Communications regulators have greenlit mega constellations and orbital data centers as telecom infrastructure, while leaving their reentry emissions of aluminum oxide, silicon, and other metals in an unpriced atmospheric commons.
The Federal Communications Commission approved 15,000 second-generation Starlink satellites in January 2026, then said nothing about the aluminum oxide, silicon, gallium, and copper that will rain back through the stratosphere when those satellites die. That silence is not a gap in the rules. It is the rules.
The agency treats orbital constellations as communications assets when it suits spectrum and property-rights arguments, and as unregulated emitters when it suits the question of where the hardware ends up. No operator has yet been forced to pick a lane, and the atmospheric commons above the jet stream has become, by default, the cheapest dumping ground in the global economy.
Starcloud has filed for 88,000 orbital data center satellites, and SpaceX has filed for as many as one million. Each of those satellites, on reentry, will ablate into a plume of metal oxides that recent atmospheric-chemistry literature, as reported in SpaceNews's analysis of the orbital servicing economy, links to ozone-layer damage, polar-vortex weakening, and measurable temperature anomalies in the stratosphere and mesosphere. That literature characterizes the direction and general nature of those effects; the specific quantitative thresholds cited in the underlying papers have not been independently verified for this article, and the SpaceNews source does not itself provide those specific figures.
What the satellite servicing economy can borrow from carbon credits, as that SpaceNews analysis argued, is a market architecture that has already forced a similar definitional choice on terrestrial emitters: pay for the gas, capture it, or prove it never reached the atmosphere. The orbital analogy is not a finished policy proposal, and it would carry real weight problems if treated as one. It is a frame for asking why the same choice has not been required of satellite operators.
The European Space Agency's Destructive Reentry Assessment Container Object, known as DRACO, is the closest thing in flight today to a measurement platform for the question. DRACO is an in-orbit data-gathering mission designed to characterize what uncontrolled reentry actually deposits in the upper atmosphere. Until its data is publicly released, the empirical case for any binding instrument will remain thinner than the launch cadence, and program status should be confirmed before relying on DRACO as a corroborating example.
The definition war will be settled by whichever instrument moves first. A reinsurer surcharge on orbital liability, an FCC notice of proposed rulemaking on atmospheric disclosures, an International Telecommunication Union spectrum condition that ties orbital authorization to reentry accounting, or a public DRACO data release would each force the question on its own. If none of those moves first, orbital infrastructure will continue to lock itself in on launch cadence, and the stratosphere will remain an unmeasured and unpriced commons for another decade.