Orbital debris is a collective-action problem. A fragment generated in one state’s operations threatens satellites owned by many others, and its removal benefits everyone. For South Asia, the stakes are concrete. Pakistan told the UN Fourth Committee in 2023 that it uses space technology for agriculture, disaster management, public health and water-resource management. Bangladesh’s national space agency, SPARRSO, established in 1980, works on earth observation, weather monitoring and disaster management, and Bangladesh launched its first communication satellite, Bangabandhu-1, in 2018. International Charter activations requested on behalf of SPARRSO for flood events show how the region draws on satellite data in emergencies. Losing satellite services to collisions would degrade systems that this part of the world cannot easily replace.

At the same time, debris governance is built on voluntary guidelines and national law, and in this region national law is uneven. This article examines whether a regional layer would help. It addresses three questions. What does the international framework require and expect? How do South Asian states currently position themselves? And what regional architecture, technical and institutional, would help states with limited capacity contribute to and benefit from debris mitigation without being excluded from space?

The International Baseline

Debris mitigation guidelines

The Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC) issued its guidelines in 2002 and revised them in 2007. They address four things: limiting debris released during normal operations, minimising on-orbit break-ups, post-mission disposal and preventing collisions. The IADC guidelines are non-binding. They informed the UN COPUOS Space Debris Mitigation Guidelines, which the General Assembly endorsed in Resolution 62/217 in December 2007; the endorsed UN guidelines are very similar to the IADC’s but not identical. The well-known “25-year rule” encourages operators to ensure that spacecraft in low Earth orbit re-enter within 25 years of mission completion. The norm is now being overtaken: in 2022 the US Federal Communications Commission shortened the benchmark to five years for the low-Earth-orbit satellites it licenses.

Compliance is the weak point. Studies cited in the literature find adherence to the 25-year rule in low Earth orbit concerningly low once naturally compliant cases are excluded, and a recent review in Communications Engineering describes global adherence to the voluntary norm as lax, noting that the IADC guidelines are weaker than rules adopted by ESA and the US Federal Communications Commission. Some modelling suggests that even high compliance matters a great deal: in one scenario in which no satellites comply, debris grows by 330% over 200 years, while 90% compliance reduces the growth to 110%.

Sustainability guidelines

In 2019 COPUOS adopted 21 voluntary guidelines for the long-term sustainability (LTS) of outer space activities, organised around policy and regulatory frameworks, safety of operations, international cooperation and capacity-building, and scientific research. In 2019 COPUOS also decided to establish a working group on long-term sustainability under its Scientific and Technical Subcommittee, with a five-year workplan; convened in 2021, it is tasked with identifying and studying challenges, considering new guidelines, and supporting awareness-raising and capacity-building, particularly for emerging space nations and developing countries. The guidelines are particularly relevant here because they treat capacity-building and international cooperation as part of sustainability itself.

Treaty law

Three treaties bear on debris: the Outer Space Treaty, the 1972 Liability Convention and the 1975 Registration Convention. Commentators ask whether they suffice to address debris and irresponsible behaviour by state and non-state actors. The Liability Convention makes launching states liable for damage caused by their space objects, absolutely so for damage on Earth or to aircraft in flight and on a fault basis for damage in orbit. It has been used once, in the Cosmos 954 case. For debris of unknown or untraceable origin, attributing fault is practically very difficult, which is one reason why prevention and shared monitoring matter more than after-the-fact liability.

South Asia: Divergent Positions, Shared Exposure

Open-source evidence shows significant differences in institutional maturity. The summary below draws on official statements and secondary sources and does not attempt a full legal survey.

Table 1. Selected features of national positions on space governance

India’s March 2019 Mission Shakti test, which destroyed an Indian satellite at roughly 300 km altitude, is best read as a governance gap rather than a one-off lapse. The mitigation machinery summarised in Table 1, from IN-SPACe’s compliance checks before authorisation to the 2030 debris-free intent, is built around the authorisation of space activities and ISRO’s own missions. A state-run military test does not obviously fall within it. India’s foreign ministry defended the test on the ground that the low altitude would clear the debris within weeks, and that is the same logic of duration on which the 25-year and five-year disposal norms rest. NASA’s assessment shows its limit: about 400 tracked fragments, some with apogees above the International Space Station, and a 44 per cent rise in the station’s debris-impact risk over ten days. Short-lived debris still endangers operating assets while it lasts, and a standard that counts only time to decay does not capture that exposure. Two consequences follow. A regional monitoring service would be tested first by exactly this kind of event, a sudden fragmentation that requires rapid conjunction warnings for neighbours, and it will be credible only if its anchor state accepts the same notification expectations as everyone else. The equity argument in Section 6 also cuts both ways: if smaller states are asked to accept differentiated obligations, the region’s largest space power cannot treat its own debris-generating activity as outside the framework.

Regional politics complicate cooperation. The South Asia Satellite initiative, for example, saw Pakistan decline participation while others engaged to different degrees, and China has pursued parallel regional space cooperation through the Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organisation, of which Bangladesh and Pakistan are members. Anti-satellite tests by four states, the United States, Russia, China and India, have generated debris, a reminder that some debris originates in the geopolitical competition, including the India–China orbital rivalry, that makes regional cooperation harder.

Three patterns emerge. First, national frameworks are at different stages, so a regional approach cannot assume common starting points. Second, there is real concern about the burden of mitigation on newcomers. Third, there is shared dependence on space-based services for resilience, which gives all states a stake in common solutions.

Regulatory Fragmentation

Mitigation standards

Some spacefaring states and agencies have codified the IADC guidelines, while binding international rules are lacking. Without national codification, a South Asian operator may meet or miss disposal norms purely as a matter of corporate choice. Emerging space nations elsewhere have begun developing guidelines and strategies of their own; Thailand’s draft national space act and a Pacific-region study group on national space law, in which several Asian states share information on their regulatory frameworks, show how states can work together on regulatory learning.

Registration

Registration is the foundation of accountability: debris and incidents can only be attributed to a launching state if objects are registered. Regional gaps in registration practice reduce the value of any shared catalogue. A regional framework could provide registration support, including templates and help with submissions to the UN registry, to states building their capacity.

Information sharing and responsibility

Information about debris and conjunctions is useful only if it is shared. As discussed in the companion article on space traffic management, states’ concerns about sovereignty and security argue for sharing only the minimum data necessary. On responsibility, regional arrangements cannot alter treaty liability, but they can create regional expectations about notification, cooperation and good-faith assistance after incidents.

An AI-Assisted Regional Debris-Monitoring Architecture

The proposed architecture combines observations from different national and international sources into a single regional picture. Each layer is designed so that states can contribute what they have and use what they need.

• Observation inputs: sensor data and orbital catalogues from national and international providers, with participating states contributing optical, radar or radio-based observations where they have them.
• Fusion and cataloguing: reconciliation of overlapping catalogues, identification of uncatalogued objects and tracking of fragmentation events.
• Prediction: orbit propagation and machine-learning models to forecast debris trajectories and the evolution of conjunction risk. Machine-learning methods developed for collision-risk estimation, such as those tested in ESA’s Collision Avoidance Challenge, offer a starting point.
• Risk services: regular risk assessments for satellites operating over or serving the region, delivered in a form that low-capacity operators can use without in-house analysis teams.
• Re-entry support: prediction of the re-entry of regional spacecraft and upper stages, with alerts to civil protection authorities.
• Disposal planning: shared tools for planning end-of-life manoeuvres and verifying post-mission disposal, supporting operators in meeting a five-year post-mission disposal limit, phased as described in Section 6.

Two caveats apply. First, AI models are only as good as their data, and debris catalogues carry significant uncertainty; outputs should be presented with uncertainty estimates. Second, the architecture is advisory and complements, rather than replaces, existing national and international services. Active debris removal remains largely untested in orbit, so this architecture focuses on monitoring, prevention and coordination, not remediation.

Equitable Access and Differentiated Obligations

Developing countries have long argued that rules to protect the orbital environment should not entrench the advantage of established spacefaring states. Pakistan’s statement at the UN stressed that space should be available to all countries on a non-discriminatory basis and that the burden of mitigation should reflect responsibility for existing debris. A South Asian framework that ignores this argument will not attract support.

Several design principles follow:

• Graduated standards: shared baseline requirements (a five-year post-mission disposal limit for new missions, matching India’s declared target and the FCC rule; registration; passivation) with longer implementation periods and technical assistance for new entrants.
• Cost-sharing: regional shared services so that small operators do not have to build their own tracking and analysis capacity.
• Reciprocity: states with greater capacity commit to share data and support training in return for the legitimacy and wider coverage regional participation offers.
• Review clause: periodic review to tighten standards as capacity grows.

The baseline should not be set at 25 years as a concession to lower-capacity states. India, the region’s anchor, has declared a target of under five years of remaining orbital life, the FCC moved to five years in 2022, and the 25-year norm is already weaker than the rules adopted by ESA and the FCC. A 25-year baseline would sit below the standard the region’s largest operator is moving towards and below the rule that FCC-licensed operators already face, so it would give little practical relief while entrenching the weaker norm. Differentiation should come through time and support instead: longer implementation periods, shared disposal-planning tools and the review clause, so that new entrants reach the five-year limit on a schedule they can meet.

A South Asian Orbital Sustainability Framework

Combining the elements above, this article proposes a South Asian Orbital Sustainability Framework with four pillars.

Table 2. Pillars of the proposed framework

The framework should begin as a non-binding declaration or memorandum of understanding and adopt its monitoring services incrementally. Hard obligations would come later, if at all, and only after capacity has been built. The information-exchange pillar should include advance notice of planned debris-generating events and prompt reporting of fragmentations, a commitment a voluntary framework can ask of its most capable members. Prohibiting destructive testing is beyond what it can deliver, so it should sit alongside wider efforts on that front. Pairing a regional initiative with the LTS Guidelines’ second-phase implementation work at COPUOS would link it to the global process.

Limitations

This is a conceptual and policy analysis. Information on several South Asian states’ debris-related regulation is limited in open sources, and some of the scholarship cited predates recent policy developments, so conclusions should be confirmed against current national instruments. The proposed architecture has not been tested, and political cooperation, not technology, is likely to be the greater obstacle.

Conclusion

No South Asian state can secure its orbital environment alone. A cooperative regional model, with shared monitoring, graduated common standards, capacity-building and information exchange, would let states with very different capabilities contribute to orbital sustainability while protecting their own access to space. The strength of the proposal lies in making sustainability an enabling regional project, not an additional burden on those least responsible for the debris problem.