The tree · Regime · Happens to the world · Could be decided within 5 to 20 years
The major space powers are bound by a ban on debris-creating anti-satellite tests
A single war in orbit, or even one more test that shatters a satellite, could make low orbit unusable for decades and stop everything above it. A binding agreement among the powers that can do it is the clearest sign that orbit is being treated as shared infrastructure rather than a battlefield.
The test: what counts as it having happened
The United States, China, and Russia are all party to a legally binding agreement prohibiting anti-satellite tests that create orbital debris, and the agreement is in force.
Settled by: The treaty text and the depositary's record of parties
The odds, by how long I live
| baselineto 2071 ± 8 | moderateto 2080 | strongto 2095 | radicalto 2136 | openno deadline |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30% | 40% | 55% | 75% | 80% |
Each column is a different guess at how long I live, from current trends (baseline) to open-ended. The number is the chance this happens before that deadline, assuming everything it depends on happens first. As of September 19th, 2026.
Why these numbers: Unilateral pledges exist, a binding three-party treaty does not; it needs either a scare in orbit or a detente, and Russia is the holdout.
What this one is worth
Nothing. The headline number does not rest on this step at any remove, so however it turns out, the chance that I live and work off Earth does not change. That is not a judgement that it does not matter. It is what the tree says: this step feeds a tier above the one the headline asks about, or sits beside the equation rather than in it.
The last 3 checks
Once a week the tree is read against the news, node by node, against the test above. Open a line to see what that week held. Every check ever made on this node is on the Radar page.
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2026-11-01 Nothing new
No binding treaty or negotiation was found; results were the 2022 UN resolution and unilateral pledges. No 2026 First Committee ASAT text surfaced in search.
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2026-10-04 Nothing new
No legally binding ASAT test ban with US, China and Russia as parties appeared; the existing moratorium efforts are non-binding and Russia and China opposed them.
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2026-09-19 No change
No new debris-creating anti-satellite test by the United States, China, or Russia was reported in the window, and no treaty progress surfaced. A September 16th, 2026 piece on India's growing anti-satellite capability is tangential, since India is not one of the three powers the criterion names.
Revisions
| Date | Field | From | To | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-25 | notes | the node's removal from Tier 4 and its place as a tracked event that gates no tier | Methodology pass item 100 part (a), decided September 25th, 2026. The node record's own fields are unchanged; tier membership lives in data/tiers.toml. |
Notes
Required by Tier 4 from September 8th, 2026 to September 25th, 2026. Removed from Tier 4 under methodology pass item 100 part (a) (docs/methodology-pass-2026-09-25.md), decided September 25th, 2026: a treaty is a sign that orbit is treated as shared, not a condition a Full Expanse cannot exist without. Kept in the tree as a tracked event that gates no tier, on the precedent of E-megawatt-heat-rejected-for-thirty-days-in-vacuum.
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The record itself is data/R-regime.toml in the public repository.