Active space debris removal missions cost $100-500M per object but no market mechanism exists to make the debris creator pay, creating a tragedy-of-the-commons deadlock

Current debris removal demonstration missions cost between $100 million and $500 million per object removed. ESA's ClearSpace-1 mission, contracted to ClearSpace SA, is budgeted at approximately 110 million euros to remove a single Vespa upper stage adapter from a 2013 Vega launch. Meanwhile, there are over 36,500 tracked debris objects larger than 10cm in orbit, and ESA estimates 1.2 million objects between 1-10cm. No legal or market mechanism exists to assign financial responsibility for debris removal to the entity that created it, and the 1967 Outer Space Treaty assigns liability to launching states, not commercial operators, creating a mismatch with the modern commercial space industry. Why it matters: Without a payment mechanism, debris removal companies cannot build sustainable business models, so they depend entirely on government contracts and demonstration missions, so the removal rate remains far below the debris creation rate, so the debris population continues to grow exponentially through fragmentation events (over 3,000 new tracked fragments were added in 2024 alone), so the long-term economic value of LEO orbital shells degrades for all operators. The structural root cause is that orbital debris is a textbook negative externality -- the operator who creates debris bears none of the collision-risk costs imposed on all other operators -- and the Outer Space Treaty's state-liability framework was designed for a Cold War era of government-only spaceflight, not a commercial market with thousands of private operators, so there is no legal basis to levy debris-creation fees, require removal bonds, or establish a cap-and-trade system for orbital capacity.