• Humanity gains insight on how to operate in space with every satellite that we launch. • True learning comes from doing; otherwise we lock into lab-born biases that come from asking the wrong questions. • I think we are running into that limit with micrometeoroid and orbital debris (MMOD) collisions, and we are close to an industry-wide shift in how MMOD risk is considered and mitigated on future missions. • If the natural space environment were uniformly, prohibitively dangerous, we would have discovered that long ago. • Sputnik would have been blasted out of the sky by meteoroids, comet tails and asteroid fragments. • We discovered instead that space was somewhat stable, and developed engineering norms to mitigate against its most extreme characteristics of temperature, vacuum, and charge.

Article Summaries:

  • Humanity gains insight on how to operate in space with every satellite that we launch. True learning comes from doing; otherwise we lock into lab-born biases that come from asking the wrong questions. I think we are running into that limit with micrometeoroid and orbital debris (MMOD) collisions, and we are close to an industry-wide shift in how MMOD risk is considered and mitigated on future missions. If the natural space environment were uniformly, prohibitively dangerous, we would have discovered that long ago. Sputnik would have been blasted out of the sky by meteoroids, comet tails and as

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