One of the interesting aspects of the orbital debris problem was that it was first identified as a potential problem based on technical analysis of Kessler and Cour-Palais and, since it was not perceived by the space user community as a serious or imminent problem, it was possible to develop a good technical understanding of the problem before solutions, which would quickly and inevitably transcend technical issues, needed to be proposed. That is, we were given an opportunity to develop a technical understanding of the issues for protecting the space environment before action needed to be proposed to implement that environmental protection. The publication of NASA Safety Standard 1740.14 in 1995 was the culmination of a series of technical developments in the areas of orbital debris environment modeling, orbital debris threat modeling, hypervelocity impact testing, and reentry risk analysis that were used in conjunction a close working relationship with the NASA Office of Safety and Mission Assurance (Code Q) to produce an effective approach to controlling orbital debris. The outcome of this effort was the development of guidelines that were grounded in a technical understanding of issues related to orbital debris, but ones that reflected limitations of that understanding and the necessities of having guidelines that were functional. The objective of this paper is to trace how the requirements for policy affected and were affected by the technical developments. The paper addresses three general topics. First is the development of guidelines directly related to orbital debris - operational debris, intentionally generated debris, postmission disposal, and failure during mission preventing postmission disposal. Over time these guidelines evolved from being quite detailed and based on specific model results, to become more general statements that were more easily interpreted and applied by space program managers. Second, since one of the key orbital debris guidelines was to halt the growth of mass in low Earth orbit, and since deorbit into the atmosphere was one of the likely means to do this, and since this could result in reentry debris surviving to ground impact, an ancillary but very important guideline was included to limit reentry risk. Third, since orbital debris issues were an unfamiliar and not readily accessible topic to most program managers at the time the safety standard was published, the guidelines were supported by a description of the procedure that should be used in accessing the guidelines and supplemented by a set of software (the Debris Assessment Software (DAS)) which provided the needed models in a user-friendly environment.
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