A permanent identity record for every catalogued object in Earth orbit: who operates it, which state answers for it, and how it ends.
Existing catalogues answer where an object is and what it is. They are much weaker on the questions a financier asks: who is behind it, whether that operator still exists, which state carries the liability today, and how the object actually ended. The Orbital Asset Registry (OAR) was built to close those gaps.
Every catalogued object receives a stable Orbital Asset ID, deliberately decoupled from the NORAD and COSPAR designators, because the five-digit NORAD catalogue is being exhausted during 2026 and identifiers that break under renumbering are of little use as the primary key of a collateral record. On top of that identity layer the Registry resolves active payloads to their operating companies, records each company's corporate status as sourced and versioned fact, attributes responsibility to states under the space treaties, and reads operators' own regulatory filings to record end-of-life events.
The Registry is the applied arm of the Institute's research programme. Where the papers work out how financial claims behave under physical constraint, the Registry supplies the reference data those claims would have to be written against. It is independent and privately operated, and has no governmental or intergovernmental status, mandate or endorsement.
Figures as at 5 August 2026, drawn from the Registry's live statistics endpoint. The catalogue refreshes daily.
The Registry is built in layers, each one adding a class of fact the layer beneath it cannot supply on its own:
A permanent Orbital Asset ID for every catalogued object, with consolidated identity, launch, orbit and status, all aliases preserved, and orbital geometry derived from element sets refreshed daily.
On-orbit payloads resolved to the company that runs them, with corporate status held as sourced, versioned fact (active, acquired, merged, distressed or insolvent), and a separate human-reviewed distress layer.
Launching-state attribution reasoned from registration, launch agency, facility and territory, each limb cited to the treaty article it rests on, and inference marked as inference rather than passed off as record.
End-of-life events parsed from operators' own FCC filings and reconciled back to catalogue objects, including operator-admitted disposal failures and the failed-disposal to uncontrolled-re-entry chains they produce.
Community optical observations compared against the Registry's own orbital record, and reception data from the SatNOGS volunteer ground-station network recording when an object was last independently heard transmitting. Evidence gathered outside the primary catalogue's feed: proof of position and proof of life, each credited to the station that produced it.
Provenance discipline is borrowed from financial data rather than from academic cataloguing. Every record carries its source, retrieval date and a content hash; status is versioned and never overwritten; machine inference is kept apart from sourced fact and does not publish without human review.
The Institute's current work applies securitisation practice to space assets: financing structures that must function where collateral cannot be observed, inspected or repossessed during transit. That work runs into a data problem before it runs into a structuring problem. A security interest needs an identifier that survives renumbering, an obligor whose corporate status is a dated fact rather than an assumption, a state against which a liability claim would actually lie, and an evidenced answer to whether the asset still exists.
None of that was available in one place. The Registry is the attempt to make it so. The discipline it imposes, that every field carries a source and inference is never dressed up as record, is the same discipline the research demands.
The identification problem is not new. The Cape Town Convention's Space Assets Protocol designed a registry of interests in space assets in 2012 and it has never entered into force. The question its drafters wrestled with, how to identify a space asset unambiguously before launch and in orbit, still has no working answer. A permanent identifier that survives renumbering, transfer and re-registration is the part of that problem this Registry actually solves.
A great many catalogued satellites still sit under owners that no longer exist: the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia. Liability for a space object does not lapse when its launching state does, so a responsible party exists today in every one of those cases; the catalogue simply does not say who.
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 Registry and cites verified authoritative texts from the Space Law Corpus, matched to the instruments in force at each object's launch.
The Registry is public and server-rendered, with a JSON API behind the same routes.
Corrections and additions are welcome, particularly on operator attribution and launching-state determinations. Write to [email protected].