20.07.2026
Gernot Fritz, Amina Kovacevic
European space law is currently undergoing a fundamental regulatory shift, and orbital sustainability is one of the areas where this transformation is most apparent. While the European Commission’s original proposal for the EU Space Act of 25 June 2025 already contained a detailed catalogue of technical debris-mitigation and traffic obligations, the current Council compromise text of 30 March 2026, the Cyprus Compromise Proposal, goes considerably further. It tightens reporting duties, adds new environmental safeguards for the end of a spacecraft’s life, and (most importantly) replaces a largely declaratory provision on “orbital traffic rules” with an operational priority regime for collision avoidance that has no real precedent in binding EU law.
This is the first of two posts on the sustainability chapter of the EU Space Act. It examines the new obligations relating to debris mitigation, trackability, manoeuvrability and collision avoidance and the new orbital traffic rules. A second post will address the environmental footprint and life-cycle-assessment obligations, in-space servicing, and the voluntary Union Space Label.
Debris Mitigation, Trackability and Manoeuvrability
Articles 59 to 74 of the compromise text form the operational core of orbital sustainability under the EU Space Act. They lay down binding minimum requirements to prevent the creation of space debris, ensure the traceability of orbital activities, and to reduce collision risks – areas where instruments such as the UN Long-Term Sustainability Guidelines and the IADC Debris Mitigation Guidelines have so far offered only non-binding recommendations. What has changed since the Commission’s original proposal is not so much the basic architecture of these rules, which is largely unchanged, but their operational depth.
Trackability: from a design standard to a live data feed
Under the Commission proposal, Article 63 simply required spacecraft to “possess the technical means” to allow trackability and precise orbital positioning. The compromise text in the revised Article 63 softens the design requirement: trackability may now be ensured either through the operator’s own technical means or by relying on external sources. At the same time, it adds two entirely new obligations that did not exist in the original text.
Operators must transmit up-to-date ephemerides and covariances to the “Union CA entity” as soon as possible after injection into orbit, and ground-segment systems must be able to produce daily orbital forecasts, including planned manoeuvres, in a recognised data format. In other words, trackability is no longer merely a spacecraft design feature; it becomes an ongoing data-supply obligation vis-á-vis the Union’s collision-avoidance infrastructure.
Manoeuvrability: same threshold, sharper purpose
The 400 km apogee threshold above which spacecraft must be manoeuvrable is unchanged (Article 63a, formerly Article 66). What has changed is the framing: the compromise text ties manoeuvrability directly to the ability to respond “without delay” to a high interest event alert under the new Article 65a discussed below, rather than to a general reference to Annex IV. Manoeuvrability capability is therefore no longer just a static design attribute – it is defined by reference to the operator’s ability to participate in the collision-avoidance procedure established by the Council text.
Collision avoidance: free by law, but far more transparent
Article 64 already required Union spacecraft operators to subscribe to collision-avoidance services under the Commission proposal. The compromise text now makes explicit that these services are provided “for free” by the Union CA entity – a clarification with real commercial relevance, since it forecloses any argument that Member States or the Agency could later charge for access to core collision-avoidance data. At the same time, the reporting obligations owed by operators to the Union CA entity become substantially more granular.
Where the Commission proposal spoke broadly of “any planned changes to the operation,” the compromise text requires notification without delay of specific events: changes to active or manoeuvrability status, exceptional operations affecting orbit or manoeuvrability, changes to the re-entry method, and any action taken in response to a high interest event alert. For compliance teams, this means that collision-avoidance reporting shifts from a general duty to disclose changes to a defined checklist of trigger events.
Re-entry becomes an environmental issue, not only a safety one
Perhaps the most substantive addition concerns re-entry (Article 65). The Commission proposal focused entirely on coordination with air and maritime traffic authorities. The compromise text retains that coordination duty but adds three new elements.
First, operators of LEO spacecraft must now register with the Union entity in charge of re-entry services before they may rely on it. Second, operators must analyse the environmental risk posed by substances that might survive re-entry and ensure that “there is no unacceptable risk” – an obligation that did not exist in the Commission text. Third, spacecraft that cannot perform a controlled re-entry as planned must be passivated, provided that this can be done safely, promptly and in a controlled manner.
Re-entry is thus reframed from a purely air-safety issue into a genuine environmental-protection obligation, mirroring the broader shift in the Regulation’s title from “safety and resilience” to “safety, resilience and sustainability.”
Light and radio pollution: from a hard legal threshold to a standardisation mandate
A more nuanced but equally important change concerns light and radio pollution. The Commission proposal fixed a concrete quantitative standard directly in the operative text: spacecraft had to maintain a visual magnitude of at least 7 throughout their lifetime (Article 72). The compromise text drops this hard-coded threshold.
The renamed Article 72 (“Optical or electromagnetic interference”) instead requires operators to establish a mitigation plan and mandates the Commission to request European standardisation organisations to draft harmonised standards on low-reflectivity coatings and shielding, following the standardisation procedure under Article 112a.
This constitutes a genuine shift in regulatory technique – from a fixed legislative benchmark to a co-regulatory standardisation process – with clear trade-offs: greater flexibility and technological neutrality, but also a delay before operators know exactly which brightness limits they must meet, since compliance now depends on standards that have yet to be adopted.
Constellations: simpler tiers, same substance
Finally, the compromise text simplifies the constellation regime. The Commission proposal distinguished between “constellations,” “mega-constellations” and “giga-constellations” without always specifying numerical thresholds in the operative articles. Article 73 of the compromise text replaces this approach with clear numerical tiers – additional obligations apply to constellations of 10 satellites, and a further, stricter layer applies to constellations of 100 satellites. The substantive requirements relating to propulsion systems, orbit-choice criteria, disposal proportionality, propellant planning remain essentially unchanged.
A Genuine Priority Regime for Collision Avoidance
The most significant structural change in the entire sustainability chapter concerns orbital traffic rules. Under the Commission proposal, Article 68 was little more than a placeholder: operators had to comply with the “orbital traffic and coordination requirements” of Annex IV, and the Commission was empowered to specify collision-avoidance requirements by way of future implementing acts. In substance, this left the actual rules of the road for orbit almost entirely unwritten.
The compromise text replaces this provision with a new, self-contained Article 65a, “Orbital traffic rules in case of high interest event.” For the first time, EU legislation sets out an operational sequence for resolving a concrete collision risk between two manoeuvrable spacecraft.
The starting point is a set of three binding principles that must guide any collision-avoidance manoeuvre (CAM): the manoeuvre must give utmost account to the protection of crewed vehicles, reduce the initial collision risk by at least one order of magnitude below the manoeuvre threshold, and not create unreasonable risks of secondary conjunctions.
How the manoeuvre is agreed then depends on the status of the two operators involved. Where both spacecraft are registered with the Union CA entity, the operators must first seek to agree on a CAM strategy themselves, with the entity’s support, within a reasonable period. If no agreement is reached, the Union CA entity recommends a strategy, applying a harmonised standard that the Commission is separately mandated to commission from European standardisation bodies.
Where only one of the two operators is registered, the Union CA entity is required to establish contact with the unregistered operator. If contact succeeds, the entity facilitates the exchange of collision-risk data and helps determine the best joint manoeuvre. If contact fails, or cannot be established within a reasonable time, the Union CA entity unilaterally recommends a strategy to the registered operator that at least complies with the three guiding principles, and shares that recommendation with the competent national authority on request.
This cascading procedure functions, in effect, as the first binding “rules of the road” for orbit under EU law – closer in structure to a maritime or aviation right-of-way regime than to the largely voluntary coordination practices that have governed collision avoidance to date.
It is also the clearest illustration of the central role that the Union CA entity has assumed within the entire sustainability chapter: because subscription to its (now expressly free) services is mandatory under Article 64, and because the priority mechanism under Article 65a is built around registration with that same entity, the Union CA entity functions as something close to a de facto air traffic controller for EU-regulated orbital activity.
Two points are worth flagging for operators and their advisers. First, the standardisation mandate under Article 65a(6a), covering criteria such as crewed-vehicle protection, constellation membership, manoeuvre capacity, spacecraft age, orbital eccentricity and mission criticality, means that important operational details will again be filled in after adoption, through European harmonised standards rather than through the Regulation itself.
Second, the regime’s effectiveness in relation to non-EU or unregistered operators depends entirely on the more fragile, ad hoc “contact” procedure, which raises practical questions about how collision risks involving third-country satellites will actually be managed once the Regulation applies.
Outlook
Taken together, these changes indicate a clear direction of travel: the Council compromise does not merely restate the Commission’s original debris-mitigation and traffic framework; rather, it operationalises it. Reporting duties become more specific, re-entry gains an explicit environmental dimension, and most notably the orbital traffic rules move from a one-line reference to Annex IV to a detailed, principle-based priority mechanism centred on the Union CA entity.
Much of the remaining technical detail, from brightness limits to CAM-priority standards, will only be settled once the corresponding implementing acts and harmonised standards have been adopted, so the practical stringency of the regime is not yet fully determined.
The second post in this series will turn to the more market-facing aspects of the sustainability chapter: the environmental footprint and life-cycle-assessment obligations, the treatment of in-space operations and services, and the voluntary Union Space Label.
If your organisation operates, manufactures for, or invests in space infrastructure, the practical question will increasingly be how these debris-mitigation, re-entry and collision-avoidance duties translate into mission design, operational procedures and contracts with suppliers and launch providers. We are happy to support you in addressing these issues.
