One hour of satellite crossings over the northern Atacama Desert in Chile in October 2025. (Image credit: F. Kamphues, ESO/M. Kornmesser)
By Tereza Pultarova,
Published by Space.com, 28 September 2026
The International Court of Justice’s advisory opinions can be used in local cases.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) could help stop the uncontrolled proliferation of satellites in Earth orbit, which threatens to erase stars from the sky, astronomers hope.
The initiative, spearheaded by the nonprofit Outer Space Institute, aims to lobby the United Nations to request an advisory opinion from the ICJ, the UN’s principal judicial body. Through this, scientists want to gain clarity over the legal responsibilities of launching states to preserve near-Earth space from orbital clutter and the dark night sky from excessive light pollution.
The campaign, originally conceived in 2023 to address the impact of internet-beaming megaconstellations like SpaceX’s Starlink, has taken on new urgency over the past 12 months. The escalation comes as tech giants and aerospace firms — including SpaceX, Google and Starcloud — have announced plans to deploy unprecedented networks of hundreds of thousands of space-based data centers.
Furthermore, in July, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted a license to California-based Reflect Orbital to fly a demonstrator space mirror, called Eärendil-1. Scheduled to launch later this year, the satellite is the first step toward a possible future constellation of tens of thousands of such mirrors, which would reflect sunlight to photovoltaic plants on Earth after sunset. If those plans were to pass, the fleet could brighten the night sky so much that astronomical observations around the world might become impossible, critics say.
Aaron Boley, an astronomer at the University of British Columbia and co-director of the Outer Space Institute, told Space.com that the initiative was spurred by the failure to gain unanimous approval from the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) to set up an expert group to monitor light pollution.
See: Original Article
