Orbital Debris Oversight, Responsibility Seen as Gray Area

Cleanup of existing orbital debris could be complicated by lack of clear international norms on how to handle small objects, space law experts told us. Many said clean-up efforts will almost surely focus on big objects in space since technology to deal with small debris is still under development.

The Outer Space Treaty (OST) doesn't distinguish between objects and debris, meaning a nation that authorizes a space mission has oversight even over the debris, with that oversight and responsibility never ending, said Gershon Hasin, Yale Law visiting lecturer. But there have been deliberations among the U.N.'s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) as well as academic discussions about looking at debris differently from objects and defining it differently, he said. "We have to change the norms" to clear the path for cleanup, he said.

A few nations generate most large objects in space and are likely to authorize missions for dealing with those, Hasin said. He said those nations almost surely will focus for now on their own messes and there won't be a need to look at missions dealing with the debris that's another country's responsibility. The ownership of smaller debris can be tougher to ascertain, so it's not clear that a nation would have any reason to claim it and object to its potential cleanup, he said.

Removing big objects that can in turn become clouds of thousands of pieces of debris is easier technically and can have a bigger impact on the sustainability of space, said Romain Buchs, ClearSpace space policy analyst. Few if any large objects in space are of unknown origin, he said. For small objects and fragments of unknown origin, there's no one who can complain if efforts are made to clean them up, he said. The European Space Agency contracted with ClearSpace for removal of a remnant of a 2013 launch still in orbit, with the ClearSpace mission launch set for 2025.

Most legacy objects left in orbit over the past 60 years were the result of civil and military space programs, and it's likely those governments will be the payers to remove them, Buchs said. As the space economy grows, regulators might require that operators remove their satellites after the end of mission, he said.

Debris remediation has "really scary" implications for national security reasons, said Michelle Hanlon, co-director of University of Mississippi's Center for Air and Space Law. Being able to do remediation also means a country can do close-proximity monitoring of satellites and grapple with and move them, she said. That complicates reaching any kind of global norm about how debris cleanup is to be handled, she said.

Discussions about small debris cleanup are in the very beginning stages, Hanlon said. She said there's no current incentive to clean up space, so the U.S. should take responsibility by funding a mission for some of its orbital debris, which could help set an expectation for other countries. She said there has been some theoretical talk about using the "due regard" language in OST to employ salvage laws in space, which could be a means for monetizing debris removal. OST Article IX says parties to the treaty will act "with due regard to the corresponding interests of all other States Parties to the Treaty" and seek "to avoid their harmful contamination."

OST's rules regime didn't envision the idea of a cleanup, "so it's not suited for that," but it also doesn't prohibit cleanup, Secure World Foundation space law adviser Chris Johnson said. When it comes to debris where the launching state can't be identified, "we are in a gray area." The space community would like to see salvage rights extended to space, and there has been some advocacy on Capitol Hill on the need for salvage rights for small objects, he said.

A potential model would be the cleanup-service provider working through the federal government, with the government putting notice through COPUOS about the intent to do removal, Johnson said. He said some nations will have issues with novel space activities like debris remediation and will interpret peaceful space activities cynically. Filings at COPUOS have expressed anxiety about the potential of taking debris belonging to another state, he said. Openness and transparency about cleanup operations could help prevent a particular state being unnerved by what another is doing, he said.

"You can't just take other people's property," so one option for demonstrating cleanup technology is buying the space object from the owner, said space lawyer Laura Montgomery. She said OST Article IX says property interests don't change, but the emergence of orbital debris service could alter that as nations or commercial operators find their hands forced about whether they have abandoned the space object or not. Today it's harder to make the argument something in space has been abandoned and thus fair game for others to take because there aren't many options for retrieval, she said.