PLANETARY SECURITYCalls for More Progress on Space Governance Growing Louder

By Doug Irving

A missile lifted off from a base in northwest Russia on a November morning in 2021. It hit its target several minutes later: a dead Russian satellite that had been orbiting uselessly since the 1980s. The Russian minister of defense applauded the precision of the missile test as “worthy of a goldsmith.”

But the satellite didn’t just vanish. It blew into hundreds of pieces of debris—solar panels, antennas, chunks of metal—that were now whipping around the Earth at thousands of miles per hour. NASA woke the astronauts on the International Space Station and told them to evacuate into their docked space capsules as the debris shot past. At last count, several hundred trackable pieces of that satellite were still in orbit.

Space may seem infinite, but the narrow band that hugs the Earth, where satellites and space stations operate, is not. A recent RAND study described it as congested, contested, and littered with debris. Tens of thousands of additional satellites are scheduled to launch in the next few years, the vanguard of a new space era. Existing space treaties won’t be enough to keep them safe, to prevent crowding and collisions, and to preserve the promise of outer space.

“If you don’t have some kind of global governance framework, if you can’t prevent satellites from running into each other, then it all becomes pretty pointless pretty quickly,” said Katie Feistel, an assistant policy researcher at RAND. “There is such opportunity in space. The potential benefits are huge. But only if we keep space sustainable.”

RAND anticipated the dawn of the space age with its first report, Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship, released 11 years before Sputnik.

It has produced more than 1,000 reports on space and space policy in the 75 years since then. It recently launched the RAND Space Enterprise Initiative to pull together research and expertise on space strategy, operations, and challenges—starting with space governance.

There are no international laws against blowing up a satellite and putting a space station at risk. There are, instead, a handful of treaties and agreements meant to encourage good behavior and cooperation in space. None of them have any enforcement mechanisms, and their language is so vague that even “outer space” has no clear definition. They were drawn up in the 1960s and 1970s, in part to prevent the United States and the Soviet Union from taking their nuclear arms race into space.