Active Debris Removal, International Environmental Law, and the Collective Management of Risk: Foundations of an International System for Space Traffic Management

Abstract

The analysis in the current chapter advances the discussion on the interrelationship between space debris, active debris removal and space traffic management, and on how they must necessarily be conceptualised and implemented should the international community prefer to safeguard the sustainability of mankind’s space activities. The first section juxtaposes the state of a number of regulatory developments on the above issues with a cursory look at the inescapable physical circumstances and processes surrounding space activities and space debris, in order to derive a number of fundamental implications for the creation of an effective future regulatory system. What emerges, above all, is the need for suitably tailored, adaptive and largely unprecedented international legal ‘machinery’ based on a common construction of the risk attending space activities. De lege lata and de lege ferenda, the chapter then briefly situates and qualifies the issues under general international law and the jurisprudence of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the context of international obligations to prevent transboundary harm—an area of international environmental law notably concerned with risk and its collective management—before finally concluding.