The short version

• The FCC replaced the 25 year post-mission disposal guideline with a five year maximum in Second Report and Order FCC 22-74, adopted 29 September 2022.
• It is codified at 47 CFR 25.283(e) and became effective 9 September 2024, with compliance required from 29 September 2024.
• It applies to spacecraft ending their mission in or passing through low Earth orbit below 2,000 km and planning uncontrolled reentry, including non-US systems granted US market access.
• Satellites already in orbit are grandfathered. Anything launched after 29 September 2024 is not.

For twenty five years the working number in orbital debris mitigation was twenty five years. A satellite in low Earth orbit was expected to clear the region within a quarter century of the end of its mission. That figure came out of NASA analysis in the 1990s and worked its way into the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee guidelines, then into national practice.

It was a reasonable number for a world launching dozens of satellites a year. It is not a reasonable number for a world launching thousands.

What the rule says

The FCC’s Second Report and Order, FCC 22-74, was adopted on 29 September 2022 in IB Docket Nos. 18-313 and 22-271. The core change is short: for the spacecraft it covers, post-mission disposal must be completed as soon as practicable and no more than five years after the end of mission.

The obligation is codified at 47 CFR 25.283(e), with parallel amendments for experimental licences at 47 CFR 5.64 and amateur operations at 47 CFR 97.207.

Three limits on scope matter.

Orbit. It applies to space stations that will terminate their mission in, or pass through, low Earth orbit below 2,000 km, and that plan uncontrolled atmospheric reentry. Geostationary disposal continues to be handled by the graveyard orbit requirement, which is a separate obligation and the one DISH failed, as we discuss in our case note on that consent decree.

Reach. It applies both to systems licensed by the FCC and to non-US systems granted access to the US market. This is the important commercial point. A non-US constellation that wants to sell service in the United States takes on the obligation.

Timing. The order was adopted in September 2022 but the rule became effective on 9 September 2024 with compliance required from 29 September 2024, following the standard Paperwork Reduction Act sequence. Satellites already on orbit are exempt. Systems that were authorised but not yet launched had a two year grandfathering window running from adoption. Anything launched after 29 September 2024 complies or does not fly.

Why five years and not zero

Five years is not a physics number. It is a compromise between two positions.

Operators argued for a longer window on cost grounds. Deorbit capability is mass, mass is money, and for a cubesat the propulsion needed to guarantee a rapid deorbit can be a meaningful fraction of the spacecraft.

Debris researchers argued that even five years leaves a long tail. The relevant risk is not one dead satellite. It is the aggregate population of uncontrolled objects in the shells where constellations operate, and the probability that any two of them meet.

The Commission landed on five years plus a “as soon as practicable” obligation, which does real work. An operator that can deorbit in one year cannot elect to take five.

What it means for an application

For most operators the rule does not change the application form so much as the engineering that has to sit behind it. Three things need to be demonstrable at filing.

Disposal capability

Either propulsive deorbit, a drag device, or an orbit low enough that natural decay does the job inside five years. Natural decay is the cheapest route and it is why so many smallsat constellations cluster below about 550 km. Above roughly 600 km, passive compliance stops being realistic.

Reliability

The FCC expects a stated post-mission disposal reliability. If a percentage of the constellation is going to fail before disposal, that has to be in the analysis, and for large constellations a small failure rate is a large absolute number.

Casualty risk

Uncontrolled reentry raises human casualty risk on the ground. The working threshold used across the US agencies is one in ten thousand for a given reentry event, and design for demise is the usual answer.

Where the FCC has gone since

The five year rule now sits inside a much larger overhaul. In October 2025 the Commission proposed replacing Part 25 wholesale with a new Part 100, and on 22 July 2026 it adopted a Report and Order, FCC 26-47, doing exactly that.

The headline changes for operators are procedural rather than substantive on debris: a uniform 15 day public notice period, a 30 day deadline for the Commission either to put an application on public notice or say what is missing, a 60 day decision deadline after comments close, a stated presumption in favour of granting conforming applications, voluntary annual NGSO processing rounds, $10 million surety bonds for processing round applicants declining to zero at 90 percent deployment, and 20 year licence terms as standard.

Part 25 remains in force until the Space Bureau announces the effective date of Part 100 by public notice. Until then, cite Part 25.

The honest assessment

The five year rule is the most consequential unilateral debris measure any regulator has taken, and it was taken by a communications regulator using its licensing power rather than by a space agency or a treaty body. That is worth sitting with.

It also shows the limits of that route. The FCC can only reach systems it licenses or that want US market access. It cannot reach a constellation that never sells into the United States, and it has no jurisdiction over the objects already up there, which is where the accumulated risk lives.

The short version

• On 2 October 2023 the FCC Enforcement Bureau entered a consent decree with DISH Network, DA 23-888, including a $150,000 civil penalty.
• The satellite was EchoStar-7, a direct broadcast spacecraft in geostationary orbit.
• DISH’s approved plan required retirement to roughly 300 km above the geostationary arc. It reached about 122 km.
• It was the first orbital debris enforcement action of its kind, and it settled a point that had been theoretical until then: a debris mitigation plan filed with an application is an enforceable licence condition.

For years the standard advice on orbital debris compliance ran something like this. The rules are real, but enforcement is unlikely, and the practical consequence of a disposal shortfall is reputational rather than financial.

That advice stopped being right on 2 October 2023.

What happened

EchoStar-7 was a geostationary direct broadcast satellite. Under the orbital debris mitigation plan DISH had filed with the FCC, and which formed part of its authorisation, the satellite was to be retired to a graveyard orbit approximately 300 kilometres above the geostationary arc at end of life.

Graveyard disposal is the standard practice for geostationary spacecraft. The arc at 35,786 km is a single ring and a finite resource. A dead satellite left in or near it is a permanent hazard to the working satellites around it, and unlike a low Earth orbit object it will not decay.

DISH began the retirement manoeuvre and found it did not have enough propellant to complete it. The satellite ended up at roughly 122 kilometres above the arc, well short of the required altitude and in a regime where it could pose a debris and collision risk.

The legal move

The Enforcement Bureau’s Order and Consent Decree, DA 23-888, found violations of the Communications Act, the Commission’s rules, and the terms of DISH’s licence.

That third limb is the one that mattered. The disposal plan was not guidance and it was not a policy aspiration. DISH had filed it, the Commission had relied on it in granting authority, and it was therefore a condition of the licence in the same way as a power limit or a coverage obligation.

The consent decree included an admission of liability, a compliance plan, and payment of a $150,000 civil penalty.

Why the number is not the point

$150,000 is not a meaningful sum to DISH Network. Anyone reading the penalty as a deterrent has misread the case.

The significance is elsewhere, in three parts.

The theory was tested

Before October 2023 it was an academic proposition that end-of-life disposal commitments were enforceable. After it, it was a documented outcome with an admission of liability attached. That changes how the commitment is drafted, reviewed and disclosed.

Fuel margin became a compliance question

The failure here was not a decision to skip disposal. It was running out of propellant. Fuel budgeting at end of life is an engineering trade-off between extending revenue service and retaining disposal margin, and every geostationary operator makes it.

After DISH, that trade-off has a regulatory dimension. An operator that stretches service life and then cannot complete disposal is not merely unlucky. It has breached a licence condition, and the decision to extend service is documented in its own records.

It travels

The reasoning is not specific to geostationary orbit or to DISH. Any disposal or debris commitment filed with any FCC application is exposed to the same analysis, including the five year post-mission disposal obligation for low Earth orbit spacecraft that took effect for launches after 29 September 2024. We cover that rule in a separate piece.

What it did not decide

It is worth being precise about the limits, because the case gets over-read.

It was a consent decree, not a litigated decision. There is no reasoned opinion working through the elements, no contested findings and no appellate treatment. Its authority is as a statement of enforcement posture, not as precedent in the strict sense.

It says nothing about liability to third parties. Nobody was harmed by EchoStar-7’s position. Had another operator suffered damage, the route would have been the Liability Convention’s fault standard between states, which is a very different and much harder problem, as we discuss in our piece on debris liability.

And it remains, as at August 2026, the only enforcement action of its kind. Searching for a comparable FCC space debris or space licensing enforcement action in 2025 or 2026 turns up nothing at the same level. One case in nearly three years is a signal, not a programme.

The practical takeaway

For operators, three things follow.

First, treat the debris mitigation plan in an application as a contractual commitment, because functionally that is what it is. Draft it with the same care as a covenant, and do not describe capability you are not confident of retaining.

Second, build disposal margin into the fuel budget as a hard reserve rather than a target, and document the reserve policy. If a decision is later taken to draw on it, that decision should be recorded and its regulatory consequence considered at the time.

Third, if disposal is going to fall short, the position is better with early disclosure to the Bureau than with a completed manoeuvre and a subsequent investigation. The consent decree route exists precisely because the Commission prefers cooperation to litigation.

The short version

• The Liability Convention has two regimes. Absolute liability for damage on Earth or to aircraft in flight, fault liability for damage in orbit.
• It never defines fault, and there are no orbital rules of the road, which is why it has never been formally invoked for an on-orbit collision.
• Only one claim has ever been brought under it, by Canada against the USSR over Cosmos 954 in 1978, and it settled.
• In practice, debris risk is managed through licence conditions and insurance, not through the Convention.

In February 2009 a defunct Russian military communications satellite, Cosmos 2251, struck the operational Iridium 33 at a closing speed of around 11.7 kilometres per second. Both were destroyed. The event produced thousands of trackable fragments, many of which are still in orbit.

It was the clearest possible test case for the international liability regime governing collisions in space. No claim was brought.

Understanding why is the fastest route to understanding what the regime actually does.

Two regimes, one convention

The Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects entered into force on 1 September 1972 and had 100 states parties as at 1 January 2026. It gives content to Article VII of the Outer Space Treaty, and it splits damage in two.

Article II. Absolute liability. A launching state is absolutely liable to pay compensation for damage caused by its space object on the surface of the Earth or to aircraft in flight. No fault is required. If a stage lands on a farm, the launching state pays.

Article III. Fault liability. Where damage is caused elsewhere than on the surface of the Earth to a space object of another launching state, the first state is liable only if the damage is due to its fault or the fault of persons for whom it is responsible.

The logic is defensible. People on the ground did not choose to be exposed to falling rockets, so they get strict liability. Satellite operators voluntarily entered a shared environment, so they get a fault standard.

The word the Convention never defines

Article III turns on fault. The Convention does not say what fault means in orbit.

There is no duty to manoeuvre. There is no right of way. There is no rule about which of two converging objects should move, no obligation to maintain propulsion for collision avoidance, no standard for how often an operator must screen conjunctions, no defined probability threshold at which action is required, and no obligation to respond to another operator’s contact attempt.

Compare that with the sea. The COLREGs run to a detailed code of who gives way to whom in what circumstances. A court assessing fault in a shipping collision has a rulebook to apply. A Claims Commission assessing fault in an orbital collision would be inventing the standard as it went.

For Cosmos 2251 and Iridium 33 the difficulty was even starker. Cosmos 2251 was a dead object with no manoeuvring capability. It could not have moved. Fault, if any, would have to attach to launching a satellite without end-of-life disposal capability decades earlier, or to the quality of conjunction warning at the time. Neither is a comfortable claim, and neither state wanted to establish a precedent it would later be measured against.

Who counts as a launching state

The Convention defines a launching state four ways, and they can all apply at once. A state that launches, a state that procures the launching, a state from whose territory an object is launched, and a state from whose facility an object is launched.

Under Article V, where two or more states jointly launch, they are jointly and severally liable. A claimant can pursue whichever is most convenient, and the launching states sort out apportionment between themselves.

For a modern mission this can be a long list. A satellite manufactured in one country, owned by a company incorporated in a second, procured by an entity in a third, launched from the territory of a fourth on a vehicle operated by a company from a fifth. The Convention has no tie breaker.

The Registration Convention was supposed to make this tractable by requiring launching states to register objects with the UN. It has 77 parties and compliance for smallsats has been inconsistent, so the register is not a complete answer to “whose object is that”.

The one claim ever brought

In January 1978 Cosmos 954, a Soviet radar ocean reconnaissance satellite with a nuclear reactor on board, reentered over the Northwest Territories and scattered radioactive debris across a wide area of northern Canada.

Canada presented a claim to the USSR in 1979 for approximately CAD 6 million, covering the cost of locating and recovering the debris. It relied on the Liability Convention and on general principles of international law.

The USSR disputed the basis. The matter settled in April 1981 for CAD 3 million, in a protocol that did not admit liability under the Convention.

That is the entire case law. One claim, on the absolute liability side, settled without a determination.

What happens instead

The regime that actually manages debris risk is national licensing, and it has moved fast while the treaty layer has not.

• The FCC now requires post-mission disposal within five years for spacecraft in low Earth orbit below 2,000 km, replacing the old 25 year guideline. We set out the detail in our piece on that rule.
• The FAA imposes debris analysis requirements through Part 450 and financial responsibility through Part 440.
• ESA has moved to a five year expectation in its own debris mitigation policy, and the proposed EU Space Act would put debris mitigation and end-of-life disposal into a binding EU instrument.
• The IADC guidelines and ISO 24113 supply the technical baseline that most of these regimes draw on.

The enforcement point is worth emphasising. A debris mitigation plan filed with a licence application becomes an enforceable condition of that licence. That is how the FCC reached DISH Network in October 2023 over a geostationary disposal failure, in the first ever orbital debris enforcement action. We cover it in our case note.

Insurance does the rest. In-orbit cover responds to loss of the satellite, and third-party liability cover responds to claims by others, which for a US licensee is sized to a maximum probable loss determination.

Would a claim work today?

Suppose a functioning European satellite is destroyed tomorrow by a fragment traceable to a specific state’s object. Would a Liability Convention claim succeed?

The claimant state would need to establish, first, that the fragment came from the respondent’s object, which is genuinely hard for anything below about 10 centimetres. Second, that the respondent was at fault, against a standard that does not exist. Third, it would have to want the precedent, because the standard the Commission articulated would then apply to its own operators.

Article XIX(2) supplies the last disincentive. The Claims Commission’s award is final and binding only if the parties have agreed that it will be. Otherwise it is a recommendation.

None of this means the Convention is worthless. It supplies the strict liability rule that makes launch insurance pricing tractable, and it establishes that states are answerable, which shapes how they license. But anyone expecting it to function as a compensation mechanism for orbital collisions is reading a different document.