As someone who regularly devotes hours creating a single footnote for an academic manuscript, I am grateful to get any sort of public recognition. I received the 2025 Distinguished Researcher Award from the Pacific Telecommunications Council, a non-profit membership organization committed to advancing digital infrastructure, telecommunications, and ICT globally, with focus on the Pacific Rim.
Best of all, I got something far
better than the usual lucite tombstone or recognition award:
My current research agenda focuses on the growing threats to space commerce from space debris, the growing risk that space will become weaponized as a new theater of warfare, anti-satellite testing, spacecraft collisions, atmospheric pollution, unenforceable treaties, and regulatory uncertainty. The papers are available at: https://hq.ssrn.com/submissions/MyPapers.cfm?partid=102928
Here are the two abstracts:
Dangers From the Regulatory Vacuums in Outer, Inner, and Near Space
Space, "the final frontier," has become an attractive, but increasingly risky market for both public and private investments. Gold rush enthusiasm anticipates solutions to the Digital Divide via small low earth orbiting satellites, extraction of valuable minerals from asteroids, a vibrant space launch and tourism industry, and expanding earth observation opportunities. Such entrepreneurial boldness juxtaposes with a severe lag in government oversight, consumer safeguards, and essential operational guardrails. The ambitious plans of Elon Musk and other space entrepreneurs could fail, despite recent market success, as SpaceX’s plans for 148 rocket launches in 2024.
Without substantial refinement of global space treaties and effective national regulation, expanding and imprudent use of space resources could trigger "the tragedy of the commons," rendering the most valuable regions of space unusable. Satellites could collide, or strike orbiting debris at extremely high speeds. Accidental collisions are more likely in a crowded orbital region, such as 200-1200 miles above earth where low earth orbiting satellites operate
A much more costly calamity can occur when a valuable, fully operational satellite collides with space debris, such as a deactivated satellite, or when it becomes a target in a test of anti-satellite (“ASAT”) technology. The likelihood of a space object collisions increases substantially when space faring nations and private ventures do not nudge no longer useful objects upward, farther into deep space, or on a downward trajectory toward earth that would guarantee complete vaporization. The testing and future use of ASAT technology risks “weaponizing” space, despite treaty-level commitments to use it solely for peaceful purposes, benefitting everyone.
This article explains how national governments have generated or tolerated the proliferation of space debris to potentially dangerous levels of space debris without penalty. It explains how intergovernmental agreements, such as the five space treaties administered by the United Nations, and the space/spectrum management agreements of the International Telecommunication Union, have not required space debris mitigation, nor sanctioned operators responsible for generating more space debris.
The failure to address and resolve proliferating space debris from ASATs and abandoned space objects will increase the potential for calamities that render space access too risky. The article identifies how intergovernmental agreements can mandate space debris mitigation, impose sanctions for noncompliance, and create financial incentives for recycling and removing existing debris.
Assessing the Impact of the Great Power Competition on Space Commerce
Just as space commerce appears to have reached a critical
mass, competing national government interests can thwart progress with strategies
and tactics that increase market risk, volatility, and uncertainty. Despite
universal support for a treaty-level commitment to pursue only peaceful
activities, for the benefit of everyone, unilateral actions by the governments
of China, Russia, the United States have the potential to disrupt markets and
even weaponize space. The five
international treaties on space-related activities cannot foreclose
weaponization of space as a likely new theater of warfare.
So-called
Great Power Competition has generated high stakes rivalry to retain or secure
supremacy in military, political, economic, and societal spheres. The battle for
a competitive advantage has the potential to reduce or even thwart continuing success
in space markets, because conflict and rivalry on earth includes an increasingly
volatile above ground component.
This paper assesses two conflicting trends. On one hand, space commerce in 2023 generated an estimated $630 billion in economic activity, rising to a potential $1.8 trillion by 2035. Low Earth Orbiting satellite constellations have the potential to bridge the Digital Divide by providing a reliable infrastructure for widely available and affordable broadband access, even in remote, rural, and impoverished locales throughout the world. Other developing market opportunities include development of a vibrant space launch and tourism industry, space exploration, colonization of the Moon and Mars and an expanded array of services via commercial satellites.
On the other hand, longstanding and emerging challenges in outer space may shift from chronic and unresolved, to acute and potentially catastrophic. National governments and private ventures can avoid triggering worst case scenarios only if they accept compulsory limits on space weapons testing and use, coupled with effective measures to reduce the risk of collisions with discarded or active spacecraft.
The paper identifies the most pressing and emerging quandaries, many of which result from a nation’s failure to comply with limitations on space activity broadly framed by space treaties entered into force over 40 years ago. Because governments of the world have not reached consensus on whether and how to modernize the treaties, the currently in force agreements do not address market entry by private ventures, lack an enforcement mechanism to compel compliance, and rely primarily on the good will of all countries to support noble aspirations that increasingly deviate from individual national interests.
Recent deployment of unconventional space objects by China and Russia point to near term use of technologies for enhanced surveillance, and disruption, or even destruction of quite valuable in-space assets. A national campaign to promote the acquisition of comparatively more power and leadership in space, by both the public and private sectors, can have consequences underappreciated in their severity.
The
paper also explains how emerging technologies and business plans contribute to
both revenue enhancement and greater risk of calamity. It offers specific
recommendations on what unconditional and immediate commitments national
governments and private ventures must make to avoid potential ruination of
space.
The network neutrality tennis match has been called in favor of the Republican Information Service team over Network Neutrality Democrats. Ventures providing broadband Internet access have no obligation to operate neutrally. And they have robust, unimpeachable First Amendment rights.
Information Service Providers, have every legal right to act as unneutral and biased as they want to be. That means no one—in a personal capacity, or on behalf of the federal government—can sanction participants in the Internet ecosystem on grounds they aren’t being fair and balanced, to repeat a past slogan. They hold themselves out as family friendly, truth agents, and block (censor!) any content they deem harmful to children, snowflakes, wokeheads, anti-wokeheads, et al.
This may come as a newsflash to some, but it should not for anyone with a baseline sense of what the First Amendment protects. Someone surely in the know, is upcoming FCC Chairman Brendan Carr. Yet he appears to have promised President Trump and Elon Musk that the FCC, under his leadership, will push the envelope on official disregard for the First Amendment.
Surely Chairman Carr knows the FCC has no statutory authority to punish broadcasters, social networks, or broadband operators from being woke, too liberal, anti-Trump, anti-Musk and whatnot.
Back in the day, First Amendment advocates did not cleave on a Democrat/Republican fulcrum. Now it appears that people who should know and embrace the First Amendment seem clueless.
The conservative majority in the Supreme Court has worked tirelessly to prevent regulatory agencies from using their expertise to assess how changed circumstances affect statutory authority. See, e.g., Loper Bright Enters. v. Raimondo, 144 S. Ct. 2244, 2266 (2024); available at: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-451_7m58.pdf; (overruling Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Nat. Res. Def. Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837 (1984); available at: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/467/837/.
While I appreciate that the FCC can
overreach, I worry that the Court has blithely ignored two serious problems it
has created:
1) It looks like the impact of non-deference
forecloses even independent regulatory agencies, like the FCC, from interpreting
laws that Congress did not, or could not future proof. For example, the last major amendment to baseline
telecommunications law occurred in 1996, with no assessment of how broadband
and the Internet fundamentally change information, communications, and entertainment
markets.
Rather than defer to the FCC’s
interpretation of ambiguous statutory authorization, the Court requires
explicit and properly tailored legislation.
Congress has developed a loathsome reputation for not assessing what
legislative amendments and additions are necessary and overdue. If Congress predictably fails to act, then
obsolete and quite probably harmful statutory language persists.
2) Court appears more inclined to use
non-deference as a basis for preventing regulatory agencies from expanding jurisdiction
to address new and potentially severe quandaries. It is easy to reverse an expansive or
re-regulatory initiative as the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals did in its
rejection of the Democratic majority FCC’s effort to interpret broadband access
as a telecommunications service. See https://www.opn.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/25a0002p-06.pdf.
Going forward, will courts apply non-deference
to regulatory expansion clearly responding to a problem, which not addressed
would trigger severe, quantifiable harm?
For example, the FCC has limited and
ambiguous authority to assess the environmental impacts of telecommunications
service providers. See https://www.fcc.gov/general/nepa-faq.
Reviewing courts and sponsored advocates already consider the scope of FCC space
environment oversight quite limited, See, e.g., https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/22-1337/22-1337-2024-07-12.html;
https://techfreedom.org/fcc-lacks-statutory-authority-and-expertise-for-outer-space-activities/,
despite the irrefutable fact that spacecraft reentry has significant, adverse
impact on the earth’s atmosphere and the pace of global warming. See, e.g., https://indico.esa.int/event/493/timetable/?view=standard_inline_minutes.
The vast increase in space launches and
injection of toxic gases and particles, including aluminum oxide, from space objects
reentering earth’s atmosphere raise questions about future sustainability of
space and the impact of on earth’s atmosphere. Even the complete
vaporization of space objects appears to have potentially hazardous impacts on
the environment below. “In a series of high-altitude research flights over
Alaska and the U.S. Midwest in March and April, researchers sampled
stratospheric air using specialized mass spectrometers. They discovered
surprising amounts of many metals commonly used in rockets and satellites,
often in ratios mirroring those found in specific high-performance aerospace
alloys. The investigation revealed that the metals are accumulating within
sulfuric acid particles, which constitute most of the stratosphere’s
particulates and influence our world’s ozone layer and climate.” Leonard David
& Lee Billings, Space Junk Is Polluting Earth’s Stratosphere with
Vaporized Metal, Scientific American (Oct. 26, 2023); https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/space-junk-is-polluting-earths-stratosphere-with-vaporized-metal/.
Would
any reviewing court affirm a decision of the FCC to expand its regulatory
oversight and require space ventures to assess the environmental impact of its vastly
expanded launch and spacecraft vaporization activities? I do not think so, particularly for any
venture led by Elon Musk. See https://ehtrust.org/federal-court-rules-in-favor-of-fcc-space-x-can-launch-thousands-of-satellites-without-environmental-review/
What court would risk being overturned by the Supreme Court for considering it rational and consistent with statutory authority for the FCC to make some assessment of the impact on earth from toxic emissions above?
