Who owns Earth’s orbit? Space debris and the Kessler syndrome

The Sky That Belongs to Nobody

Mara: A listener asked who holds the right to put satellites in orbit, especially with mega-constellations—vast coordinated networks of hundreds or thousands of satellites operating together—like Starlink filling up the sky.

Eli: That question hits the services we rely on daily, because that overhead lane is getting crowded in a hurry.

Mara: The congestion centers on low Earth orbit. That is the orbital corridor running from 200 to 2,000 kilometers above our heads, where satellites circle Earth.

Eli: So how do private companies send up thousands of spacecraft without buying any real estate along the way?

Mara: They cannot buy space because it is legally a global commons—a shared resource that belongs to everyone and no one at the same time, like the open ocean outside national waters. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty declared it the province of all mankind, with Article II stating that space cannot face national appropriation by claims of sovereignty, use, or occupation.

Eli: The threat of orbital collisions worried NASA scientist Donald Kessler early on. During the 1970s, discarded Delta rocket stages—detachable sections of a launch vehicle containing their own engines and propellant—floating above Earth began detonating and scattering shrapnel.

Mara: Rocket stages detonating in silence, throwing shrapnel across paths other spacecraft were traveling.

Eli: Those blasts pushed NASA to create its Orbital Debris Program in 1979. Kessler warned that collisions would accelerate until ten years before another can be expected.

Mara: Yet when diplomats negotiated the treaty, they were thinking about military hardware. The rush began in the 1950s when intercontinental ballistic missiles proved weapons could cross outer space.

Eli: Envoys signed the agreement in Washington, London, and Moscow on January 27, 1967. They feared nuclear warheads crossing the sky, never picturing commercial satellites streaming video to phones.

Mara: Even so, they tied private actors to governments. Article VI specifies that commercial space ventures require official authorization alongside continuing government oversight.

Eli: For decades, that system handled a quiet neighborhood. Between 1960 and the mid-nineties, cataloged space objects grew steadily by an average of only 220 items each year.

Mara: Now mega-constellations have flipped the script. Orbit held roughly 11,500 active satellites by 2026, with Starlink accounting for the bulk of that growth.

Eli: That jumped from 3,300 active satellites back in 2020, meaning operational spacecraft more than tripled across six years.

Mara: Every single one of those platforms needs its own safe operating lane and radio bandwidth to function.

Eli: If no single country or company can own orbital space, how does anyone get the legal green light to launch thousands of satellites and claim their radio frequencies?

The Parking Plan in the Sky

Mara: That green light divides between ground and sky. Sovereign governments issue operating licenses, through domestic agencies like America's FCC or Britain's Ofcom.

Eli: National agencies approve the spacecraft. But who prevents thousands of radio transmitters from jamming each other?

Mara: That falls to the International Telecommunication Union, the UN body managing spectrum coordination—the international scheduling process that assigns radio frequencies so satellites don't broadcast over one another, like assigning different frequencies to local radio stations. ITU division head Jian Wang says to picture a "parking plan for an apartment complex", with assigned spaces and rules.

Eli: Only here, you claim your spot by arriving first. Under ITU date priority, newer systems must protect earlier filings—the formal regulatory applications to register and reserve specific satellite radio frequencies and orbital paths—which sounds remarkably like calling shotgun on outer space.

Mara: That contrasts with geostationary orbit—a circular orbit roughly 36,000 kilometers directly above the equator where a satellite matches Earth's rotation and stays frozen over one point.

Eli: To stop mega-constellations from simply hoarding those frequencies, ITU member states approved milestone rules back in 2019.

Mara: Once assignments are brought into use, companies have two years to launch 10 percent of their fleet.

Eli: They get five years to reach halfway, and seven years to finish. Miss that deadline, and you forfeit unbuilt capacity.

Mara: Starlink has moved quickest under that pressure. By March 2026, it operated more than 9,941 active satellites, providing broadband directly to consumers.

Eli: Over 9,900 satellites from one commercial operator is an astonishing share of low orbit.

Mara: Competitors are pushing hard, too. Amazon planned 3,236 satellites for Project Kuiper, while Eutelsat OneWeb acts as a wholesale carrier through regional telecom providers—selling transmission capacity to other providers rather than directly to end consumers.

Eli: Yet when constellations overlap, coordination still depends on voluntary bilateral discussions rather than any binding referee.

Mara: That means conflicting filings can linger unsettled for years while the spacecraft are already flying overhead.

Eli: Friction has already surfaced between Starlink, OneWeb, and China's Guowang and Qianfan networks. If governments hit an impasse, no international authority can step in to enforce an agreement.

Mara: So radio spectrum gets coordinated. But with tens of thousands of new craft launching, what physically happens if orbit gets too crowded?

The Physics of Shrapnel

Eli: What physically happens is violent kinetic destruction. We got the proof of concept nobody wanted back in 2009, when an active commercial Iridium satellite and a dead Russian military craft, Cosmos 2251, crossed paths.

Mara: They collided nearly eight hundred kilometers up. Their impact speed was eleven point seven kilometers per second.

Eli: At twenty-six thousand miles per hour, they completely shattered each other. That single collision instantly produced more than two thousand three hundred pieces of debris.

Mara: At orbital speeds, a paint fleck just one centimeter wide packs devastating energy. NASA calculated that it inflicts the damage of a five-hundred-and-fifty-pound object traveling at highway speed on Earth.

Eli: Scale that debris up to ten centimeters wide. An impact like that unleashes the force of seven kilograms of TNT, the chemical high explosive.

Mara: It makes you realize why even a one-centimeter fragment is so dangerous.

Eli: Remember that baseline from earlier of thirty-three hundred active satellites back in 2020. Stacking thousands more into narrow bands triggers constant conjunction warnings, which are red alerts sent to satellite operators when radar tracking predicts two orbiting objects will cross paths dangerously close to one another.

Mara: And with that many close encounters, the fear is that a single breakup triggers a runaway chain reaction.

Eli: Caps advocates warn that leads straight to the Kessler syndrome, which is a chain reaction where colliding satellites smash into thousands of fragments that hit other craft and create an expanding cloud of lethal shrapnel. Because collisions shatter craft faster than atmospheric drag—the friction and resistance exerted by gas molecules in the upper atmosphere that slows satellites and lowers their orbit—can clear them, repeated impacts could make specific, valuable altitude bands unusable by pricing out future missions with impossible shielding and insurance costs.

Mara: And that destruction does not stay in orbit. A cascade would degrade services we rely on every day, including Earth observation, climate monitoring, and weather forecasting.

Eli: Daily life on Earth would feel it immediately, with hits to GPS navigation, shipping, aircraft tracking, disaster mapping, and precision agriculture. At the same time, ground-based astronomy could face a range of consequences.

Mara: Can strict cleanup rules and automated dodging technology actually prevent a runaway chain reaction, or will regulators be forced to cap the total number of satellites?

Dodging, Deorbiting, and the Debate Over Caps

Eli: Scientists advocating binding orbital limits argue cleanup rules fall short. European Space Agency researchers report that freezing all future launches would still not stop orbital debris from multiplying.

Mara: Even with zero new launches?

Eli: Zero. Fragmentations generate shrapnel faster than atmospheric drag can sweep it away.

Mara: But five-year deorbit rules are supposed to counter that.

Eli: Recent simulations showed standard five-year disposal rules slowed the increase in collision risks, but failed to prevent debris from worsening.

Mara: Even with high compliance?

Eli: That model assumed ninety percent compliance with disposal guidelines. Even so, without active debris removal—launching a specialized robotic craft to rendezvous with, grab, and drag dead satellites or discarded rocket boosters out of orbit—simulations showed debris increasing by more than five hundred percent.

Mara: Open-access advocates argue that hard caps would stifle connectivity just as systems improve. Starlink satellites operate below six hundred kilometers.

Eli: Where natural drag pulls defunct craft down within a few years?

Mara: Exactly. They also complete thousands of automated avoidance burns every year, firing a satellite's onboard rocket thrusters to steer it away from an oncoming collision.

Eli: Thousands of dodges every year is an intense burden for software.

Mara: Regulators believe smarter spectrum coordination can accommodate that traffic. The FCC approved an order that its chairman said could expand low-orbit broadband capacity sevenfold.

Eli: Sevenfold?

Mara: Chairman Brendan Carr noted consumer gear could maintain 'connections to seven or more satellites at a time.'

Eli: I concede that rigid numerical caps could freeze connectivity. But regulators are enforcing post-mission deorbit—using remaining onboard propellant or atmospheric drag to pull a retired satellite down so it safely incinerates in the atmosphere.

Mara: Under what deadline?

Eli: Applicants must certify their constellations will deorbit no later than five years after finishing missions.

Mara: Promises on paper are easy, but will regulators actually penalize an operator that abandons hardware?

Eli: In 2023, the FCC proved it has teeth by penalizing DISH Network.

Mara: How much was the fine?

Eli: The agency imposed a one hundred fifty thousand dollar penalty over EchoStar-7.

Mara: For parking it in the wrong zone?

Eli: The craft was boosted only 122 kilometers above its operational arc, the designated orbital slot in geostationary orbit where a satellite is stationed to provide coverage. Regulators required 300 kilometers. It recalls Jian Wang's parking plan for an apartment building. Towing one abandoned vehicle is futile when the garage ceiling is already collapsing under decades of wrecks.

Mara: That is why demonstration flights like RemoveDEBRIS and ClearSpace-1 tested cleanup techniques. In 2024, Astroscale's ADRAS-J probe performed a close flyby of a spent Japanese rocket stage.

Eli: To inspect it before attempting capture?

Mara: Right. Yet active debris removal is still commercially unproven, and paying for dozens of annual removals remains an unsolved hurdle.

Eli: With commercial launches accelerating faster than treaties can adapt, what happens to everyday life on Earth if space becomes too dangerous to navigate?

The Price of an Open Commons

Mara: Forcing obsolete hardware out of orbit does not just clean the sky, because it creates real risks down on the ground.

Eli: In March 2024, a cylindrical metal piece slammed into a home in Naples, Florida. The piece weighed nearly two pounds. NASA confirmed it came from a space station battery pallet discarded in 2021.

Mara: A piece of a space station surviving reentry and hitting someone's home?

Eli: It occurred again in May 2024, when space debris hit a homeowner's roof in Macon County, North Carolina.

Mara: That brings orbital hazards uncomfortably close to home. Yet what falls back to Earth is dwarfed by what heads up. More than 300 rocket launches took place across the globe in 2025.

Eli: Those rockets carried more than 4,000 payloads into space.

Mara: Operators deploy an average of ten new payloads each day.

Eli: Meanwhile, over three intact satellites or spent rocket bodies fall back through the atmosphere daily.

Mara: The European Space Agency projects rapid growth ahead. Over 100,000 operational satellites could circle Earth by the early 2030s.

Eli: Caps advocates point back to Don Kessler's warning. Reaching that first major collision took decades. But Kessler cautioned that another could follow in only about ten.

Mara: Which raises the question of whether satellite density has outrun the atmosphere's capacity to clean itself.

Eli: Advocates for caps point to Kessler’s 1978 cascade model. They argue that once debris passes a tipping point, collisions generate more fragments that inevitably trigger additional collisions.

Mara: Yet researchers still do not know whether key altitude bands have already slipped past the point of no return.

Eli: So operators keep deploying thousands of spacecraft without knowing where the cliff actually is.

Mara: To answer our listener directly: no country and no private company owns outer space, or holds an exclusive right to orbital paths.

Eli: Under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, space is an unclaimable global commons. But sovereign states carry full international responsibility for the private companies they license.

Mara: Under international law, governments must authorize and continually supervise their commercial operators. If orbits get too congested, cascading collisions will smash spacecraft into fragments and render vital altitude bands hazardous.

Eli: A shared commons lacking global enforcement gives commercial operators no incentive to pause until orbital highways fail.

Mara: The sky has no landlord, but unless the nations launching thousands of satellites actively police the commons, we may soon find ourselves locked out of our own orbit.

Eli: Thanks for spending this time with us. I'm Eli.

Mara: And I'm Mara. Until next time, this has been Angle.