Since the turn of the millennium, a growing number of governments have announced major space exploration initiatives, highly-visible commitments requiring trillions of dollars in additional space budget expenditures to reach their goals on the ‘Moon, Mars, and beyond’. The initiatives represent a significant transformation in the international political economy of outer space, signaling the re-emergence of governments into an increasingly civilian-commercialized space arena, which, over the past two decades, has become dominated by privatized multinational consortia. The initiatives appear to indicate that leading space-faring nations are taking steps to reassert their decision-making prerogatives about how space is used and regulated, with profound implications for the outer space legal regime. In particular, these space-faring nations are using the initiatives to legitimize their proposals to shift the regime’s basis for decision-making from inclusive, principles-based treaties and organizations, to more exclusive, science-based agreements over which they exert a controlling influence. In so doing, the international space legal regime is evolving in a direction paralleling other technology-based commons regimes, such as those for Antarctica and the Internet.
Air and Space Law