Purpose In light of the discussions on outer space property management, this conceptual review paper aims to discuss and evaluate if, when and under which conditions certain land management and property right frameworks can apply to allocate and/or restrict property rights in outer space. Design/methodology/approach This paper applies a pragmatic review approach which seeks to better understand if and how the basic tenets of the land management frameworks could better shape and revise the challenges in outer space regulations. Findings Despite the fact that regulatory guidelines on outer space rights are existing, the analysis shows that these lack a number of practical tools and measures aiming at intervening if stakeholders do not follow the rules. With the use of land management frameworks, it is possible to derive policy options for making the outer space management more practical and action-oriented, in particular for the removal of space debris. These include amongst others more attention for formulating global public restrictions in outer space, incorporating regulatory guidelines for accessing open space regimes, addressing responsiveness and robustness in adherence and compliance to regulations Research limitations/implications Given the conceptual and discursive character of the paper, there are no specific empirical data, yet several recommendations for further research include expanding the boundary work between the land management and regulatory outer space domain. Practical implications The insights derived from land management and real estate related property theories could potentially provide new starting points for (re)formulating the regulatory framework for outer space property discourses. Social implications Interpreting the outer space regulations from known and practiced land management perspective helps to bridge the policy–society knowledge and necessity gap on outer space activities. Originality/value The specific land management perspective and discursive analysis on outer space debris provide new options for devising and extending regulatory guidelines for assigning responsibilities on outer space debris and debris rights, restrictions and responsibilities.

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<p>Since 2010s, many companies such as SpaceX, OneWeb, Amazon and Samsung showed their interests to launch hundreds and even thousands of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites for global internet service. Due to their unique characteristics compared to medium Earth orbit (MEO) and geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) satellites, these LEO mega-constellations soon draw much attention from the scientific community. Studies from constellation design, to applications such as positioning, ionosphere modelling and gravity recovery are investigated by many researchers.</p><p>Orbit determination is a key to many applications. Traditionally, onboard Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers are used to determine LEO satellite orbits. However, with thousands of satellites in space in the future, an independent system without relying on GNSS is worth to be studied. Since these LEO satellites are intended for internet service, connections between the satellites and to the ground are available by nature. But how would the distribution of a station network affect the orbit accuracy? How many stations would be sufficient to determine a precise orbit? Besides observations from ground stations, inter-satellite link (ISL) is also proposed and implemented by many current GNSSs. It already showed its potential to improve the orbits. Could this technique also be applied to the orbit determination of LEO satellites?</p><p>This simulation study investigates the influence of ground station distribution to orbit determination, as well as the benefit from ISL observations. By using a constellation with 60 LEO satellites, we show that for regional station networks, a high latitude network leads to worse orbit accuracy than a middle or low latitude network. With the help of ISL observations, orbit errors reach the same level as a global station network. We further investigate the influence of different number of stations contained in the network. The results prove that although increasing the station number could improve orbits, the improvement is minimal when the global network contains more than 16 stations. While for a regional network, even with 60 stations, the orbit errors are 1.5 times larger than for a small global network with 6 stations. This proves that the ground station distribution is more important than the number of observations. Furthermore, if the ISL technique is adopted, even a regional station network with 16 stations could be sufficient to determine an accurate orbit.</p>

<p>An accurate model of all the forces acting on a satellite is an essential precondition of achieving high orbit accuracy. Solar radiation pressure (SRP), the largest non-gravitational perturbation for GNSS satellites is typically modeled by an empirical model (i.e., Empirical CODE Orbit Model, ECOM/ECOM2). If satellite metadata information is available, an analytical box-wing model can be formed to reinforce the ECOM models. However, the current GNSS satellite orbits show notable degradation during eclipse seasons in particular for long-arc solutions and orbit predictions. The reason is proven to be mostly due to the ignoring of the thermal imbalanced forces (i.e., radiator emission and thermal radiation of solar panels). The ECOM parameters can compensate these thermal radiation forces fairly well outside eclipse seasons, while this is not true when satellites are inside eclipse seasons, because the Earth’s shadowing of a satellite in orbit causes periodic changes of the thermal environment. On one hand, these thermal imbalanced forces contribute also inside the shadow while inside the shadow all the ECOM parameters are deactivated. On the other hand, satellite attitude could be far from the nominal inside the shadow, making that these thermal imbalanced forces cannot be well absorbed by the ECOM parameters. To capture these thermal forces, we set up physical thermal force models for each Block type of GNSS satellites. In the absence of published thermal properties, we estimate necessary thermal modeling parameters using tracking data over long time period. With the use of the physical thermal force models, satellite orbits inside eclipse seasons are greatly improved. For instance, orbit misclosures are improved by a factor of two for BDS-3 and Galileo satellites when using the 5-parameter ECOM model.</p>