Space sustainability will evolve into a data-driven system

If you stayed in a hotel last night, there’s a good chance you saw that familiar placard in the bathroom: “Help save the planet — hang your towel and we won’t wash it.” At a recent panel, I asked the audience how many had seen that sign. Most hands went up. Then I asked them to keep their hands raised if they believed the hotel put that sign there because it genuinely wanted to save the planet. Every hand went down!

And that, I told them, is how governments feel about Kessler syndrome. It’s a dynamic we see across the space domain.

We like to invoke the image of a runaway chain reaction of collisions, but our behavior shows we don’t treat it as imminent. It’s the orbital equivalent of the towel card: something we acknowledge rhetorically, gesture toward symbolically, but rarely invest in solving materially. And nothing illustrates that better than what happened on Intelsat-33E.

The sustainability wake-up call we ignored

IS-33E failed suddenly aaround 4:32 UTC on Oct. 19, 2024. ExoAnalytic and others confirmed a major breakup event. Over the following two weeks, our sensors tracked hundreds of debris fragments, and we now assess the total population to exceed 1,000 pieces. This was not a hypothetical Kessler cascade — it was a real, present-day GEO fragmentation with real risk to operators across longitudes.

And yet, not one government approached us to request a full debris characterization or to fund a detailed assessment. No coalition was formed. No coordinated response was initiated. No regulatory body called for a deeper investigation.

If Kessler Syndrome were truly treated as an urgent threat, IS-33E would have triggered the orbital equivalent of a national transportation safety investigation. Instead, it landed somewhere between polite interest and institutional silence.

This is not because space agencies or operators don’t care. It’s because modern “sustainability” is still treated as a narrative, not a system. The global spaceflight community has more commitments, guidelines and charters than ever before — but the IS-33E example proves we have far fewer mechanisms to generate, share and act upon the data that sustainability actually depends on.

Sustainability is a data problem first

For all the lofty language surrounding norms and responsible behavior, the foundational truth is simple: Space sustainability is a data problem, a coordination problem and a persistence problem.

You cannot manage what you cannot see. You cannot coordinate what you cannot characterize. You cannot sustain what you cannot monitor continuously.

And in 2025, we saw how fragile the system is: Megaconstellations are growing faster than global sharing frameworks. Space weather storms forced thousands of unplanned maneuvers, exposing coordination gaps. Untracked debris continues to rise even as tracked catalog numbers increase. ISAM and debris-removal missions show extraordinary promise — but also dual-use ambiguity when not persistently monitored.

Sustainability frameworks like ESA’s Zero Debris Charter, NASA’s Space Sustainability Strategy and the EU Space Act represent real progress — but they don’t yet ensure the operational visibility required to enforce their own goals. This is why 2026 cannot be just another year of ambition. It must be the year we begin treating sustainability like engineering, not marketing.

What 2026 must demand

If the space community wants sustainability to mean something in 2026, three shifts must occur.

Zero Debris and the EU Space Act are encouraging, but only if supported by persistent, high-fidelity SDA capable of measuring progress and detecting deviations. We need fewer surprises. Fewer unannounced failures. Fewer blind spots in storms. Fewer “mystery objects” triggered by incomplete data. And megaconstellation operators must share more — especially during solar events.

Debris removal missions must demonstrate transparency to avoid misinterpretation. Civil space tracking management systems must integrate commercial SDA at speed. Sustainability cannot rely on the assumption that everyone will do the right thing. It must rely on knowledge, shared early, persistently and without ambiguity. Sustainability is achieved when surprises are rare, transparency is normal and safety is not an aspiration but an observable condition.

If 2024 taught us anything, it’s that we can no longer afford sustainability as a towel-card gesture. If 2025 taught us anything, it’s that policy momentum without operational visibility is insufficient. And if 2026 is going to be different, it will be because we finally treated sustainability not as a slogan, but as a system — built on data, coordination and persistent truth.

Clinton Clark is chief growth officer at ExoAnalytic Solutions.

Ralph “Dinz” Dinsley is general manager at 3S Northumbria.

This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of SpaceNews Magazine.

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