Orbit is a shared highway with no lanes painted on it: tens of thousands of tracked objects, a liability treaty written in 1972, and one long-prophesied traffic jam everyone is trying to avoid.
If your satellite breaks my satellite
Space law's answer to fender-benders is the 1972 Liability Convention: the state that launches an object is liable for the damage it causes — absolutely liable if the damage happens on Earth. It has been invoked in earnest exactly once, and the case is a story in itself: in 1978 a Soviet reconnaissance satellite, Cosmos 954, scattered radioactive debris across northern Canada, and the USSR eventually paid Canada three million Canadian dollars. Alongside it sits the Registration Convention — every object launched must be declared to the UN — which is why there is, literally, a public ledger of everything in orbit.
The junkyard overhead
Six decades of launches left more than payloads: spent rocket stages, dead satellites, shrapnel from explosions and two infamous anti-satellite tests. Space surveillance networks track tens of thousands of debris objects large enough to catalog, and millions of smaller fragments fly untracked — at orbital speeds, a paint fleck strikes like a rifle round. The Station performs collision-avoidance maneuvers when the numbers turn uncomfortable, and crews have sheltered in their return capsules while debris passed. In 1978, NASA scientist Donald Kessler described the nightmare scenario now named for him: enough debris colliding with debris could cascade, each crash breeding the next, until entire orbits become unusable for generations.
Traffic rules, being written live
The response is a patchwork racing to catch up. Guidelines say a defunct low-orbit satellite should deorbit within years, not centuries — and the timelines are tightening; geostationary satellites retire to a designated 'graveyard orbit' above the valuable arc, whose slots and radio frequencies are allocated by the International Telecommunication Union. Megaconstellations of thousands of satellites now share the busiest altitudes, trading maneuver data with each other and with astronomers. And the first demonstration missions for actually hauling junk out of the sky have flown. Orbit is the newest commons humanity has had to learn to govern — the treaties gave it a constitution, and the traffic code is being drafted in real time.