome, invalidate thousands of space policies at a stroke and exceed any reinsurance capacity.
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