An interview with Dr. Tim Flohrer: On Low Earth Orbit orbital debris mitigation, avoidance, and tracking

Eduardo Maristany* and Swetha Tadisina

Edited by Laura Shupp

Interview | Aug. 31 2023

*Email: eduardom@alum.mit.edu

DOI: 10.38105/spr.9xy5fs4fhi

Article Summary

MIT Science Policy Review spoke with Dr. Tim Flohrer about his perspective on policy and technological aspects of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) orbital debris mitigation, avoidance, and tracking. Dr. Flohrer is the Head of the Space Debris Office at the European Space Agency (ESA). He holds a PhD in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Bern and a Master’s in Geodesy from the Dresden University of Technology. He joined the Space Debris Office as an engineer in 2007 and since 2014, he has worked for ESA’s Space Situational Awareness Programme (SSA) and Space Safety Programme, and he currently leads activities addressing the monitoring of space debris. In parallel, he also supports operational collision avoidance activities for ESA and third-party missions, re-entry predictions, mitigation analyses, long-term predictions of the space debris environment, and space debris risk assessments. Additionally, he is a delegate to the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC). Because of his ties to ESA and deep technological knowledge, he brings a valuable, and often overlooked, international perspective on the orbital debris mitigation, avoidance, and tracking space.

Open Access

This MIT Science Policy Review article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/.

Eduardo Maristany

Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA

Swetha Tadisina

Engineering Studies Program, Dept. of Computer Science, Lafayette College, Easton, PA