IT SEEMS China’s catastrophic destruction of a defunct weather satellite last year may have been facilitated by the country’s failure to translate an international agreement into domestic law.
The smashed satellite created an orbiting blizzard of long-lived shards. This breached international guidelines covering the mitigation of space debris, which are defined by the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC), which counts the majority of spacefaring nations as members, including China.
The country’s motivation for exploding the satellite was unclear, but the act was especially curious because Chinese delegates had helped to formulate the IADC guidelines.
According to Li Shouping, director…
