An International Environmental Agreement for space debris mitigation among asymmetric nations

Taxing congestion of the space commons

“…They focus on simulation results in an evolutionary framework where the collision risk evolves with time according to the past decisions. Singer and Musacchio (2011) analyze the cost-savings from deorbiting satellites after their mission lifetime. In their model, the costs and benefits are specified by estimations provided in the astronautic literature.…”

“…We consider an arbitrary large number of spacefaring agencies and firms that decide upon launching costly satellites with the risk that some will not be operational due to collisions. Our model accounts for the launching decisions contrary to Singer and Musacchio (2011) where the decisions are limited to deorbiting efforts, and the launching possibilities are a priori not restricted contrary to Klima et al (2016). The probability of failure of a satellite is evaluated by the probability of collision with another satellite.…”

“…A slightly more realistic approach leading to almost the same model as ours is discussed at the end of the article. Moreover, our model is flexible enough to take into account the specifications used in Singer and Musacchio (2011).…”

International cooperation and competition in orbit-use management

“…Prior work in this area has established several stylized facts: the inefficiency of decentralized orbit use (Adilov, Alexander and Cunningham, 2015;Rouillon, 2020); the importance of tipping points and decentralized rational actors' inability to avoid crossing them (Lewis, 2020;Rao and Rondina, 2022); and the potential for satellite tax-like policies to efficiently limit collision risk and debris accumulation while increasing the value generated by satellites (Rao, 2019;Rao, Burgess and Kaffine, 2020;Béal, Deschamps and Moulin, 2020). However, this literature has not yet considered how management policies can be structured given international open access and national competition for satellite services, and with the exception of Singer and Musacchio (2011) it has largely ignored the potential of debris abatement treaties.…”

“…Third, we contribute to the literature on self-enforcing international environmental treaties. Prior work in this area has considered how uncertainty over a catastrophe threshold affects treaty formation (Barrett, 2013;Barrett and Dannenberg, 2014) and even how a space debris abatement treaty could be structured (Singer and Musacchio, 2011). However, the literature…”