Muhammad Rabeet Ali (University of London) has posted The Cloud Above the Clouds: Mega-Constellations, Transboundary Re-entry Risk and the Law of Orbital Data Centres on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Outer space law was drafted for a handful of states launching a handful of objects for public purposes. It now governs more than fourteen thousand active satellites, most of them owned by a single private company, launched from one country, serving customers in many others, and increasingly designed not to observe or connect the Earth but to sell computing power to it. This paper examines three pressures that this transformation places on the United Nations space treaties: the scale of mega-constellations; the transboundary risk of objects that pass over, and fall onto, the territory of states that did not launch them; and the emergence of orbital data centres, commercial computing infrastructure now proposed at the scale of up to one million satellites. It argues that the treaty regime’s three load-bearing concepts, namely state responsibility for ‘national activities’ (Article VI), launching-state liability (Article VII and the Liability Convention) and registry-state jurisdiction (Article VIII), were designed around a public, state-centred and physically defined model of space activity. Orbital data centres strain all three at once because they relocate a sovereign-sensitive economic function, the storage and processing of data, into a domain beyond territorial sovereignty. Left unaddressed, this creates a risk of ‘orbital regulatory arbitrage’, in which registration choices rather than the location of users determine which law governs the world’s data. Drawing on recent state practice, including Pakistan’s emerging framework for foreign satellite broadband, the paper proposes a genuine-link requirement for registration, a proportional-occupation principle for large constellations, system-level re-entry safety and overflight notification standards, a compensation fund that reaches beyond physical damage, and conflict rules for data processed in orbit.
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