Build Global Partnerships in Space for Lasting Peace and Security

This brief is part of “Election 2024: Policy Playbook,” a series by Rice University and the Baker Institute that offers critical context, analysis, and recommendations to inform policymaking in the United States and Texas.

The Big Picture

• As space exploration transitions from governments to the private sector and concerns about adversarial international interactions grow, international space cooperation is becoming increasingly relevant and urgent.
• The Outer Space Treaty (OST) of 1967 governs how nations interact in the space arena, but it is out of date and increasingly less relevant for commercial space activities, as well as the associated economic and national security threats.
• A growing number of countries are enacting unilateral laws that aim to establish a legal basis for space commerce — laws that may set up a direct challenge to the OST.
• For the U.S. to maintain its leadership in space, the OST should be updated to reflect the continuing growth of the commercial space sector and the evolving global geopolitical landscape.

Summarizing the Debate

Global expansion of space infrastructure over the last decade has seen the rapid deployment of new applications and services for a plethora of commercial uses. Furthermore, there is an increasing reliance on the commercial space sector for civil and national security applications, blurring the lines between government and commercial space activities.

The OST is a multilateral treaty between 137 countries, including all major spacefaring nations, that provides the basic framework for international space law. It is designed to legally limit nation states to peaceful uses of space, prohibiting any claims of sovereignty over outer space or any astronomical object.

A Rapidly Growing Space Economy

On the commercial front, the global space economy is growing rapidly, increasing by 7.4% from $531 billion in 2022 to $570 billion in 2023. By some estimates, the global space economy is projected to reach $1.8 trillion by 2035. This new era of commercial space exploration is encouraging a wide range of companies and governments across the world to step up their investments in the space economy. 

The United States maintains its lead as the target market for space investment dollars. However, since 2019 the number of non-American startup space investors has exceeded the number of U.S. investors. This trend may ultimately threaten U.S. preeminence in commercial space and is narrowing the gap between the U.S. and its closest rival, China.

This shift to private investment has direct consequences for civil and national security policy as companies drive rapid innovation in key dual-use technologies such as orbital maneuvering, space situational awareness, and satellite servicing. The lack of a well-defined, legally binding framework for overseeing both government and private space activity creates a frontier environment that raises the potential for future conflict.

Latest Research

NASA’s Artemis program — designed to create a sustainable human presence on the moon — relies heavily on international partnerships. As of October 2024, over 40 countries have signed NASA’s Artemis Accords, which establish a nonbinding framework for space cooperation. The need for appropriate regulation is becoming more urgent as the commercial sector is leading the development of many critical technologies for civil and defense applications.

Innovation in the commercial sector can lead to rapid scaling of emerging technologies, providing the U.S. with a significant competitive advantage. However, the restrictions on sharing sensitive technologies among allies can lead to inefficiencies, unnecessary duplication of effort, and poor use of resources. In a 2024 commentary, Dave Turovsky discusses a 2023 Department of Defense report, finding that the U.S. “does not possess the capacity, capability, responsiveness, or resilience required to satisfy the full range of military production needs at speed and scale.” 

The main obstacle to U.S. competitiveness in the global market stems from restrictions imposed by the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and Export Administration Regulations (EAR), which make U.S. technology less attractive to foreign investors who can find alternatives outside the U.S.

International Cooperation

One recent example of a successful international agreement in sensitive technology areas is the AUKUS partnership between the U.S., U.K., and Australia, which has significantly eased export controls in two main areas of cooperation: 

1. Supplying nuclear submarine technologies to Australia.
2. Sharing advanced capability development in defense applications among all three nations.

The greatest impact of the AUKUS agreement is the removal of key trade barriers within the alliance for sensitive technologies. The easing of ITAR and EAR, especially when coupled to the technology safeguards agreements incorporated into AUKUS, allows the sharing of technology development and cooperative supply chains — resulting in more rapid deployment to the field. While not explicitly applying to space technologies, the broadly defined innovation category leaves room to incorporate satellite observations and space situational awareness ground systems into this agreement.

Policy Actions

1. To attain a competitive, international, secure, sustainable, and successful use of space, the U.S. should lead a diplomatic effort bringing together the full international community to create a 21st century outer space treaty that takes into account all present and future civil, commercial, and defense activities in space. 
    
2. To maintain U.S. leadership and values, the United States should develop progressive and collaborative procurement methods among partners and promote international standardization in space systems to drive interoperability of infrastructure and resources. This can be accomplished, in part, by the expansion of AUKUS to include a wide array of critical space technologies and an expansion of similar agreements to the Five Eyes (FVEY) — an intelligence alliance between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K., and the U.S. — as well as other friendly nations.

The Bottom Line

A modern outer space treaty is urgently needed to promote strong, sustainable international cooperation in commercial and national security sectors, ensuring the peaceful use of space and reinforcing U.S. leadership in this domain.

This material may be quoted or reproduced without prior permission, provided appropriate credit is given to the author and Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. The views expressed herein are those of the individual author(s), and do not necessarily represent the views of Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.