For nearly three decades, the International Space Station (ISS), a collaboration among Canada, Europe, Japan, Russia and the United States, has fostered research that benefits everyone. It has yielded air and water purification products and safer medical scans, contributed to robotic surgery and neonatal care advancement, supported cooperation among scientists from more than 100 nations, and served as an incubator for a growing space economy. Yet the ISS faces an increasing threat: millions of pieces of debris hurtling through space. In late 2024, the station had to fire thrusters twice in six days to dodge debris, including fragments of a weather satellite that have been orbiting Earth for 18 years after a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) weapons test.
ORBITAL HIGHWAYS IMPERILED
Space underpins the modern world, with benefits that transcend exploration to uphold global security and foster rapidly growing commerce with instant connectivity. Satellite technology overcomes geographic hurdles, enabling communications from civilian GPS systems to joint force synchronization and missile warning systems. The same advancements that link an increasingly interwoven planet, however, threaten the crucial domain when coupled with irresponsible behavior among reckless spacefaring nations.
“This increasing reliance on space comes at a cost,” Dr. James Minnich, a retired U.S. Army colonel and professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies (DKI-APCSS), said on the center’s “Dialogue” webinar, titled “Sustainability and Responsibility in Space.”
“Every launch, every maneuver and every collision generates debris, turning our orbital highways into a minefield of high-speed projectiles. Even a tiny paint fleck can cripple a satellite or threaten the lives of astronauts.” Disrupted communications and economic losses could turn the shared domain into a “zone of mistrust” and conflict, Minnich said.
Space sustainability discussions focus on managing debris, preserving accessibility to the domain and mitigating the risks posed by actors who seek to deny equal access. From a military perspective, the ability to access space preserves global stability. “A nation can use space for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance for arms control treaty verification,” Dr. Namrata Goswami, a space security professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, said on the DKI-APCSS webinar in late 2024. The capability is vital “because without that kind of knowledge, you can have misperceptions of another nation, what they’re doing with weapons of mass destruction,” Goswami said.
Dangerous moves by China, Russia
Space surveillance networks track about 40,000 pieces of debris, the European Space Agency reported in early 2025. The agency’s scientists estimate there are more than 1.2 million pieces larger than a centimeter — big enough to cause catastrophic damage. In 2020, a group of space experts from China, Europe, Japan, Russia and the U.S. compiled a list of the 50 most dangerous objects in low Earth orbit (LEO), which begins 100 kilometers up and is where most space activity occurs. Scientists ranked objects based on the likelihood they would create large debris fields in the event of a collision.
The 20 riskiest objects were Russian, nearly all of them derelict rocket bodies, the U.S. Space Command’s (USSPACECOM) Apogee magazine reported. Most spacefaring nations have adopted a 25-year guideline: A spacecraft in LEO should leave orbit no more than 25 years after its mission is complete. The U.S. also changed its processes for high-altitude launches, reducing debris by venting rocket fuel and gases before the spacecraft enters orbit, Air & Space Forces Magazine reported. Analysts say the CCP, however, ignores such global norms.
Two of Beijing’s planned communications constellations could leave spent rocket sections in LEO for a century or longer, SpaceNews magazine reported in early 2025. While China is not alone in contributing to debris, its multiplying satellite launches — including more than 1,000 planned for coming years to enable the pair of constellations — alarm observers. “Without changes, a growing cloud of long-lived upper-stage debris could threaten not only Chinese space assets but the safety and sustainability of all activity in LEO for generations to come,” the magazine reported.
Meanwhile, China rarely follows the principles of nations such as the U.S. to share information about objects in orbit, Darren McKnight, a fellow at the space tracking company LeoLabs, told Apogee. Beijing’s unwillingness to do so makes misunderstandings more likely and increases the chances of accidents and rising tensions. “For decades now, the U.S. has so cared about the space domain that we have made available the vast majority of the tracking data that we have, free for the world,” USSPACECOM Commander Gen. Stephen Whiting said in 2024. “Every day, we screen every active satellite against all that debris, and we provide notifications out to everyone, including the Chinese and the Russians … because we don’t want satellites to run into pieces of debris and create more debris.”
The CCP created the most dangerous debris cloud in space, analysts say, with its 2007 missile test targeting China’s Fengyun 1C weather satellite. Most of the 3,500 pieces of debris created by the high-altitude explosion remain in orbit, according to the U.S. Space Force. “A decade and a half later, they’re still seeing problems because the stuff just keeps raining down,” Marlon Sorge, executive director of the nonprofit Aerospace Corp.’s Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies, told The Washington Post newspaper. In 2021, Russia drew international condemnation with a similar test, also using a direct-ascent anti-satellite
(DA-ASAT) weapon. Moscow’s missile shattered a defunct military satellite into more than 1,800 fragments, each larger than 10 centimeters, and produced a debris cloud that threatened ISS astronauts, Apogee reported.
Mitigating the damage
India and the U.S. also have conducted past DA-ASAT tests. However, Moscow’s test spurred dozens of nations to ban the practice. The U.S. committed in 2022 not to perform the destructive testing, and a United Nations resolution calling on states to abandon
DA-ASAT weapons was adopted by more than 150 countries, although China and Russia voted against it. As of late 2024, 38 countries had pledged to ban DA-ASAT testing, according to the U.S.-based Secure World Foundation. They include Australia, Canada, France, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and the United Kingdom.
Meanwhile, world leaders have warned that Russia is considering placing nuclear weapons in space to target other nations’ satellites. Such a move would violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which was initiated by the Soviet Union and the U.S. to prevent an arms race and was signed by 114 countries. It remains the framework for international space law and prohibits the deployment of weapons of mass destruction in space.
Partner nations continue collaborating on space capabilities and sustainability. The U.S.-led, multinational Operation Olympic Defender, for example, bolsters operations, enhances resilience, reduces the spread of debris and synchronizes efforts among members, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand and the U.K. Such cooperation enables like-minded nations to share the responsibility of space security, Whiting told U.S. lawmakers in early 2025.
“These advantages and our ability to deter potential adversaries cannot be taken for granted,” he said. “Deterrence in space is consistent with other domains. It requires a keen understanding and clear communication of what we are deterring against; credible, acknowledged capabilities to impose costs on those who attack us; and resilient architectures to dissuade attack by making any effort futile.”
Multinational partnerships also are forming to mitigate space debris.
The U.S. Space Force and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory signed their first international research and development agreement with two Indian companies in 2023. U.S. resources are supporting work by Bengaluru-based 3rd iTech, an image sensor company, and 114AI, which develops software to monitor and analyze space activity. The initiative will help identify debris risks.
Japan’s Astroscale, which specializes in removing space debris, has agreed to projects with the Japanese space agency as well as with France, the U.K. and the U.S., according to The Japan Times newspaper. Astroscale and Japanese startup Orbital Lasers announced plans to partner with Indian corporations, including robotics company InspeCity, space situational monitor Digantara and Bellatrix Aerospace, which makes satellite propulsion systems.
Goswami, the Johns Hopkins space security professor, is optimistic that spacefaring nations will continue collaborating to preserve the domain. “When you look at history — despite nations disagreeing a lot, including to the extent of having conflict — they agreed on air traffic management, right? There is some level of international, global understanding. That’s why we are all able to travel.”
Air traffic management was an economic necessity for corporations and a security requirement to protect civilians. In space, the forefront of commercial innovation and a key domain for ensuring national and individual security, similar circumstances could prevail. As commercial firms across the world build space capabilities, companies, citizens and interconnected economies must have space traffic and debris management.
Even in countries that refuse to ban destructive DA-ASAT testing or routinely communicate on space debris, Goswami said, “there is this conversation — especially in India and China, that I study — that we need to be very, very careful in what we do going forward, and we need to develop space in such a way that does not create this global backlash. So, there is room for hope.”
