The Outer Space Treaty bars national appropriation of outer space: what a satellite operator actually holds is a frequency assignment recorded by the ITU, and a seven-year clock to use it

by Arjun Mehta · September 10, 2026

Science & Technology Writer, The Globe Ledger

The trade press writes about geostationary orbit as if it were real estate. Operators are said to hold slots, sell slots, swap slots and lose slots; countries are said to own positions over their own territory. The vocabulary is convenient and a poor description of the underlying legal instruments. No state may appropriate any part of the geostationary arc, no instrument examined here confers title to a longitude, and the thing that is actually bought, defended and occasionally forfeited is a radio-frequency assignment recorded in a register kept in Geneva.

Start with the treaty. The Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies opened for signature on 27 January 1967 and entered into force on 10 October 1967. Article II is one sentence: “Outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.” Article I begins: “The exploration and use of outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries, irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development, and shall be the province of all mankind.”

Note the breadth of Article II's closing words. It bars appropriation not only by declaration of sovereignty but by use or occupation, and then by any other means at all. Parking a satellite at a longitude and keeping it there for thirty years is, on the face of the text, exactly the kind of use or occupation the article was written to exclude from generating title. Two limits on that reading are worth stating plainly. Article II speaks of national appropriation, and whether it also forecloses title asserted by a private party is a question lawyers still argue over; and the ITU instruments described below, which are where operators' rights actually come from, confer no title of any kind either way. As for how widely the treaty is accepted, the last consolidated status table this article was able to open — the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs compilation of the status of space-law agreements as at 1 January 2020 — recorded 110 States having ratified, accepted, approved or acceded, with a further 23 having signed only. That table has since been superseded: the Office issues the compilation annually, and newer editions exist that this desk could not open. The current figures are therefore higher than the ones given here, and readers who need them should consult the Office's latest annual status document rather than this one.

The proposition has been challenged head-on at least once, and at high political volume. In 1976 seven equatorial states — Colombia, the Congo, Ecuador, Indonesia, Kenya, Uganda and Zaire — adopted what became known as the Bogotá Declaration, asserting sovereignty over the segments of the geostationary orbit lying above their territories. As a 2014 paper prepared for the Legal Subcommittee of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (A/AC.105/C.2/2014/CRP.6, 17 March 2014) summarises, the claim rested on the absence of any agreed definition of where outer space begins: if the boundary is undefined, the equatorial states argued, it cannot be established that the geostationary orbit lies in outer space at all. The claim was rejected by other states as contrary to the non-appropriation principle in Article II, and the episode is still cited in COPUOS as evidence that the delimitation question has practical consequences.

If sovereignty is unavailable, what is the queue actually made of? The answer is spectrum, and the governing instrument is not the Outer Space Treaty but the constitutional and regulatory texts of the International Telecommunication Union. Article 44 of the ITU Constitution, headed “Use of the Radio-Frequency Spectrum and of the Geostationary-Satellite and Other Satellite Orbits”, contains the operative principle at No. 196, its second paragraph: “In using frequency bands for radio services, Member States shall bear in mind that radio frequencies and any associated orbits, including the geostationary-satellite orbit, are limited natural resources and that they must be used rationally, efficiently and economically, in conformity with the provisions of the Radio Regulations, so that countries or groups of countries may have equitable access to those orbits and frequencies, taking into account the special needs of the developing countries and the geographical situation of particular countries.” The tail of that sentence matters as much as the head: the same provision that calls the orbit a limited natural resource also builds equitable access into the constitutional text. The preceding provision, No. 195, requires Member States to “endeavour to limit the number of frequencies and the spectrum used to the minimum essential to provide in a satisfactory manner the necessary services.”

The orbit, in other words, is treated in ITU law as an attribute of the spectrum rather than as territory. What follows from that framing is a coordination regime rather than a land registry. Article 45 of the Constitution, headed “Harmful Interference”, states the object of the whole system at No. 197: “All stations, whatever their purpose, must be established and operated in such a manner as not to cause harmful interference to the radio services or communications of other Member States or of recognized operating agencies, or of other duly authorized operating agencies which carry on a radio service, and which operate in accordance with the provisions of the Radio Regulations.” Article 1 of the Constitution, at No. 11 — sub-paragraph (a) of its second paragraph — gives the Union the task of effecting allocation of bands of the radio-frequency spectrum, the allotment of radio frequencies and the registration of radio-frequency assignments and, for space services, of any associated orbital position in the geostationary-satellite orbit, in order to avoid harmful interference between radio stations of different countries. Note the formulation even there: what is registered is an assignment, together with an associated orbital position, not the position itself.

The procedure itself is set out in the Radio Regulations and runs in three stages. First, advance publication: under No. 9.1, an administration sends the Radiocommunication Bureau a general description of the network or system for publication in the International Frequency Information Circular “not earlier than seven years and preferably not later than two years before the planned date of bringing into use of the network or system”. Second, coordination under Section II of Article 9: the Bureau publishes the coordination request and identifies the administrations whose existing networks may be affected, and those administrations have four months to agree or to raise technical objections. Third, notification under Article 11, made not earlier than three years before the assignments are brought into use, followed by examination by the Bureau and, if the finding is favourable, recording in the Master International Frequency Register.

That register is the closest thing to a deed in the system, and it is not one. Recording an assignment gives it international recognition and a place in the coordination order; it does not convey a position, a volume of space or an exclusive right to a longitude. What it buys is the right to be protected from harmful interference by later filings, and the corresponding obligation not to cause it to earlier ones. Priority in that ordering is a function of dates — which is where the entire popular language of “owning a slot” comes from.

There is also a deadline, and it drives much of the timetable in commercial satellite planning. Radio Regulations No. 11.44 provides that the notified date of bringing into use of any assignment to a space station of a satellite network “shall be no later than 7 years following the receipt of the advance publication information”. Miss it and the filing lapses; the place in the queue disappears with it.

For geostationary networks the regulations then define what counts as use, precisely enough to make gaming it difficult. Under No. 11.44B, an assignment is considered brought into use “when a space station in the geostationary-satellite orbit with the capability of transmitting or receiving that frequency assignment has been deployed and maintained at the notified orbital position for a continuous period of ninety days”. Ninety days of an actual, capable spacecraft actually holding station: that is the test that converts a paper filing into a recognised assignment.

Not all of the spectrum is handled this way. The ITU framework distinguishes unplanned bands, run through the coordination procedure just described on what its own training materials call a first-come, first-served basis, from planned bands governed by a priori plans in Appendices 30 and 30A of the Radio Regulations for the broadcasting-satellite service and its feeder links, and Appendix 30B for parts of the fixed-satellite service. In the planned bands a predetermined orbital position and block of frequencies are set aside in advance, in the ITU's words as a “guarantee for equitable access to the spectrum / orbital resources”, with “spectrum set aside for future use by all countries”. The purpose is explicitly distributional: the plans exist so that states not in a position to file early are not shut out, which is the ITU's structural answer to the problem the Bogotá signatories were complaining about.

The interaction of the two regimes is the real tension in orbital governance, and it maps onto the treaty text. Article I of the Outer Space Treaty says use shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development. A first-come coordination queue, taken alone, rewards whoever has the engineering and administrative capacity to file first and launch on time. The Appendix 30/30A/30B plans are the counterweight, reserving capacity that cannot be consumed by early movers.

One further feature explains why national administrations, rather than companies, appear on every filing. The ITU deals with its Member States and their administrations, not with operators. And under Article VI of the Outer Space Treaty, states bear international responsibility for national activities in outer space, whether carried on by governmental agencies or by non-governmental entities, and such activities require authorisation and continuing supervision by the appropriate state. A commercial operator's regulatory existence is therefore always mediated through a state that has agreed to sponsor and supervise it — which is why filings are lodged by administrations, and why the choice of sponsoring administration is a commercial decision in itself.

Put the pieces together and the everyday shorthand becomes translatable. “An operator bought a slot” normally means it acquired a company, or a set of rights under a national licence, associated with assignments already recorded for a given orbital position. “A slot was lost” usually means a No. 11.44 deadline passed without ninety days of station-keeping under No. 11.44B. “A country's slot” generally means an allotment under one of the a priori plans, or a filing lodged by that country's administration.

None of those translations involves ownership, and that is not a technicality. The non-appropriation rule is what keeps the geostationary arc from being carved up as sovereign territory by the states that reached it first, and the ITU's coordination and planning machinery is what allocates use of it in the absence of title. That is why the argument over access to orbit is conducted in the language of coordination, protection from interference and equitable planning rather than in the language of property. The queue is real and the deadlines are hard; the deed does not exist.