Research papers and working papers from the Space Finance Institute.
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.
A framework for financial markets constrained by the finite speed of information. An information-velocity limit defines causal domains analogous to light cones, and arbitrage is realisable only where those domains overlap. The no-arbitrage condition is restated under causal filtrations, building on the established theory of asset pricing under delayed and restricted information.
The paper proves an obstruction result on which dynamics can carry martingale prices, derives an operational bound on arbitrage reach from signal-survival probability, and derives the maturity-dependent hedging cost of communication blackouts, with a worked Earth–Mars example. As information speed grows without bound the model converges to classical finance.
Version 2 (July 2026) revises and corrects the original and consolidates the programme's technical material into this single paper; the version note in the paper details the changes.
Capital markets are built on synchronised clocks. This paper extends financial market theory into regimes where communication delays become economically significant: light cones replace synchronised time, causality bounds replace arbitrage bounds, and spacetime geometry shapes market structure.
The observation that light speed bears on markets is not new; a scattered literature has developed its fragments separately. This paper's contribution is synthesis and operationalisation: causal market regimes are formalised, institutional mechanisms are proposed on top of emerging off-Earth time standards, and an empirical agenda is set out as designs any researcher with the data can execute.
Version 2 (July 2026) repositions the paper within the prior literature and corrects the original; the version note in the paper details the changes.
Current work applies securitisation practice to space assets: financing structures that must function where collateral cannot be observed, inspected, or repossessed during transit. Alongside it, an empirical agenda on latency and asset prices is set out in the papers above for any researcher with the data to execute.
The reference data that work depends on is public. The Orbital Asset Registry holds a permanent identity record for roughly 70,000 catalogued orbital objects, resolves payloads to operating companies and responsible states, and records end-of-life events read from operators' own regulatory filings.
Our reading of the surrounding literature is public. The Observatory is a living map of the finance-under-physical-constraint literature: the works, who wrote them, and the citations that should exist but don't. Data is CC BY; suggestions are welcome.
Papers are issued in the SFI Working Paper Series. Each paper has its own page above, carrying the full citation, the DOI and the series number. Standard academic citation formats apply.
For working papers not yet published, write to danielcheah@spacefi.institute for the most current version and the appropriate citation format.