This article is written by Priyam Pratik, a First Year law student at the Faculty of Law, University of Allahabad.
I. Introduction
When the Outer Space Treaty was opened for signature in 1967, its drafters were picturing a handful of state-owned spacecrafts circling the earth, not a commercial fleet numbering in the tens of thousands. That assumption no longer holds. SpaceX alone has been authorised to operate close to twelve thousand Starlink satellites and has filed paperwork with the International Telecommunication Union for tens of thousands more, while OneWeb has deployed roughly six hundred satellites toward an eventual constellation of about six hundred fifty, and Amazon is building its own Project Kuiper network of some three thousand two hundred spacecraft. This article argues that the environmental and space law regimes designed for an era of sparse, state controlled orbital activity are structurally unequipped to manage the ecological consequences of constellations operating at this scale. It examines three related harms, namely collision risk and orbital debris, atmospheric pollution from satellite re-entry, and light pollution affecting astronomical observation, before turning to the regulatory architecture that governs them and the litigation that has tested its limits. It closes with an account of the enforcement gap exposed by recent Federal Communications Commission practice and offers a modest set of reforms.
II. The Physical and Atmospheric Footprint of a Crowded Sky
A. Collision Risk and the Kessler Problem
As early as 1978, NASA scientists Donald Kessler and Burton Cour Palais warned that once the density of objects in low earth orbit crossed a certain threshold, collisions would begin generating debris fast enough to trigger further collisions, a self-sustaining cascade now known as the Kessler syndrome. The warning was theoretical for three decades. It became concrete in February 2009, when the defunct Russian satellite Kosmos 2251 struck the operational Iridium 33 satellite over Siberia, destroying both spacecraft and adding close to two thousand trackable fragments to an already congested orbital shell. Mega constellations sharpen this risk considerably, not because any single satellite is especially dangerous, but because sheer numbers multiply the odds of a conjunction event. The European Space Agency experienced this first hand in September 2019, when its Aeolus wind measurement satellite had to fire its thrusters to avoid a Starlink satellite after the two spacecraft’s collision probability climbed to roughly one in a thousand, ten times above the agency’s own safety threshold. What made the episode notable was not the manoeuvre itself but the process behind it. The decision over which operator should move was settled by an exchange of emails, a coordination method that SpaceX’s own team later conceded would not scale to a sky filled with tens of thousands of satellites.
B. Atmospheric Chemistry and Ozone Depletion
A second, less visible consequence unfolds once a satellite’s working life ends. Most low earth orbit satellites are designed to burn up on re-entry rather than survive to the surface, and this design choice, intended to protect people and property on the ground, simply relocates the environmental cost to the upper atmosphere. Researchers at the University of Southern California used atomic scale molecular dynamics simulations to model what actually happens when a typical two hundred fifty-kilogram satellite disintegrates during re-entry, and found that the process generates roughly thirty kilograms of aluminium oxide nanoparticles. These particles do not simply disperse. Because of their size, they can take up to three decades to settle from the mesosphere down into the stratosphere, where they act as a catalyst for chlorine driven ozone destruction, a reaction chemically similar in principle to the one that produced the Antarctic ozone hole. The same study calculated that re-entering satellites had already increased atmospheric aluminium levels by nearly thirty percent above natural background by 2022, and projected that once currently planned constellations are fully deployed, annual aluminium oxide deposition could rise more than sixfold above natural levels. The Montreal Protocol of 1987, still regarded as one of international environmental law’s clearest success stories, was built around chlorofluorocarbons emitted at ground level. It has no mechanism whatsoever for addressing pollutants generated fifty to eighty kilometres above the earth’s surface by an industry that barely existed when the Protocol was negotiated.
C. Light Pollution and the Loss of the Night Sky
The third harm is more familiar to the public, if harder to capture in legal terms. Astronomers began raising concerns within months of the first Starlink launch in 2019, arguing that sunlight reflecting off large constellations would streak across long exposure images and interfere with both professional researches, including the detection of near-earth asteroids, and the ordinary human experience of an unlit night sky. SpaceX has responded with design changes, including sun visors intended to reduce satellite brightness, and astronomers have generally credited the company for engaging constructively on mitigation. Even so, the underlying tension has not disappeared. As constellations expand into the tens of thousands, cumulative brightness effects compound in ways that satellite by satellite mitigation cannot fully offset.
III. A Regulatory Architecture Built for a Different Era
A. The International Layer
Outer space law rests on a small number of treaties negotiated during the Cold War. Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty obliges states to conduct activities in space with due regard for the interests of other states and to avoid harmful contamination, but it supplies no enforcement mechanism and no environmental standard against which contamination can actually be measured[11]. The 1972 Liability Convention establishes a fault based, state to state compensation regime for damage caused by space objects, but it has been invoked exactly once. When the nuclear-powered Soviet satellite Kosmos 954 disintegrated over the Northwest Territories in January 1978, scattering radioactive debris across a swath of Canadian territory, Canada billed the Soviet Union just over six million Canadian dollars for its cleanup operation and eventually settled for three million. That episode illustrates both the promise and the poverty of the international framework. It can, in principle, produce compensation, but only through prolonged diplomatic negotiation between sovereign states, a mechanism poorly suited to a world in which the relevant actors are private companies launching thousands of satellites a year rather than governments launching a handful. The International Telecommunication Union, for its part, coordinates radio spectrum and orbital slots but performs no environmental review function at all.
B. The United States Domestic Layer
Domestically, the Federal Communications Commission has licensed the overwhelming majority of the world’s mega constellation satellites, yet it has done so under a categorical exclusion from the National Environmental Policy Act dating to the mid-1980s, when the agency reasonably concluded that licensing individual satellites one at a time was unlikely to have measurable environmental consequences. That assumption has not been revisited in any structural sense even as the scale of licensing activity has grown by several orders of magnitude. The Commission has, to its credit, tightened its orbital debris rules, adopting in 2022 a new requirement that satellites in low earth orbit be deorbited within five years of the end of their mission, replacing a voluntary twenty-five year guideline that had governed the industry for decades. But that rule addresses debris mitigation, not atmospheric chemistry or light pollution, and it remains an isolated fix rather than part of any integrated environmental assessment.
C. Litigating the Gap
Two recent decisions from the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit illustrate how difficult it has proven to force environmental review through litigation. In Viasat, Inc. v. FCC, a competing satellite operator and an environmental group jointly argued that the Commission’s approval of a SpaceX license modification violated NEPA because it failed to account for collision and debris risk. The court did not reach the merits of that claim at all, holding instead that the petitioners lacked standing because the chain of contingencies required to connect the license modification to a concrete injury, namely that a SpaceX satellite would collide, that the collision would generate debris of a damaging size, and that the debris would then strike a Viasat satellite, was too speculative to satisfy Article III[15]. Two years later, in International Dark-Sky Association, Inc. v. FCC, the same court confronted the light pollution question directly and reached the merits, but the outcome was much the same. The court held that the Commission had acted within its discretion in declining to order a full environmental assessment of the Gen2 Starlink authorisation, reasoning that SpaceX’s own mitigation commitments, combined with conditions the Commission imposed on the license, were sufficient to avoid the kind of significant environmental effect that would trigger mandatory review under the agency’s NEPA regulations. Read together, these cases suggest that the categorical exclusion functions less as a rebuttable presumption than as a near absolute bar, one that both standing doctrine and deferential arbitrary and capricious review make exceedingly difficult to dislodge through the courts.
IV. Enforcement in Practice: The Limits of Self-Certification
Even where rules exist on paper, the Commission’s enforcement record suggests they carry limited weight in practice. In October 2023, the FCC announced its first ever space debris enforcement action, against DISH Network, for failing to properly dispose of its EchoStar 7 satellite. DISH had committed to relocating the satellite three hundred kilometres above the geostationary arc at the end of its mission but, running short of propellant, moved it only one hundred twenty-two kilometres, well short of its own disposal plan. DISH admitted liability and paid a penalty of one hundred fifty thousand dollars. The Commission’s enforcement bureau called the settlement a breakthrough, and in one narrow sense it was, being the first case of its kind. But a fine of that size, against a company with tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue, functions as little more than a rounding error, and it says something about the current regulatory model that the entire orbital debris compliance regime still rests on operator self-certification, checked only occasionally and after the fact.
V. Toward a Coherent Regulatory Response
Three reforms would meaningfully narrow the gap between the scale of mega constellations and the regulatory tools available to govern them. First, the categorical exclusion itself should be replaced with a graduated review threshold pegged to constellation size, so that an application to deploy several thousand satellites triggers a materially higher level of scrutiny than a single scientific satellite, rather than both being treated identically under a rule drafted for an earlier and much smaller industry. Second, the Commission, the Federal Aviation Administration, and NASA should coordinate a single integrated environmental review rather than each examining a narrow slice of the same activity, since collision risk, atmospheric chemistry, and light pollution are interdependent effects of one underlying decision to authorise a constellation. Third, the fragmented international picture may finally be shifting. The European Commission’s proposed EU Space Act, published in June 2025, would require operators to submit an environmental footprint declaration before authorisation and empowers regulators to weigh light and radio pollution alongside debris mitigation as part of a single sustainability assessment. Whatever the eventual fate of that specific proposal, it demonstrates that a more integrated model is administratively achievable, and its cross-border reach, applying even to non-EU operators serving European customers, hints at how regulatory convergence might eventually be forced even without formal treaty reform.
VI. Conclusion
The environmental consequences of satellite mega constellations are no longer speculative. They are documented in peer reviewed atmospheric chemistry, in the enforcement files of the Federal Communications Commission, and in the litigation record of the District of Columbia Circuit. What remains uncertain is whether the legal architecture built for a handful of state satellites can be adapted quickly enough to govern an industry now measured in the tens of thousands. The treaties of the 1960s and 1970s were not written with this problem in mind, and domestic regulators have so far preferred incremental fixes, a shortened deorbit timeline here, a modest fine there, to the harder work of building an integrated environmental review. That approach may have been defensible when satellites were rare. It is considerably harder to defend now.
References
International Instruments
Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on the Safety, Resilience and Sustainability of Space Activities in the Union, COM(2025) 335 final (June 25, 2025); see also EU Space Act, Eur. Comm’n, https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/eu-space-act_en (last visited July 9, 2026).
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International Dark-Sky Ass’n, Inc. v. FCC, 106 F.4th 1206 (D.C. Cir. 2024), https://storage.ghost.io/…/22-1337-2064317.pdf.
Viasat, Inc. v. FCC, 47 F.4th 769 (D.C. Cir. 2022), https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-386646A1.pdf.
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Change to SpaceX’s Starlink Internet Constellation Faces Legal Challenge, Space.com (June 3, 2021), https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-megaconstellation-fcc-viasat-dish.
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