Every few decades, the environmental law ends up chasing a threat it did not foresee. In the era of 1980s it was chlorofluorocarbons and the ozone hole. In the 2020s it may be something with a similar chemistry problem but a very different source. Not a spray can, Not even a refrigerator but A rocket.
Ozone recovery is usually told as a finished success story where the Montreal Protocol of 1987 phased out CFCs and the ozone layer has been healing ever since. [1] That story is true but somewhere incomplete. Global ozone levels are still roughly two percent below where they stood before CFCs began causing damage in simple which means recovery is real but not yet complete. [2] A new pressure is now building on that recovery from an industry the 1987 treaty never anticipated, a commercial spaceflight.
The Science in Short
When a rocket burns solid propellant, it releases chlorine directly into the stratosphere. It is the same family of chemicals behind the ozone hole except when injected straight into the altitude where the ozone actually sits, rather than drifting up slowly from the ground the way CFCs did. [3] Rockets also emit black carbon and increasingly, as satellite mega-constellations expand the alumina particles released when old satellites burn up on re-entry. [4] None of this is simply extra heat in the sky. It changes stratospheric chemistry and works against the very recovery the Montreal Protocol was designed to protect. [5]
For now, the damage is measurable but small. A widely cited 2022 study modelling 2019-level launch activity found global ozone loss of about 0.01 percent and rising to 0.15 percent in the upper stratosphere over polar regions in spring. [6] But the industry is not staying at 2019 levels. Global orbital launches rose from 102 in 2019 to 258 in 2024 and a 2025 modelling study projects that if this growth continues at its current pace the annual ozone loss could reach between 0.17 and 0.29 percent by 2030 with Antarctic springtime ozone falling by close to four percent under the higher-growth scenario. [7] The 2022 WMO/UNEP Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion described this as an area of large knowledge gaps. which in plain language means there is enough evidence to justify concern but not yet enough to be precise about how bad it will get. [8]
Why the Montreal Protocol Does Not Apply
This is where the problem stops being purely scientific and becomes a legal one. The Montreal Protocol works by listing substances like CFCs, halons, HCFCs and later hydrofluorocarbons under the 2016 Kigali Amendment. Rocket propellant is not on that list because the treaty was drafted to phase out chemicals used in refrigeration and aerosols not exhaust from a launch vehicle. Researchers now put the resulting problem plainly. the space sector remains unregulated by the very treaty that exists to protect the atmospheric layer it affects. Unlike aviation, which built up decades of environmental standard-setting through bodies such as the International Civil Aviation Organization the launch industry has grown quickly with nothing comparable attached to it. [9]
This is not just an academic observation. Scientists advising the Montreal Protocol’s own Scientific Assessment Panel have suggested that closing the gap may be as simple as adding provisions on spacecraft disposal and launch emissions to the existing treaty, rather than negotiating a new one from scratch. [10] In the United States, commentators have pointed to Title VI of the Clean Air Act as a domestic hook the Environmental Protection Agency could use to regulate rocket emissions, partly to keep the country’s own Montreal Protocol commitments intact. [11] Both routes rest on the same premise. the law was not written with rockets in mind and it shows.
India’s Spot
India’s own regulatory posture sharpens the point. The Indian Space Policy 2023, approved by the Cabinet Committee on Security opened the launch sector to private players for the first time, created IN-SPACe as a single-window authorisation body and set a target of raising India’s share of the global space economy from under two percent to ten percent. [12] Commentary on the Policy notes that environmental protection is listed among its stated goals. [13] But that goal sits at the level of aspiration and not as an obligation. Reviews of the Policy consistently flag the same weakness. it sets ambitions without timelines and creates institutions without legislative backing leaving the operating rules to be written later by IN-SPACe on no fixed schedule. [14] None of the available commentary on the Policy identifies any provision addressing atmospheric or ozone-related impacts of launch emissions specifically. The Space Activities Bill that might have filled this gap was drafted in 2017 and lapsed with the outgoing Lok Sabha in 2019 with no replacement has been enacted since. [15]
That silence is not unusual internationally but it is worth noticing here because India wants this industry to grow fast. Estimates of the global space economy’s value by 2040 vary a great deal from a little over a trillion US dollars on one projection to nearly four trillion on another and India has said explicitly that it wants a larger share of that market. [16] Chasing growth of that scale in an industry with no binding domestic or international rule on its atmospheric emissions is exactly the kind of situation environmental law usually regrets not addressing earlier. Aviation and shipping both attracted emissions regulation only after long stretches of largely unconstrained growth. the space sector is still at the point where that choice has not yet been made. [17]
A Genuinely Multidisciplinary Problem
This is not a topic that fits inside one doctrinal box which is exactly what makes it worth writing about. Understanding it requires reading atmospheric chemistry alongside treaty text. what a chlorine molecule does to stratospheric ozone matters as much as what counts as a controlled substance under the Montreal Protocol. It also sits inside space law since any domestic rule would have to work through licensing and authorisation frameworks built for entirely different purposes of national security clearance, liability for damage caused by space objects and orbital debris management. It touches regulatory design more broadly. Some commentators have proposed market-based tools such as emissions caps paired with tradable launch permits or borrowing of the logic of carbon markets rather than the substance-listing approach the Montreal Protocol originally used. Atmospheric science, international environmental law, space law and regulatory economics do not usually share a page. On this issue, they have to.
What Could Actually Be Done
Three routes are realistically available. The first is international. What if we amend the Montreal Protocol or attach a linked protocol to bring rocket propellant emissions within its scope. the same legal technique used to add hydrofluorocarbons through the Kigali Amendment in 2016 without renegotiating the underlying treaty. The second is domestic. India’s Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 already gives the central government broad power to set standards for emissions and industrial processes and nothing in that Act prevents IN-SPACe’s authorisation conditions or a future space activities law from including an environmental clearance step tied to the launch frequency and propellant type.[1] The third is market-based. emissions caps paired with tradable permits for launch providers. It is an idea already circulating in policy commentary which would let the industry keep growing while pricing in the atmospheric cost of each launch.
Where This Leaves Us
None of this depends on treating rockets as today’s biggest polluter. They are not and a blog that claimed otherwise would be overstating a genuinely uncertain scientific picture. What the evidence does support is narrower and for a person who studies law more useful. an industry is scaling up quickly its emissions reach the one part of the atmosphere international law has spent nearly forty years trying to repair and neither international law nor Indian domestic law currently has a rule for it. Environmental law already has a name for exactly this situation. the precautionary principle. Rocket emissions may be as clean a test case for it and as the next decade will offer.
[1] The Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, No. 29, Acts of Parliament, 1986 (India).
Author DEVANSHI SHARMA Graduated with an LL.M. in Corporate and Business Laws from Gujarat National Law University, Gandhinagar.