State Succession in the Space Object Catalogue: A Machine-Readable Dataset of Responsibility for Objects Whose Owners No Longer Exist

Abstract

A great many satellites remain catalogued under state owners that no longer exist: the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia. Liability for a space object persists indefinitely under the space treaties, so a responsible party exists today in every one of those cases even though the original launching state has gone. The catalogue does not say who that party is.

The paper introduces a dataset mapping historical catalogue codes to the parties liable today and to operational successors, under a taxonomy of five relationship types: continuator, dissolution, IGO succession, IGO privatisation and merger. Each determination carries effective dates, legal citations and documented caveats. The dataset is integrated into the Orbital Asset Registry and cites verified authoritative texts from the Space Law Corpus, matched to the instruments in force at each object's launch.