India Charts Course for Sustainable Space Operations Amid Orbital Debris Crisis

Since the first satellite broke free of Earth's gravity in 1957, humanity has treated the orbital commons as an inexhaustible frontier — yet the neighborhoods closest to home, where communications, navigation, and observation satellites dwell, are finite and increasingly imperiled. India, through ISRO's Debris Free Space Mission and its companion tracking systems, is among the nations now reckoning with a hard arithmetic: more than 29,000 trackable objects crowd low Earth orbit, and the physics of high-velocity collision mean that unchecked debris does not merely accumulate — it multiplies. Th