18.08.2026
Gernot Fritz, Amina Kovacevic
This is the second of two posts on the sustainability chapter of the EU Space Act. The first post looked at the debris-mitigation, trackability and orbital-traffic rules. This post turns to the parts of the sustainability chapter that reach beyond pure orbital behaviour: the mandatory environmental footprint of space activities, the framework for in-space operations and services (ISOS), and the treatment of the Commission’s proposed “Union Space Label.” As with the first post, the comparison is between the European Commission’s original proposal for the EU Space Act of 25 June 2025 and the Council’s Cyprus Compromise Proposal of 30 March 2026.
Where the first post showed the Council text operationalising and tightening the EU Space Act’s orbital rules, this post tells a more mixed story. The environmental footprint regime is narrowed and simplified rather than expanded. The ISOS framework keeps its mandatory serviceability requirement but drops the standardisation ambition underpinning interoperability in practice. And the Commission’s market-based incentive – the voluntary Union Space Label – has been removed from the operative provisions of the compromise text.
Environmental Footprint and Life-Cycle Assessment: a narrower, self-declared standard
Articles 96 to 100 introduce a new regulatory layer for space activities: a mandatory Environmental Footprint (EF), based on a Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology, covering a mission from design and manufacturing through operation to end of life. In this respect, the basic architecture is unchanged between the Commission proposal and the Council compromise. What has changed is its reach and its evidentiary rigour.
The Commission proposal required Union space operators to calculate the EF for “the space activities they carry out”. In principle, all activities within the Regulation’s scope. The compromise text narrows this to “the space activities subject to EUSA certification” (Article 96(2)). This is a substantive narrowing: activities that fall within the Regulation but are not subject to certification are no longer automatically caught by the EF obligation.
The Commission proposal built a two-layer verification structure: operators had to produce an Environmental Footprint Declaration (EFD) and, separately, obtain an EF certificate issued by a “qualified technical body” carrying out independent technical assessment, verification and validation (Article 98). The compromise text drops Article 98 entirely. There is no longer a third-party EF certificate in the text at all. The detailed content requirements for the EFD itself (name, trade name, type of activity, EF performance class, and so on, formerly Article 96(7)) are likewise removed, replaced by a shorter, more general filing obligation: operators must submit the EF study, the underlying datasets, and proof that those datasets were transmitted to the Commission (Article 96(6)). In substance, the compromise text therefore shifts from independently verified environmental disclosure towards a self-declaration-based regime, at least at this stage of the negotiations.
The Commission proposal expressly obliged operators to require, by contract, that their suppliers provide the data needed to calculate the EF (Article 96(3)) – thereby ensuring that life-cycle data would flow down complex, often extra-EU supply chains. That obligation is not carried over into the compromise text. Operators still need the underlying data to comply with Article 96(2), but the Regulation no longer specifies how they must secure that data vis-à-vistheir suppliers.
The data-infrastructure elements of the regime remain largely unchanged. Operators must still transmit aggregated and disaggregated datasets to the Commission before certification (Article 99), the Commission still integrates these into a public EF-related database and may use the disaggregated data to inform policymaking and generate derived datasets (Article 100), and operators keep full ownership of their transmitted data while the Union acquires exclusive worldwide IP rights in anything the Commission derives from them. The transparency infrastructure thereforesurvives. The independent verification layer does not.
A new "light regime" for research, education and SMEs
The Commission proposal exempted small enterprises and research and education institutions from the entire EF regime until 31 December 2031 (former Article 96(8)). The compromise text removes this provision from Article 96 itself, but retains and expands the exemption in a newly created Chapter IVa on the “light regime.” The new Article 101b grants research and education institutions and SMEs an unconditional exemption from the environmental-sustainability chapter for In-Orbit Demonstration and Validation (IOD/IOV) activities, and keeps the transitional exemption until 31 December 2031 for all their other space activities.
Read together with the parallel light-regime provision for manoeuvrability and end-of-life obligations (Article 101a), the effect is to consolidate exemptions that were previously scattered across individual provisions into a dedicated chapter. For smaller operators, this makes the structure of the applicable exemptions considerably easier to identify.
In-Space Operations and Services: mandatory serviceability without common interface standards
Article 101 keeps the core approach of the Commission proposal: from 1 January 2034, Union space operators providing or receiving in-space operations and services (ISOS) (including refuelling, repair, reconfiguration, and the removal of debris or malfunctioning objects) must comply with dedicated requirements, and larger Union-owned assets must be built to receive such services.
The compromise text also clarifies the applicable threshold: rather than referring to spacecraft “above the mini-satellite class,” it states the applicable weight threshold directly – 600 kg – which corresponds to the upper boundary of the “mini-satellite class” as defined elsewhere in the text, so this appears to be a clarification rather than a substantive change in scope. The requirement to fit dedicated Spacecraft Service Interfaces (SSI) and a cooperative operational mode is retained, now folded into a single paragraph (Article 101(2)) instead of being spread across several.
What has not survived is the standardisation ambition that underpinned the Commission’s ISOS chapter. The Commission proposal empowered the Commission to adopt implementing acts laying down design principles not only for the mandatory SSIs, but also for “Composable and Exchangeable Functional Satellite Modules” (satAPPs), i.e. modular, interoperable in-orbit servicing hardware that could be swapped between missions and providers. That entire limb (former Article 101(5)) is absent from the compromise text.
Union-owned assets above the threshold still have to be serviceable, but the Regulation no longer commits the Commission to developing the common technical interfaces that would make servicing interoperable across providers. For a market based on reducing the need for new launches and extending the useful life of existing infrastructure through shared servicing capability, this is a meaningful gap. Whether it will be addressed again in the further legislative negotiations remains open.
The Union Space Label: removed from the operative text
The most significant change in this part of the Regulation is the deletion of an entire regulatory instrument. The Commission proposal dedicated an entire chapter (Title VI, Chapter II, Articles 111 and 112) to a voluntary “Union Space Label,” awarded by the Agency to operators who go beyond the Regulation’s minimum requirements on debris risk, safety, light and radio pollution, resilience, ISOS-readiness and environmental impact. The proposal provided graduated protection levels (“basic,” “substantial,” “high”) intended to function as a recognisable market signal, including in particular for procurement and funding decisions.
In the Council compromise text, this chapter is gone. Articles 111 and 112 no longer exist as such: the position in the numbering they occupied is now taken by a single, generic Article 112a on “Standards,” which instead empowers the Commission to request harmonised standards from European standardisation bodies under the usual New Legislative Framework mechanism. The provision has no connection to a voluntary labelling scheme, awarded protection levels, or market differentiation.
The only trace of the original Chapter II left in the compromise text is a single, apparently outdated cross-reference in a recital on implementing powers, which still mentions “templates for the Union Space Label Schemes”. This appears to be a drafting remnant rather than a substantive provision, consistent with the Presidency’s own note that article numbering and cross-references are not finalised until the end of negotiations.
Whether this reflects a deliberate political choice to prioritise a leaner text or an interim casualty of the Council’s internal negotiations is not something the compromise text itself reveals. Either way, in the Council compromise of 30 March 2026, the EU Space Act’s market-based sustainability incentive has disappeared from the Council’s operative text, leaving mandatory minimum compliance as the principal lever the Regulation currently pulls on sustainability.
Given that Parliament has not yet finalised its own position and trilogue negotiations lie ahead, this is unlikely to be the last word. For the time being, however, operators hoping to use a “Union Space Label” as a market differentiator, or investors treating it as a due-diligence proxy, should not build plans around a mechanism that, in the current Council text, does not exist.
Outlook
Taken together with the changes described in our first post, a clear distinction emerges. Where orbital behaviour is concerned, debris mitigation, trackability, collision avoidance, and orbital traffic rules, the Council compromise adds detail and operational specificity. Where sustainability moves into environmental measurement and market-based incentives, the compromise text takes a more restrained approach: narrower EF scope, no independent EF certification, no supplier data-flow-down duty, no modular ISOS interoperability standard, and, most visibly, no Union Space Label.
Whether this asymmetry survives the further legislative negotiations – or whether some of the elements removed by the Council are reintroduced – will be a central question for the sustainability framework of the final EU Space Act.
If your organisation is preparing environmental footprint methodologies, structuring in-space servicing offerings, or was counting on a future Union Space Label as part of its market positioning, the practical question now is how to plan around a regime that remains under negotiation. We are happy to support you in assessing the implications for your operations, contracts and market strategy.
