The FCC five-year post-mission disposal rule

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The rule by which the United States Federal Communications Commission shortened the expected post-mission disposal period for satellites ending their missions in low Earth orbit from twenty-five years to five, adopted on 29 September 2022 and phased into effect thereafter. Its significance is jurisdictional as much as environmental. The twenty-five-year figure it replaced came from the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee guidelines of 2002 and the United Nations guidelines that followed — instruments with no binding force, which states were free to implement or not. The FCC has binding force over anyone who wants to use radio spectrum to communicate with a satellite in United States territory, which in practice includes most commercial operators regardless of where they are incorporated. A licensing condition attached to spectrum is therefore doing work that space law proper has never managed, and the episode is a good illustration of where enforceable authority over orbital behaviour actually sits: not in a space treaty, but in a communications regulator. Not a place.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.