Space Sustainability Implications of Combining Space Environment Pathways With Shared Socioeconomic Pathways

Climate change has been shown to contract the upper atmosphere, reducing its density and inducing less drag on space objects over time. Recent work has demonstrated the deleterious effect on sustainable space operations due to slower de-orbit times. This work characterizes the differential impacts to the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) regime for various possible futures by combining atmospheric models from Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) with satellite-launch behaviors from Space Environmental Pathways (SEPs). By leveraging the open-source orbital environment modeling tool MOCAT-pySSEM, population- and time-dependent orbital populations for active satellites, debris, and rocket bodies are simulated for years 2025-2100 across four SEP-SSP pairings. Results indicate that accounting for climate change via the choice of an SSP can increase object populations by 15-100\% as compared to time-varying density models which do not account for atmospheric contraction. These results indicate an imperative to consider future climate impacts when performing long-term space environment modeling.