Space debris and outer space sustainability: legal challenges

Abstract

By 2025, humankind had reached a turning point in space. The orbital environment, once considered effectively unlimited, is now increasingly understood as a finite and congested operational domain. This article presents an in-depth evaluation of the legal and policy regimes for space sustainability, along with a comparison with the physical challenges posed by space debris, which continue to grow while the treaty regime in place was drafted in the context of the Cold War era. This paper draws upon the European Space Agency Annual Space Environment Report 2025 and extensive amount of legal research to conclude that the present framework is structurally not well suited to combat the generation of cascading debris, which is a feature of the Kessler Syndrome, through voluntary soft-law guidelines and fault-based liability standards. The discussion identifies a growing governance gap in which the rapid deployment of mega-constellations and the rise of Active Debris Removal (ADR) technologies are far exceeding the development of binding international law. Furthermore, this report highlights a discontinuity in the global legal order by presenting the regulatory differences between the EU law-driven market proposal of the EU Space Act and the US-based coordination-driven regulatory approach. The current study does not offer completely new models for reform, but rather takes stock of the ongoing discourse regarding the need for a more stringent Space Traffic Management (STM) regime, compensation mechanisms for unidentified debris, and the potential creation of an international STM framework. It calls for greater international coordination and more coherent governance structures in order to ensure the long-term sustainability of orbital operations.