Commercial players now drive almost 80% of global space activity, a sharp reversal from the era when states controlled nearly everything for defence and research.
Investment poured in once launch costs dropped and satellite and propulsion tech matured, and a new roster of companies began shaping the sector: rocket makers, launch firms, satellite manufacturers, data-driven service providers and specialist insurers.
With that growth came messy procurement chains and contracts that sprawl from manufacturing to launch to in-orbit service.
Disputes inevitably followed – defects, capacity fights, financing blowups, launch failures, export-control friction, collision satellite insurance claims, spectrum skirmishes and insurance arguments that get louder each year.
Where collisions or frequency interference arise between parties without contracts, disputes often drift toward advisory rulings from the Claims Commission under the 1972 Liability Convention or the ITU’s Radio Regulations Board.
Those paths are non-binding and slow. So the more interesting action sits in commercial disputes anchored in contracts, which is where market participants spend most of their legal energy.
Historically, satellite players struck deals within a tiny ecosystem and leaned on informal fixes such as cross-waivers of liability and insurance.
As Laura Yvonne Zielinski notes in Global Arbitration Review, the network was so tight that formal dispute resolution felt like overkill. That world is gone.
The influx of new actors and high-value orbital assets has created complex relationships governed by chosen law (English, Singaporean, others) and backed by arbitration clauses that reflect the industry’s rising stakes.
International commercial arbitration dominates. Bodies like the LCIA, ICC and ICDR have managed disputes over late satellite delivery, launch failures, capacity leases and the sale of satellite hardware.
A noticeable trend now involves disagreements between manufacturers and customers who rely on in-orbit performance data.
Consider the Thuraya v. Boeing fight: insurers said Boeing’s 702 model lost power because of defective solar panels. The ICC tribunal didn’t buy the argument that Boeing had early knowledge of systemic flaws.
A more recent flashpoint comes from NorthStar Earth & Space and Spire. The issue wasn’t only defects – it hinged on whether Spire had to keep satellites operational when their data no longer met contractual service levels.
NorthStar rushed to an Ontario court for an interim order to keep the satellites alive because Spire planned to deactivate them. The contract required ICC arbitration, but the urgency pushed NorthStar to court for temporary relief.
Arbitration on the merits continues, and the case has become a cautionary tale. Constellation-services contracts need to account for messy realities between launch and orbital operations, including partial performance and degraded data sets.
Investor-state arbitration has surfaced as well. Devas Multimedia’s investors pursued India under the Mauritius-India and Germany-India BITs after India scrapped a deal allowing Antrix to build and operate satellites and lease S-band spectrum to Devas.
India said it needed the spectrum for military use and invoked force majeure. Tribunals disagreed and found treaty breaches, awarding Devas’ investors about $200 mn.
Devas also filed a commercial ICC case against Antrix under the underlying contract, running the dispute on two tracks.
According to Beinsure analysts, the uptick in disputes matches the sector’s growth. More launch cadence, more constellation builds, more data-centric services – all of it strains contracts drafted when the industry felt smaller.
Arbitration will likely carry the load because courts aren’t built for the cross-border and technical detail that orbit-era conflicts demand.
