Space Lacks Right-of-Way Rules: Unlike maritime or aviation traffic, orbital operations have no binding convention to decide which satellite yields during close approaches. The 2019 ESA–Starlink near-miss highlighted how reliance on voluntary coordination and unilateral maneuvers is unsustainable as traffic grows.

Explosive Growth in Collision Avoidance: Starlink alone performed over 355,000 avoidance maneuvers in the 12 months ending May 2026 (more than triple the previous year), showing that the current system wastes propellant and risks escalation as constellations expand toward tens of thousands of satellites.

Need for a Neutral, Verifiable Rule: A workable solution requires an objective rule based on measurable facts (e.g., maneuver capability, fuel margin, debris risk) rather than ownership or nationality. This would enable reliable autonomous decision-making, ensure equitable burden-sharing, and prevent catastrophic debris-generating collisions before traffic becomes unmanageable.

In September 2019, the European Space Agency faced a decision it had almost no framework for making. Updated U.S. military tracking data showed that its Aeolus satellite now had a one-in-a-thousand chance of colliding with a satellite from SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, ten times ESA’s threshold for a maneuver. The two operators had earlier agreed the risk was negligible, but a bug in Starlink’s on-call paging system meant SpaceX never saw the follow-on messages showing the risk had climbed. With no reply and the clock running, ESA fired Aeolus’s thrusters and moved out of the way itself.

The episode is often filed as a communications glitch, and in part it was. The more durable lesson is what it exposed. When two operators must sort out who moves and no rule decides for them, someone must act unilaterally and hope. Orbit has no equivalent of the maritime convention that tells one ship to give way and the other to hold course. As ESA’s own Holger Krag put it at the time, “There are no rules in space. Nobody did anything wrong.” The only reason there was........

© Eurasia Review