Inside Climate News (13 June 2026)

A Commercial Space Race Prompts a Thorny Question: Who Owns the Sky?

​Researchers and space governance experts say current agreements like the Outer Space Treaty don’t adequately address stewardship, equity and collective responsibility, required ingredients for a framework that can effectively manage space for the common good.

“We are teetering on the precipice of how the uses of space are changing, and that threatens our ability to use space,” said astronomer and dark sky policy expert John Barentine, who co-founded the Center for Space Environmentalism in 2025.

The center filed formal comments with the FCC on all four satellite-fleet proposals, writing that the deployments are “a massive industrialization of orbit that poses severe collision risks” and that they push the massive energy demands of artificial intelligence into low Earth orbit, threatening its sustainability. And mirroring sunlight to Earth from satellites could threaten ecosystems and disrupt astronomical research, the group added.

Read more: ​https://insideclimatenews.org/news/13062026/commercial-satellite-space-race-pollution/