claim: Spacecraft reentry is already a documented, not hypothetical, burden on aviation: successful rocket launches more than doubled from 87 in 2015 to 212 in 2023, of which 128 rocket bodies were abandoned to uncontrolled reentry, and a November 2022 Long March 5B reentry closed airspace over Europe and delayed 645 flights with a plausible economic impact measured in millions of euros.

source: Hook, Wright, Byers & Boley, Uncontrolled reentries of space objects and aviation safety, Acta Astronautica vol. 222 (2024)

grade: A

facet: empirics

subclaim: real


claim: Airspace closures caused by reentering space objects are a foreseeable and recurring feature rather than a rare contingency, and the contested base is growing: collision risk is rising with simultaneous increases in both reentries and flights, with the highest-density airspace around major airports at roughly 0.8 percent per year and large busy regions (Northeast U.S., Northern Europe, Asia-Pacific) reaching a 26 percent annual chance of being affected.

source: Wright et al., Airspace closures due to reentering space objects, Scientific Reports (2025)

facet: rival

subclaim: material


claim: The contested-airspace base is not self-extinguishing in the near term: over 2,300 rocket bodies are already in orbit committed to eventual uncontrolled reentry, and controlled reentry is an operator-resisted policy choice that launching states and companies are documented as reluctant to bear the added cost for, defeating the stranded-institution rival on present data.

source: Byers, Wright et al., Unnecessary risks created by uncontrolled rocket reentries, Nature Astronomy (2022)


claim: The welfare-relevant price the corridor-fee regime needs is the marginal external cost along the efficient (optimally-tightened) use path, not the realized cost under the current over-conservative static-closure rule; differencing against realized static-closure cost mixes the irreducible residual-risk externality with the deadweight loss of static segregation, so the headline is a distortion-inclusive avoided-cost estimate, not the priceable externality.

source: Rao, The Economics of Orbit Use: Open Access, External Costs, and Runaway Debris Growth, J. Assoc. Environ. Resour. Econ.

facet: economics


claim: The benchmark the data-gradient must target is the optimal closure where residual risk equals the marginal external cost it prevents (the marginal external cost on the efficient path); an orbital-use fee that internalizes the externality could more than quadruple the long-run value of the industry, but the magnitude depends on the demand elasticity of the priced activity, establishing the cadence-elasticity feedback as a first-order cross-system term.

source: Rao, Burgess & Kaffine, Orbital-use fees could more than quadruple the value of the space industry, PNAS (2020)

subclaim: mechanism


claim: Policy claims about orbit (and by transposition reentry) must be tested in coupled models where forward-looking agents respond to costs and policy; a cost-lowering intervention can increase the priced activity and offset its own benefit, so a per-event avoided cost measured in partial equilibrium can flip once cadence and routing are endogenized.

source: Rao et al., OPUS: An Integrated Assessment Model for Satellites and Orbital Debris

grade: B

facet: mechanism


claim: The efficient instrument for a standing congestible commons is a corrective price, which is distinct from a one-time coordination or institution fix; instrument choice turns on whether the externality is standing or transitional, so a per-event NAS cost cannot serve as a standing-fee reference unless the willingness-to-impose-cost margin is identified.

source: Rao, The Long-Run Economics of Sustainable Orbit Use, Routledge Handbook of Space Policy

subclaim: alternatives


claim: An avoided-cost figure differenced against a counterfactual the simulator computes under its own sizing rule, when no observed sector ever ran the dynamic regime, is a calibrated-model output rather than a design-based estimate; such estimates live in the world of rarely-stress-tested assumptions the credibility critique targets.

source: Leamer, Tantalus on the Road to Asymptopia, Journal of Economic Perspectives 24(2) (2010)

facet: identification


claim: Empirical work is credible only when it leans on a research design exploiting natural or quasi-experimental variation rather than functional-form assumptions; the analyst's first obligation is to name the actual source of as-good-as-random variation in closure tightness, and a simulation-only policy effect with no untreated comparison is not identified.

source: Angrist & Pischke, The Credibility Revolution in Empirical Economics, JEP 24(2) (2010)


claim: A continuous treatment or instrument identifies a causal effect only under an exclusion restriction (it must affect the outcome solely through the treatment); the EU SST prediction-uncertainty bound is a model-generated regressor driven by ballistic coefficient, size, and tracking quality, so regressing cost on it returns a biased object-characteristic composite unless an instrument or conditional-independence evidence is supplied.

source: Angrist, Imbens & Rubin, Identification of Causal Effects Using Instrumental Variables, JASA 91(434) (1996)


claim: Callaway-Sant'Anna group-time ATT estimation presumes clean (uncontaminated) not-yet-treated or never-treated controls and parallel trends; closures that displace flights into adjacent or later sector-by-window control cells are an SUTVA/interference violation that staggered-DiD heterogeneity corrections do not address, since those corrections target forbidden timing comparisons, not interference between units.

source: Callaway & Sant'Anna, Difference-in-Differences with multiple time periods, Journal of Econometrics (2021)

source: Goodman-Bacon, Difference-in-differences with variation in treatment timing, Journal of Econometrics (2021)


claim: North's framework supplies the institution-side test the design needs: institutions must be judged by adaptive efficiency (revisability as technology evolves), not blackboard/static optimality, and a price that points to one allocation can lock it in through increasing returns; a credible cost number is necessary but not sufficient to overcome the transaction costs of changing a path-dependent, liability-anchored rule.

source: North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, Cambridge University Press (1990)

facet: governance


claim: External-risk handling for launch and reentry events spanning the aviation and maritime sectors is an open governance problem rather than a solved variable, supplying context for why the current response is conservative segregation but not an operationalized FAA enforcement or residual-risk allocation mechanism for a narrowed hazard area.

source: Rabu, Handling of external risks, including launch and re-entry events, in the aviation and maritime sector, Journal of Space Safety Engineering (2024)


claim: Cross-domain air and maritime treaty governance precedent is a surveyed analogue for space traffic management but supplies no FAA enforcement or residual-risk allocation rule for a narrowed hazard area, so the liability mechanism a dynamic-closure rule would require remains unspecified.

source: Cross-Domain Lessons for Space Traffic Management: An Analysis of Air and Maritime Treaty Governance Mechanisms, RAND (2023)


claim: Air-traffic delay is a congestion externality (a genuine market failure) only to the extent a carrier ignores delay it imposes on others; much realized delay (for example hub-clustering delay) accrues to the generating carrier and is already internalized, so part of the measured closure cost may be a coordination cost the airspace common already absorbs rather than an unpriced externality.

source: Mayer & Sinai, Network Effects, Congestion Externalities, and Air Traffic Delays, NBER Working Paper 8701 (2002)


claim: The static 4-hour airspace closure imposes measurable cost (delay, added distance, fuel burn) on airlines and other NAS users, and re-coordination (shorter closures, opening the launch/return corridor, treating the vehicle as an aircraft) significantly reduces airline impact, so realized cost is coordination/mechanism dependent rather than a fixed externality.

source: Tinoco, Yu & Firmo, Sharing airspace: Simulation of commercial space horizontal launch impacts on airlines and finding solutions, Journal of Space Safety Engineering (2021)


claim: The impacted-flight set is a heterogeneous distribution across user-community boundaries rather than one homogeneous price: using actual Cape Canaveral flight data, general aviation accounted for 33 percent of flights impacted by horizontal spaceplane landings, while international carriers accounted for 9.5 percent of flights impacted by vertical launch and 8.3 percent of those impacted by horizontal landings, with the remainder domestic carriers.

source: Tinoco, Eudy & Cannon, Simulation and Analysis of 4-D Airspace Closures due to Commercial Space Operations: Impacts on Airlines and General Aviation, Journal of Aviation/Aerospace Education & Research (2020)


claim: Reentry/airspace closure burden and its economic consequence rise with air-traffic density and vary by airspace region, so a single program-level cost masks community and sector heterogeneity and should be reported as a distribution over aircraft-class and sector groups rather than a scalar.

source: Wright, Boley & Byers, Airspace closures due to reentering space objects, Scientific Reports (2025)

facet: measurement


claim: Air-traffic delay propagates across a coupled sector network and can be characterized and predicted, enabling a net (within-window plus propagated/reactionary) network-cost accounting rather than a within-polygon cost; without this, a smaller closure can be credited as avoided cost while displaced volume re-congests neighboring sectors.

source: Rebollo & Balakrishnan, Characterization and prediction of air traffic delays, Transportation Research Part C (2014)


claim: Air-traffic congestion externalities are network-coupled and non-proportional, so withholding or redirecting volume changes the delay borne by other carriers and can saturate a receiving sector, meaning a tighter closure can reallocate cost rather than remove it and a constant-per-event-times-cadence extrapolation is not warranted once receiving sectors congest.

source: Mayer & Sinai, Network Effects, Congestion Externalities, and Air Traffic Delays, American Economic Review 93(4) (2003)


claim: Moving to a controlled-reentry regime would create a cost to space operators that is currently being externalized to the aviation industry; one quantified event (November 2022 Long March 5B closure over Europe) delayed 645 flights with a plausible economic impact of millions of euros, grounding the appropriator-versus-provisioner asymmetry between who triggers the hazard and who bears the cost.

source: Hook, Wright, Byers & Boley, Uncontrolled reentries of space objects and aviation safety, Acta Astronautica vol. 222 (2024)


claim: A polycentric coordination-center alternative to monocentric national closure is a real, documented institutional form: DLR's SpaceTracks project is building a Launch Coordination Center prototype intended to coordinate stakeholders before, during, and after launches and reentries so that the interests and needs of all stakeholders are balanced.

source: Kaltenhaeuser et al., Improving air and space safety through enhanced coordination with the SpaceTracks Suite microservice architecture, Journal of Space Safety Engineering (2024)

source: Kaltenhaeuser et al., Integrating Air Traffic Management and Space Traffic Management: Concepts, Challenges, and Solutions for the Evolving Aerospace Landscape in Europe, AIAA 2024-4824


claim: Earth-observation disruption precedent shows the basis of competition can change: legacy EO sold exquisite resolution to a few government customers while disruptors won a different job (frequent revisit, timeliness) for which good-enough imagery refreshed daily beats exquisite imagery refreshed monthly, a non-consumption foothold the incumbent never targeted, warning that a backward-looking event study on current traffic can price the trajectory disruption is about to obsolete.

source: Earth Observation Technologies: Low-End-Market Disruptive Innovation, IntechOpen (2020)


claim: LEO mega-constellation growth strains the orbital commons and motivates more rational surveillance and governance, the empirical anchor for the rising reentering population the candidate cites as cadence growth and the value-network trajectory a disruption-informed design must model rather than pricing a snapshot.

source: Wang et al., LEO Mega Constellations: Review of Development, Impact, Surveillance, and Governance, Space: Science & Technology (2022)


claim: The closure footprint has two components the design conflates: a residual-risk component and a discretionary policy component, since national authorities may choose to preemptively close airspace as an explicit decision variable on top of the computed strike probability, so a measurement that prices only delay/distance/fuel/DOC against the gross closure cannot isolate the prediction-reducible volume from the rule/conservatism-driven volume.

source: Wright et al., Airspace closures due to reentering space objects, Scientific Reports (2025)

source: Tinoco, Yu & Firmo, Sharing airspace, Journal of Space Safety Engineering (2021)


claim: Bowen's space-control versus space-denial distinction supplies the conceptual test: an Aircraft Hazard Area is the deliberate negation of others' use of a shared line of communication (denial), and only the portion of the closure traceable to genuine residual reentry risk is reducible by positive capability (better prediction), so a measurement that cannot name which fraction of the footprint is irreducible denial cannot claim prediction shrinks it.

source: Bowen, War in Space: Strategy, Spacepower, Geopolitics, Commanding Space chapter (2020)

source: Bowen, The RAF and Space Doctrine / space-control-space-denial distinction (2017)


claim: Sizing a counterfactual closure to realized ex-post dispersion is a deterministic point-solution presented as robust; the remedy is two-stage stochastic programming with recourse (first-stage commit under a forecast distribution, second-stage resize once dispersion is revealed), so the reported avoided cost should be re-cast stochastically and stress-tested against the forecast-error distribution rather than plugging in dispersion a real planner would not have known.

source: Dantzig, Linear programming under uncertainty, Management Science 1(3-4) (1955)


claim: The minimum-area hazard area subject to an explicit casualty/collision-probability constraint is a buildable constrained optimization, already formulated for commercial-launch hazard areas, so ReentryFlow's resized closure can be compared against a certified-minimum-area polygon at the FAA-held tolerance to report the true achievable saving and a signed bias for the current resize.

source: Wang et al., Risk Level Analysis for Hazard Area During Commercial Space Launch, IEEE/AIAA Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC) (2019)


claim: Air-traffic-flow scheduling under shared sector-capacity constraints has been formulated and solved as a Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition (a master problem coordinating coupling sector-capacity constraints with per-event subproblems priced by the master's dual variables), so the high-cadence closure-and-reroute problem can be cast as a coupled program whose linking (dual-price) term measures how far the coupled-optimal avoided cost diverges from the sum of independent per-event estimates.

source: Rios & Ross, Massively Parallel Dantzig-Wolfe Decomposition Applied to Traffic Flow Scheduling, AIAA Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference (2009)

source: Dantzig & Wolfe, Decomposition principle for linear programs, Operations Research 8(1) (1960)


claim: A system's defining properties are emergent and destroyed when it is taken apart; understanding requires expansion to the containing system, and the chronic failure mode is suboptimization, where improving a part (narrowing a closure subsystem) can degrade the whole (shift congestion to an adjacent sector and worsen the NAS), so an additive exposed-flight cost can misstate the system reconfiguration cost.

source: Ackoff, Systems thinking and thinking systems, System Dynamics Review


claim: Reality presents messes (systems of interacting problems that cannot be solved one at a time) and the cardinal error is doing the wrong thing right (efficiently solving a mis-bounded problem); pricing a per-event cost inside the existing static-AHA structure is a solve move that leaves intact the fragmented air/space governance the systems literature names as the generating structure.

source: Ackoff, The Future of Operational Research is Past, Journal of the Operational Research Society

facet: priority


claim: U.S. space sustainability governance is a system-of-systems whose interacting parts (agencies, operators, mitigation systems, policy instruments) must be designed together rather than as separable problems, supporting expansion of the system boundary to the containing governance system rather than inheriting the static-segregation rule as given.

source: Shi, Huang & Arnas, A system-of-systems approach to US space sustainability governance, Acta Astronautica


claim: Governmental response to space traffic management and orbital debris has been slow and uneven, creating a persistent gap between problem and solution rooted in fragmented bureaucracy and politics, evidencing that the generating structure is a governance mess rather than a single priceable parameter.

source: Lambright, Governing space traffic: bureaucracy, politics, and orbital debris, Space Policy


claim: Integrating space launch and reentry activities with air traffic management is a systems-engineering integration problem spanning cross-domain best practices, corroborating that the containing system is an air/space integration architecture and that a dissolved (route-integrated) counterfactual is the structural-redesign direction the avoided-cost analysis is currently silent on.

source: Dhief et al., A review of international best practices in integrating space launch activities with air traffic management, Acta Astronautica (2024)


claim: Interactive (proactive) planning holds that those affected must participate in the design of a plan, not merely review it; the candidate's dynamic-closure counterfactual is an expert-authored static plan that the airlines, controllers, operators, and liability holder did not participate in designing, so its avoided cost is validated against an assumed-compliance footprint rather than the parties acting on their own purposes.

source: Haftor, An Evaluation of R.L. Ackoff's Interactive Planning: A Case-based Approach, Systemic Practice and Action Research


claim: Sizing each closure to realized dispersion or one heuristic policy without certifying the gap to the optimum yields a value of unknown slackness; LP/MILP duality provides the certified optimality gap, and space-domain scarce-resource allocations such as satellite range scheduling already report Lagrangian-relaxation bounds, so the closure-and-reroute optimality gap is reportable on the same EU SST/FAA instances.

source: Lagrangian heuristic for satellite range scheduling (IP with relaxation providing a bound on the optimal allocation), Computers & Operations Research