SRC-226

ESA's Annual Space Environment Report, Issue 10.0, 1 May 2026, ref GEN-DB-LOG-00288-OPS-SD, 151 pp.

Commissioned by ESA. Who paid for a study is recorded because it bears on how its conclusions should be read, not because it makes them wrong.

Published claims resting on this source

• CLM-0750 The 2020 edition of the international debris guidelines says a retiring geostationary satellite should climb at least 235 km above its working orbit, plus an extra allowance that depends on how large and light it is, and the 235 km is made of 200 km of protected zone plus 35 km for the way gravity nudges the orbit back down.
• CLM-0751 Working the international disposal formula through by hand shows that for a very large and very light satellite the extra height it must climb at retirement is dominated not by the fixed 235 km allowance but by the push of sunlight on it, and that for anything lighter than about 8.5 kilograms per square metre facing the sun that sunlight term is the larger of the two.
• CLM-0752 ESA's 2026 report says that nothing naturally removes objects from geostationary orbit the way the atmosphere slowly clears low orbit, so a retiring satellite there has to be deliberately moved out and kept out for at least a century.
• CLM-0753 ESA's 2026 report says the world is not clearing satellites out of orbit well enough, that even the usual 90 per cent success target would not reduce the amount of debris on its own, and that the figure needs to rise to nearly 100 per cent.
• CLM-0754 ESA's 2026 report projects that collisions between existing pieces of debris will keep making more debris in low Earth orbit even if nothing else is ever launched, and it makes no such projection for geostationary orbit at all; nothing in the register says whether the same runaway effect would happen up there or not.
• CLM-0756 The international space debris guidelines are advice, not law: ESA's own report says they are a starting point for national rules and technical standards, and that it is up to each country, operator and manufacturer whether and how to apply them.
• CLM-1183 ESA's 2026 report counts about 960 catalogued objects in geostationary orbit at the end of 2025, about 800 of them satellites, but nearly 9,700 objects pass through the protected zone around it at some point in their orbits. A separate chart counts about 1,870 satellites near geostationary orbit in 2025, more than half of them drifting.
• CLM-1188 Over the past ten years, almost every satellite retiring from the geostationary belt has tried to move itself out of the way as the debris rules ask, but only about seven to nine in ten have managed it, and the report notes two bad years, 2015 and 2022.

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