A new iron curtain?

Over decades, IR scholarship saw outer space as a kind of sanctuary, a global commons ruled by the high-minded, but vague, ideals of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. Today, a new kind of "Iron Curtain" is being drawn, only this time, it isn't made of concrete, but of millions of shards of spinning metal. This is the Kessler Syndrome, which describes a situation in which the density of objects in low Earth orbit (LEO) becomes so high due to space pollution that collisions between these objects cascade. This phenomenon exponentially increases the amount of space debris over time.

Orbital debris is a passive weapon, unlike the nuclear weapons that need active intent in order to employ them. A state which is not technologically advanced to play the orbital dominance game can potentially have a strategic use of the Tragedy of the Commons. A weaker actor can easily counter the High-Tech Advantage of a superpower by developing a debris field. Assuming a military and economic engine of a superpower is tied to GPS and satellite communication, then a locked sky, caused by a Kessler cascade, is the final asymmetric equaliser.

Russia used a direct-ascent anti-satellite (ASAT) missile in November 2021, shooting down its own defunct Cosmos 1408 satellite by doing so. The resulting explosion generated over 1,500 pieces of trackable debris, which forced astronauts on the International Space Station to take cover. Through this, Russia indicated that it was capable of generating a localised Kessler cascade at any time by deliberately putting a debris cloud into a highly populated orbital plane; a deterrence by denial strategy.

Due to the emergence of non-state actors, in the case of SpaceX Starlink, we are now seeing the digital enclosure of the celestial commons, with tens of thousands of satellites planned to be launched into orbit in addition to the already more than 5,000 satellites orbiting.

Although Starlink can give connectivity to the entire world, its high density enhances the statistical likelihood of a Kessler event. This creates a new form of sovereignty where, in IR, we traditionally define sovereignty as the capacity to drive out other people in a land. In LEO, SpaceX and the US (as the launching state) are achieving a de facto sovereignty as it is not by means of legal decree, but through congestion. When an orbital shell is congested with 40,000 satellites, it is physically impossible that a competing state would put its infrastructure into the same space without colliding in a disastrous collision. It's the soft occupation of space where the risk of a Kessler cascade serves as a gateway blocking the Global South and the new space powers.

More so, there is this attribution problem here too, which further makes accountability difficult. Who is responsible should a bit of Chinese test debris, 10 years old, strikes a French satellite, triggering a cascade that kills a Brazilian communications array? The Liability Convention, enacted in 1972, has hardly been tested and is not tough enough to impose orbital cleanup.

The threat of a self-sustaining collision cascade will ultimately make a fundamental change in IR: it will no longer be a race to the top, but a race to the bottom, with the power to destroy the commons no less strategically significant than the power to use it. To avoid the "New Iron Curtain" situation, IR scholarship needs to leave the myth of space as a sanctuary and adopt Orbital Realism. This demands a new form of norms which would accept orbital space as a limited, delicate and sovereign-proximate resource. Otherwise, there will be a dark age in world connectivity where the same technology that was supposed to unite the world, the satellite, will be the tool of its irreversible seclusion.