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 built and operated by the Registry of Space Assets (RSA) as 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.
Figures as at 27 July 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.
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 — and 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.
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 danielcheah@spacefi.institute.