Today, 22 April is Earth Day, an annual event (since 1970) commemorating our love of nature and the environment and our commitment to such public goods as clean air and clean water, but what about outer space, especially Low Earth Orbit or LEO? (See, for instance, this 2023 report by Shelli Brunswick titled “This Earth Day, Don’t Forget About Space”.) Among other things, LEO is becoming congested with space debris; according to Wikipedia (links and footnotes omitted),

This [congestion] has caused growing concern in recent years, since collisions at orbital velocities can be dangerous or deadly. Collisions can produce additional space debris, creating a domino effect known as Kessler syndrome. NASA’s Orbital Debris Program tracks over 25,000 objects larger than 10 cm diameter in LEO, while the estimated number between 1 and 10 cm is 500,000, and the number of particles bigger than 1 mm exceeds 100 million. The particles travel at speeds up to 7.8 km/s (28,000 km/h; 17,500 mph), so even a small impact can severely damage a spacecraft.

As it happens, recent technological advances in small satellites, lower launch costs, and innovative satellite applications will most likely increase the levels of space congestion and space debris in the years to come. Add to this volatile mix the fact that outer space is also a military zone, one that is vital to U.S. national security and the global balance of power, including the competition in outer space among China, Russia, and the United States. As I mentioned in a previous post, for example, earlier this month both the Department of Defense and the U.S. Space Force published new policies (see here and here) calling for the U.S. military and various U.S. national security agencies to procure some of the services and systems they need for their outer space operations from private commercial providers. Neither report, however, addresses the problems of space congestion and space debris.

So, how should we solve this veritable tragedy of the outer space commons without stifling innovation or endangering our national security? How can spacefaring countries like China, Russia, and the U.S. harmonize their competing uses of Low Earth Orbit in a peaceful, efficient, fair, and safe way? To this end, my colleague and friend Justin Evans and I want to make a modest proposal: Why not an LEO market or a system of space auctions? (See here, for example.) That is, what if countries like China, Russia, and the United States had well-defined property rights in outer space, and what if those rights could be traded? We will survey the new DoD, USSF, and Rand reports (see above) and explain our proposal in greater detail in our next few posts.