State Succession in the Space Object Catalogue: A Machine-Readable Dataset of Responsibility for Objects Whose Owners No Longer Exist

Abstract

Many objects in the public space catalogue are still attributed to owners that no longer exist: the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, the European Space Research Organisation, and the three treaty-based satellite organisations (INTELSAT, INMARSAT, EUTELSAT) whose fleets passed to private companies between 1999 and 2001. Liability for space objects attaches at launch and does not expire, and under the law of state succession it survives the disappearance of the launching state. For any given object, then, a responsible party exists today. Identifying that party currently requires doctrinal work, because catalogue owner codes record the historical attribution and no public dataset supplies the current one. This paper introduces such a dataset. It maps each affected SATCAT owner code to the party liable under the space treaties today and, where the two have come apart, to the operational successor as well, using a five-value relationship taxonomy (continuator, dissolution, IGO succession, IGO privatisation, and a reserved merger class). Every ruling carries an effective date, a cited legal basis, and stated caveats; codes that were considered and excluded are documented with reasons. The dataset is small by construction, since it is grounded in the catalogue's own vocabulary, and it is joined live to every object in the Orbital Asset Registry, where rulings appear beside citations to hash-verified authoritative texts held in the Space Law Corpus, drawn from the instruments that were in force at each object's launch.

Keywords: Space Law, State Succession, Liability Convention, Registration Convention, Satellite Catalogue, INTELSAT, Space Situational Awareness