The Problem: Orbital Unsustainability as an Economic Risk

The global space economy has grown rapidly in recent years, leading to a sharp increase in the number of objects in Earth’s orbit. In the past decade, the rise of commercial space activities and the launch of large satellite constellations have accelerated the use of Low Earth Orbit, making it one of the most valuable yet increasingly crowded regions of space.

While this growth has opened up major opportunities in areas like telecommunications, navigation, and Earth observation, it has also raised serious concerns about the long-term sustainability of space operations. The growing number of active satellites, along with abandoned spacecraft, rocket stages, and debris from past collisions, has significantly increased orbital congestion and the risk of further accidents.

As a result, space debris is no longer just a technical challenge, but also a financial risk for operators and investors. Even very small debris fragments can cause catastrophic damage because of the extremely high velocities at which objects travel in orbit. In some cases, collisions may lead to the total loss of satellites and the disruption of essential services such as communications, navigation, or weather forecasting.

As a consequence, satellite operators have to perform collision-avoidance manoeuvres in order to protect active spacecraft. These manoeuvres consume fuel, reduce operational efficiency, and shorten the lifespan of satellites, ultimately increasing operational costs.

The growing debris environment is increasing the risks faced by operational spacecraft, and the economic implication of this orbital congestion goes beyond direct operational losses. The growing debris environment increases uncertainty regarding the reliability and profitability of future space projects, affecting investor confidence and raising insurance and capital costs.

Mitigating these risks requires improvements in spacecraft design, including the use of more resistant materials and protection systems. This, in turn, leads to increased development and manufacturing costs. In addition, the development of advanced tracking systems, monitoring technologies, and collision-avoidance strategies is essential to reduce the likelihood of impacts and ensure the long-term sustainability of space operations. These activities also mean additional investment.

Why the Kessler Syndrome Matters for Investors

Another key concern is the risk of a chain reaction of collisions, known as the Kessler Syndrome, where each collision creates more debris that can trigger further impacts. If this were to happen, some orbital regions could become very difficult to use, putting at risk the long-term viability of satellite-based activities.

Because of this, orbital sustainability is also important from an investment point of view, since many space-related businesses rely on safe and reliable access to these orbital resources.

At the same time, the increasing orbital congestion is creating demand for new technological and commercial solutions. The development of technologies like active debris removal, in-orbit servicing, and improved space traffic management shows a growing awareness that the future of the space economy depends on preserving the orbital environment.

Space agencies and international organizations are already working on better regulations, debris mitigation measures, and new clean-up solutions to make space operations safer and more sustainable.

As a result, the risks and concerns about orbital sustainability, together with the expansion of space activities and economic growth, are beginning to create the foundations for a new market focused on orbital sustainability services.

Emerging Market: Orbital Sustainability Solutions

This problem does not exist in isolation; it also triggers a market response. When infrastructure worth trillions of dollars is at stake, and the cost of doing nothing can impact entire industries, new business opportunities tend to appear.

The growing number of orbital debris, the increasing costs of dealing with it, and the heavy dependence of modern economies on satellite services are all driving demand for a new set of solutions: orbital sustainability services.

Among these, three areas stand out as particularly important from an economic perspective: in-orbit servicing, active debris removal, and space situational awareness.

In-Orbit Servicing

Many satellites stop working not because they are broken, but because they have run out of fuel. In geostationary orbit, where a single satellite can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars and is designed to operate for 15 to 20 years, running out of propellant years ahead of schedule represents a significant economic loss.

In-orbit servicing addresses this problem by sending a spacecraft to refuel, repair, or reposition a satellite already in orbit. Satellites in geostationary orbit can represent investments of hundreds of millions of dollars, making their replacement particularly costly.

In this context, in-orbit servicing offers an alternative by extending the operational life of existing assets. Moreover, if servicing becomes more widespread, it could fundamentally change satellite design, enabling more flexible and modular systems that can be upgraded and adapted over time.

The market is already starting to take shape. In 2019, Orbital ATK launched the MEV-1 spacecraft, which successfully docked with an Intelsat satellite, marking the first commercial in-orbit servicing mission. At the time, market estimates pointed to an opportunity of around USD 3 billion for the 2017–2027 period, with roughly 300 GEO satellites seen as potential candidates for life extension services.

In Low Earth Orbit, things work a bit differently. Satellites are usually smaller, cheaper, and launched in large constellations. But as these constellations keep growing, it is becoming more likely that solutions like servicing entire fleets or shared refuelling systems in low orbit will strengthen.

Active Debris Removal

Unlike in-orbit servicing, which is designed for satellites that are still operational, active debris removal deals with objects that are no longer in use, such as defunct satellites, old rocket bodies, and large debris fragments drifting in increasingly crowded orbits.

Since these objects cannot manoeuvre or respond to warnings, they may remain in orbit for decades or even centuries. To address this issue, several solutions are being developed, including robotic arms, nets, harpoons, and even laser-based systems that can slightly alter a debris object’s trajectory to speed up its re-entry into the atmosphere.

The demand for these services comes from a simple fact: large debris objects are the main source of future collision risk, and removing even a small number of them can make a big difference in improving orbital safety. NASA has estimated that taking out around five large objects per year could be enough to stabilise the LEO environment.

Moreover, depending on how quickly debris decay or are removed, the maximum number of satellites that can safely operate in orbit ranges from around 21,500 to over 107,000. The difference between those two figures is how fast debris is cleared.

There is also a financial reason to act early. Research shows that orbit stops being profitable before it becomes unusable, so operators start losing money from debris well before any major collision. This gives companies a clear reason to invest in cleanup before the situation reaches a critical point.

There are still important barriers, though. Under international space law, debris objects remain the property of the country that launched them, meaning that no company can remove another nation’s debris without formal authorisation. This significantly limits the commercial potential of active debris removal.

At the same time, there is a deeper economic issue because orbital space is a shared resource and debris affects everyone. No single company has a strong incentive to take on the cost of removal on its own.

This situation can be described as a market failure in which satellite operators seek to maximize private returns while the costs of orbital pollution are effectively transferred to other users of the space environment. The result is chronic under-investment in mitigation. The social cost of this gap has been estimated at around USD 11.5 billion per year in lost satellite services.

Still, the commercial ecosystem is developing: Astroscale has been preparing demonstration removal missions, the European Commission-funded Remove Debris project tested nets and harpoons in orbit in 2018–2019, and JAXA has launched a public-private project to remove a Japanese rocket body in the following years.

Tracking, Data Services, and Space Traffic Management

For any satellite to avoid debris, it is necessary to know where the debris is. Space situational awareness is the set of technologies and systems used to detect, track, and catalogue objects in orbit. It feeds directly into space traffic management, which coordinates satellite operations and issues warnings when two objects are on a collision course.

Together, these services are the information layer that makes everything else in the orbital economy possible.

The problem is that current tracking capabilities remain limited. The US Space Surveillance Network, the most advanced system available, tracks around 20,000 objects, representing less than 0.02% of the total estimated debris population larger than one millimetre.

Many undetected objects are too small to be tracked but still large enough to cause severe damage on impact. Even managing known risks is already demanding: the Sentinel-2A satellite received more than 8,000 collision warnings over a two-year period, and in 2017 over 90 avoidance manoeuvres were carried out by operators worldwide.

Each manoeuvre consumes fuel, disrupts operations, and costs money. In that sense, better tracking reduces collision risk and can therefore improve the overall economic performance of the satellite market.

The commercial opportunity is growing fast. As large broadband constellations enter orbit, the amount of tracking data is set to grow beyond what current government systems can handle alone. For example, a constellation like SpaceX’s Starlink could generate millions of conjunction warnings, making automated, AI-based systems essential to process them.

Private companies are already stepping in to fill this gap. LeoLabs, for instance, operates a network of ground-based radars combined with advanced data analytics, and by 2019 had developed a dedicated tracking and compliance platform for the New Zealand Space Agency.

At the policy level, the United States has also adapted to this shift by separating civilian space situational awareness services from military operations and by developing an open data-sharing platform designed to support a new generation of commercial services built on top of government data.

An Emerging Market for Orbital Sustainability

In-orbit servicing, active debris removal, and space situational awareness are often treated as separate solutions, but in practice they are closely interconnected and address different aspects of the broader challenge of orbital sustainability.

Servicing helps extend the life of existing satellites, active debris removal reduces collision risks by targeting large defunct objects, and tracking systems provide the data needed to manage activity in orbit.

However, all three areas are still developing and face significant challenges, including legal constraints, technological limitations, and weak economic incentives for implementation.

Barriers to Investment

This market is clearly real and growing, and it responds to a clear economic need. However, despite these strong fundamentals, private investment has not yet reached the scale required.

The reasons are mainly structural, legal, and economic, and understanding them is essential to assess if and when the market can fully develop.

The Regulatory Gap

The biggest barrier is probably the lack of a clear and enforceable international system that defines who is responsible for orbital debris and what obligations operators actually have beyond voluntary guidelines.

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 set the foundations of space law, but it was written at a time when only governments were active in space, long before commercial satellite operations became a reality. Adherence to space sustainability guidelines is largely voluntary, and emerging space operators require incentives to adopt best practices.

The result is a patchwork of national regulations, voluntary industry standards, and international recommendations that apply unevenly across operators and jurisdictions.

The compliance data make the problem concrete. ESA estimates that around 75–97% of LEO constellation objects comply with the IADC 25-year deorbiting guideline, while compliance among non-constellation LEO objects is closer to 70–85%.

However, even at the upper end of these ranges, long-term simulations show that a 90% post-mission disposal rate in LEO would still lead to a high number of catastrophic collisions over time. In other words, current compliance levels, even when voluntary guidelines are followed, remain insufficient to stabilise the orbital environment.

This gap is even more pronounced at higher altitudes: for LEO orbits above 650 km, fewer than 20% of satellites reaching end-of-life in 2017 were actually deorbited. Overall, there is a substantial gap between what guidelines recommend and what operators do in practice.

This lack of clear rules creates a real challenge for investors. When regulations are uncertain and inconsistently enforced, it becomes difficult to properly assess the value of sustainability-focused businesses.

Without a solid regulatory baseline, sustainability is treated as an extra cost, one that profit-driven operators are likely to avoid whenever possible, and as a result, the market for these solutions struggles to grow.

The Incentive Problem

Even when rules exist, there is still a deeper economic problem: space is a shared resource, and users do not always have the right incentives to use it responsibly.

When a satellite operator launches a new mission, the debris it generates imposes costs on every other user of that orbital zone, but the operator bears none of those costs directly. Firms operating satellites maximise profits and do not internalise the social cost of orbital pollution.

The result is that, from any individual operator’s perspective, investing in debris mitigation is an expense that benefits competitors as much as oneself. Nobody wants to pay for cleaning up a mess that everyone contributed to and everyone benefits from clearing.

This problem is especially visible in active debris removal. The cost of removing debris has to be paid entirely by whoever funds the mission, but the benefits, safer orbits, are shared by all operators.

Without a mechanism that forces operators to bear the cost of the debris they generate, whether through fees, taxes, or liability rules, it is very difficult to build a business model that makes active debris removal financially sustainable.

Although the overall cost of the problem is high, it is spread across the entire industry rather than falling on any single actor. As a result, no individual operator has a strong enough incentive to act on their own.

One of the most visible attempts to address this incentive problem is the Space Sustainability Rating, developed by the World Economic Forum, MIT, ESA, and other partners. Rather than relying on regulation, the rating tries to influence behaviour through reputation.

It evaluates satellite missions across areas such as debris mitigation, collision avoidance, and data sharing, and gives operators public recognition for good performance. In that sense, it creates a non-financial incentive to act more responsibly.

The idea is not new. The Space Sustainability Rating is clearly inspired by sustainability certification systems like LEED in the construction sector, which gained traction not just through regulation, but through a mix of government support, local incentives, and the reputational benefits of being certified.

But that comparison also highlights the limits of the approach: LEED took years to shape industry practices, and space sustainability is likely to evolve just as slowly. So far, adoption has been modest. As of late 2024, only a small number of operators, including Eutelsat, OHB Sweden AB, Stellar, and TU Delft, had obtained a rating. The framework is there, but it has yet to scale.

Technological Cost and Complexity

Beyond incentives, there is a much more practical barrier: the technology itself is extremely challenging and costly to develop.

Active debris removal means tracking down and capturing objects that are moving at several kilometres per second, are not designed to respond, and were never built to be serviced in the first place.

This involves complex operations such as close-proximity manoeuvres, relative navigation, rendezvous, and docking with non-cooperative targets, capabilities that are still far from routine, even for experienced space actors.

Bringing these technologies to a point where they are reliable and affordable enough for a viable commercial model remains both an engineering and a financial challenge.

In-orbit servicing faces similar constraints, though it is closer to commercial viability. The capital required to develop and launch a servicing spacecraft is high, the missions are long in development, and the technical risks are significant.

Each mission is effectively a bespoke engineering project, which keeps costs high and makes it difficult to build a scalable business model around it.

Space situational awareness is more developed commercially, but there are still important limitations. Today’s tracking systems cannot reliably spot objects smaller than around 10 cm in LEO, even though most debris falls into that size range.

The European Union’s SST network is able to track only about 20% of objects larger than 7 cm, and that data is not publicly accessible. This highlights a clear detection gap.

Closing it is essential not only for improving collision avoidance, but also for making active debris removal missions accurate enough to be carried out safely. Doing so will require significant investment in sensors, data infrastructure, and information-sharing systems.

Market Uncertainty and the Dependence on Government

All of these barriers point to a broader issue: the business case for orbital sustainability services still depends heavily on assumptions about future regulation and government demand, both of which remain uncertain.

In-orbit servicing currently has the clearest commercial logic, since extending the lifetime of a GEO satellite can generate direct and measurable savings. Active debris removal, by contrast, lacks a comparable revenue model.

In economic terms, active debris removal behaves like a public good: the benefits are shared across the entire sector, while the costs fall on whoever carries out the mission. Without mechanisms such as mandatory fees or direct public procurement, it is very difficult for private companies to recover those costs.

As a result, the growth of this market is, for now, closely tied to government action. Space agencies have a central role, not only as funders of research and development, but also as customers and regulators shaping market conditions.

Projects like JAXA’s public-private effort to remove a defunct rocket show how government involvement can enable missions that would not move forward on private funding alone.

Similarly, initiatives such as ESA’s Clean Space programme and recent US policy efforts on space traffic management are aimed at building the institutional framework needed for a functioning market.

Still, relying mainly on government procurement is a fragile foundation for long-term growth. Public budgets change with political cycles and shifting priorities, creating a level of uncertainty that private operators have little control over.

The Market Exists, But It Is Not Yet Complete

Taken together, these barriers, unclear rules, weak incentives, high technological costs, and a strong reliance on government demand, help explain why private investment in orbital sustainability is still limited.

However, this does not mean the market will not develop. Instead, it suggests that the market is still in an early stage: the demand is real and growing, the technology is improving, and the broader institutional framework is beginning to take shape.

What is missing is a clear and credible set of rules, something that turns voluntary good practices into a level playing field and gives investors the confidence to step in.

The existing literature suggests that, until this happens, the market is likely to grow slowly and unevenly, driven more by reputational incentives and government contracts than by strong commercial dynamics.

Conclusion: Can Orbital Sustainability Become a Viable Investment Opportunity?

This article aimed to ask whether orbital sustainability can become a viable investment opportunity in the space economy. The answer is yes, but not unconditionally, and not yet at scale.

Based on the evidence reviewed in this study, the orbital environment is a shared resource under stress and the economic consequences of failing to manage it are enough to affect entire industries. In this line, the case for investment is strong.

The debris problem is not a distant risk, it is already generating measurable costs in collision avoidance manoeuvres, satellite design constraints, and operational disruptions. A social cost estimated at around USD 11.5 billion annually demonstrates the economic weight of the problem.

The services designed to address it — in-orbit servicing, active debris removal, and space situational awareness — represent an answer to the structural demand that will continue growing as satellite populations expand.

But there are still clear barriers. The rules are inconsistent and mostly voluntary, they do not meet the needs for long-term orbital stability, and the lack of regulation discourages private investment.

For example, in the case of active debris removal, the lack of “polluter pays” rules makes it difficult for companies to build a viable, self-sustaining business.

While initiatives like sustainability ratings can help influence behaviour through reputation, voluntary approaches on their own are not enough to drive the level of change needed to protect the orbital environment.

Nevertheless, orbital sustainability can become a viable investment opportunity, but only under specific economic and regulatory conditions. Those conditions include enforceable international standards that create a level playing field, measures to internalise the cost of orbital pollution, and support from the government, both as a regulator and as an initial customer while the market is still developing.

The main question is one of timing. The market for orbital sustainability is not waiting for the problem to arrive. It is already responding to a problem that already exists. What it still needs is a set of rules and the right regulations to help it grow from a promising market into a fully working one.

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