AS we wrote in an editorial last week, the announcement of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. during his 5th State of the Nation Address (SONA) on July 27 that the Philippines would pursue the establishment of a space launch facility, is a pleasantly surprising ambition, and one that could pay huge dividends to the country. However, once that ambition becomes a reality and a space launch from Philippine soil is actually carried out — something that could happen as soon as next year — the country will have to contend with a new set of legal responsibilities that are often overlooked but are quickly growing in importance.
The Philippines has already had a taste of this in the past couple of years with increasing incidents of hardware from Chinese space launches falling into our waters. Despite suspicions, there is nothing malicious in this. The flight paths Chinese rockets must follow pass over Philippine territory, and for the most part, the Chinese authorities are diligent in providing advance warning of launches for safety’s sake. So far, none of these have resulted in any real harm, apart from a bit of excitement when rocket debris is located, and perhaps some occasional disruption to air traffic that must be rerouted around the expected drop zones.
The potential danger to lives and property, however, is very real. In March 2024, hardware that had been discarded from the International Space Station and expected to fall harmlessly into the sea instead struck a home in Naples, Florida. In December of that year, a large metal ring weighing several hundred kilograms fell from the sky and crashed into a field in a rural village in Kenya. It was later identified as a part connecting two stages of a European rocket, and while no one was hurt, it struck the ground with enough force to crack walls in nearby houses.
In February 2025, pieces of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket hit the ground in Poland, landing near a shopping mall, an airport and an electrical equipment warehouse. Several months later, a three-ton Chinese satellite that had gone out of control reentered the atmosphere over the Canary Islands, creating a shockwave that reportedly broke windows in some buildings, although the hardware either burned up in the atmosphere, or fell into the ocean. In January this year, an 11-ton upper stage of a Chinese rocket was nervously watched for several days by space agencies around the world as its decaying orbit carried it over populated areas, and it was far too large and heavy to burn up completely in the atmosphere. In the end, it reentered the atmosphere over Europe, traveling across the Middle East and India before breaking up and falling into the Indian Ocean or the Pacific Ocean; the agencies monitoring it still are not sure where, exactly.
According to data from the Polish Space Agency and other authorities, some form of space debris, whether defunct satellites or parts of rockets, reenters the atmosphere every day, with big pieces weighing a ton or more falling to Earth once a week on average. Much of it burns up in the atmosphere or falls into the sea, but not all of it does, and as the number of space launches and orbital objects increases, the risk of this rain of high-tech trash doing some real damage is increasing as well.
Once the Philippines starts contributing to the problem with space launches from our territory, it will be subject to the rules addressing the handling of space debris and its potential to cause harm on Earth. These are two United Nations treaties; one called the Liability Convention and the other known as the Rescue and Return Agreement. The liability convention gives countries the right to compensation if another state’s space object hurts people or damages property. The rescue and return agreement provide for countries to be compensated for retrieving and returning another country’s fallen space debris. So far, only the latter has been relevant to the Philippines as a claimant for compensation with respect to the occasional piece of Chinese space junk, but launches from here will put that shoe on the other foot, so to speak, and expose the government to potential liability.
In its eagerness to become a properly spacefaring nation, the Philippines should assess this potential liability, particularly since most spaceflight activities from here — as they are becoming in the rest of the world — will be carried out by private enterprises. Crafting regulations to address risks before they are realized will help to ensure the success of the Philippines’ space venture.
