Throughout human history, the sky symbolised freedom — vast, open, untouched. Today, that no longer holds. The earth’s orbital environment has become crowded, fragile, and vulnerable, threatened by what is today evidently a failure of governance rather than just of engineering.
The language of space sustainability has grown familiar in international forums and policy documents. Yet familiarity has bred complacency. As launches become more frequent and the number of private actors multiplies, the gap between what is promised and what is implemented has continued to widen. The result is an orbital environment that is actively used, commercially exploited, and strategically warranted but ethically under-governed.
Orbital harm is difficult to govern because much of the debris capable of causing damage is impossible to track consistently. Authorities are also able to say which fragment came from which object only after it has caused some damage, and even then with limited certainty.
Reducing risk depends on having accurate information about when objects in orbit might come close to one another and exactly where they are. But access to this information is uneven across satellite operators and countries, and it may be withheld for commercial reasons or kept secret for security reasons.
There’s also no regular way to check whether operators actually follow through on promises to make satellites safe when they stop working, to move them out of the way or to bring them down once their mission ends, especially for small satellites or missions that last only a short time. As a result, regulators mostly go by what companies say they will do before launch rather than on what regulators can confirm once the satellite is in orbit, which ultimately leaves responsibility unclear.
Responsibility and prevention
Even debris smaller than a coin, travelling at orbital velocities, carries enough energy to disable or destroy active satellites. Each collision generates thousands of new fragments, multiplying risk. International law obligates states to take reasonable measures to prevent foreseeable harm arising from activities under their jurisdiction. In the context of orbital debris, this means states need to plan for collisions, fragmentation, and long-term congestion — but do they? Indeed, choosing not to mitigate risk is itself a decision because it expects others to deal with dangerous situations.
Orbital governance also remains anchored in outdated assumptions. The existing treaties were written for an era when space activity was limited, controlled by states, and innovation was slow. Importantly, they don’t address cumulative harm and stewardship. Article VI of the Outer Space Treaty makes states internationally responsible for national activities in outer space, including those carried out by private actors. Article VII establishes liability for damage caused by space objects. Yet these provisions were not designed to prevent cumulative harm and are also poorly suited to preventing cumulative harm before it becomes irreversible.
At present, there is no international duty-of-care standard for the earth’s orbits and no ethical threshold for ‘acceptable’ congestion.
National licensing regimes are one of a few mechanisms that can enforce orbital responsibility before damage occurs. Increasingly of late, before they approve a rocket launch or a mission, regulators need to be told the orbital lifetime, the ways in which the payload can be disposed of, whether it has provisions to avoid collisions, and whether it can be passivated (i.e. deprived of the ability to move around). However, regulators in different jurisdictions ask for different levels of details, so operators register in permissive regulatory environments.
To avoid this, licensing conditions need to be standardised, alongside mandating launch operators to use measurable debris-mitigation thresholds, compulsorily share data to improve space situational awareness, and use verifiable end-of-life disposal strategies.
The ethical vacuum is becoming more pronounced as new actors enter space. Nations entering spaceflight for the first time and private enterprises are central to the future of orbital activity — but will these actors inherit the permissive norms that produced today’s congestion or will they help redefine responsibility for the decades ahead?
Principles embedded in international environmental law, including precaution, proportionality, and intergenerational equity, offer a useful guide. These principles recognise that uncertainty does not excuse inaction and that the way we use (non-rivalrous) resources today should not foreclose future generations’ access to the same resources.
India’s opportunity
The present moment is particularly significant for India. Its space programme has for a long time operated with tight constraints while delivering global services. As commercial participation expands and launch capabilities grow, India can either remain a silent participant or help shape their ethical norms. Specifically, as India develops its national space legislation and licensing regime, it has a chance to embed orbital responsibility as a legal requirement.
Ethical governance means recognising that shared environments demand shared restraint and that access to orbit carries obligations beyond national interest or commerce. Setting up such a governing system in turn requires us to answer some tough questions first: When does congestion become negligence? Who bears responsibility for cumulative risk? What obligations do present-day operators owe to future spacefarers?
Voluntary guidelines and rhetorical commitments no longer work; instead, governments and private sector enterprises must express the best principles of environmental governance in enforceable terms in space policy. Existing guidelines to mitigate debris in orbit, while being technically sound, rely largely on voluntary compliance and lack uniform monitoring or sanctions for non-compliance. This has resulted in an uneven regulatory landscape in which the responsible operators absorb higher costs.
Space should be sustainable, which means we should be willing to build the ethical governance required to make it so. In space as on the earth, governance that waits for damage before assigning responsibility will arrive too late.
Shrawani Shagun is a researcher focusing on environmental sustainability and space governance. Abhiram Nair is a space sustainability researcher and entrepreneur shaping the future of responsible orbits.
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