Space is no longer a place we visit to plant flags. It is where the global economy and national security now live — and our rulebook is nearly sixty years out of date.
For half a century, space was a government project. Nations went there to prove something about science, about engineering, and about national will. The astronauts were public employees, the rockets were public property, and the point of the exercise was as much symbolic as scientific. But that era is over. What replaced it is both a gold rush and an arms race at once, unfolding in the same orbits under rules written before today.
Two forces have remade the frontier almost overnight. First, private companies now do what only superpowers once could: SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Planet Labs and dozens of others launch, operate, and profit in orbit at a cadence no government program ever matched. Second, that same orbital infrastructure has become indispensable to national defense and therefore a target. In today's world, satellites are the backbone of how countries communicate, navigate, detect threats, and coordinate military operations. GPS, secure communications, missile warning systems, and real‑time intelligence all flow through space assets. If those systems were disrupted or destroyed, a country's ability to defend itself, project power, or even manage basic infrastructure would be severely weakened.
The result is a domain that is simultaneously more commercial, more crowded, and more contested than at any point in human history, and only getting started. Our institutions were built for none of this. It is time to fix that.
From Flags to Markets
The numbers tell the story of a revolution. The global space economy already approaches half a trillion dollars a year, and credible forecasts put it on a path toward $1.8 trillion or more within the next decade. In the United States alone, the sector already contributes $131.8 billion to GDP each year. Investors poured billions into space startups last year alone, and the United States now captures roughly half of all private space funding worldwide. This is no longer a niche of aerospace contractors living on government cost-plus contracts. It is one of the fastest-growing high-technology sectors on Earth, and the world's wealthiest people are racing to own a piece of it.
The engine of this growth is reusability. When SpaceX learned to land and re-fly its rockets, it did to spaceflight what the shipping container did to global trade: it collapsed the cost. Launching a kilogram to low Earth orbit once cost tens of thousands of dollars; today it can be done for a small fraction of that. Cheaper and faster access changes everything downstream. It is why the United States flew more than 200 commercial launches in a single year, which is the highest annual total this century. It is also why a single company, SpaceX, now accounts for the overwhelming majority of the world's commercial launch activity.
What gets launched has changed too. Instead of a handful of exquisite, billion-dollar satellites, operators now deploy thousands of small, coffee can size, mass-produced ones. Starlink blankets the planet with broadband from orbit; Planet Labs images the entire Earth's landmass every single day; Earth-observation firms sell insight on crops, shipping, emissions, and troop movements to anyone willing to pay. Commercial space stations are being built to succeed the aging International Space Station, and lunar logistics is becoming a business rather than a mission. The center of gravity has shifted decisively from the public sector to the private one.
Make no mistake: this is a triumph. Competition has driven costs down, cadence up, and innovation faster than any government program ever could. But a frontier opened by private capital and moving at commercial speed creates problems that markets alone will not solve. This is where the trouble begins, for which we are not ready.
The New High Ground
The same satellites that power our economy also power our military. Precision navigation, secure communications, missile warning, intelligence, and reconnaissance all run through orbit. Modern forces cannot move, see, or shoot without space, and adversaries know it. That dependence has turned what was once a sanctuary into the ultimate high ground, and the competition to control it is now explicit national policy.
The threat is not hypothetical. U.S. intelligence assesses that China and Russia are fielding a full spectrum of counterspace weapons: ground-based missiles that can destroy satellites, jammers and lasers that can blind or disrupt them, and maneuvering "inspector" craft that can shadow and, if ordered, disable other nations' spacecraft. Officials describe reversible attacks such as jamming and sensor dazzling as occurring on a near-daily basis. Russia's pursuit of a nuclear anti-satellite weapon has been called the single greatest threat to the world's entire space architecture, because a nuclear detonation in orbit would not destroy one satellite but cripple whole swaths of low Earth orbit for years. If this happens, enormous economic impact would occur. Under President Trump, the United States has answered with a declared policy of space dominance: the Pentagon has been directed to ensure American supremacy in orbit, and the Space Force is accelerating the deployment of its own counterspace weapons.
The scale of the buildup is staggering. China operated barely a thousand satellites in 2025; defense planners expect that fleet to approach twenty thousand within fifteen years, many of them dedicated to surveillance and targeting. In response, the United States stood up the Space Force, is spending on the order of $40 billion a year on military space, and is racing to make its constellations resilient, harder to find, harder to kill, and quicker to replace. Crucially, it is doing so hand-in-hand with industry: programs that draw on commercial satellite networks in wartime now treat private operators as part of the national defense fabric. This means government and private sectors are becoming more intertwined.
From a threat standpoint, cybersecurity also needs changing to protect satellites and the networks that control them, because modern space systems behave like connected digital infrastructure rather than isolated hardware. Satellites rely on software, radios, ground stations, and cloud‑based control systems that can be hacked, jammed, or spoofed. A successful cyberattack could disrupt GPS, communications, banking timestamps, aviation routing, or even missile warning systems, creating national‑level consequences. The threat is growing as nations target satellites through cyber intrusions and signal interference, and as commercial constellations expand with software‑heavy, rapidly deployed systems that often have uneven security. Yet international space law barely addresses cybersecurity, leaving countries and companies to rely on their own regulations and best practices. In reality, securing space now requires zero‑trust designs, hardened command links, continuous monitoring, and coordinated defense across governments and commercial operators, because whoever controls the software and signals in orbit controls critical power on Earth.
Here is the uncomfortable truth this creates: the line between a commercial satellite and a military one has all but disappeared. The broadband constellation that connects rural households also connects soldiers at the front. The imaging company that monitors deforestation also tracks armored columns. Private firms are now strategic actors whether they intend to be or not, and that raises questions of law, liability, and protection that no commercial contract was written to answer. It also concentrates extraordinary power in very few hands. A single company, SpaceX, already launches most of the world's payloads and operates the largest constellation ever flown; whoever controls orbital slots, spectrum, and launch capacity increasingly decides who reaches space at all. That is both a triumph and a single point of failure: the Western world's access to space now hinges on the choices of one company, and ultimately one person, which is a degree of dependence few governments would tolerate in any other piece of critical infrastructure. A domain meant to be the province of all humankind now runs on infrastructure owned by a handful of firms and the governments that license them.
Rules Written for a Different Era
So, what are the current rules and what do we do about it? The foundation of all space law is the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. It was negotiated when only three nations had ever reached orbit and governments were the only actors imaginable. It is a magnificent agreement for its time as it keeps weapons of mass destruction out of orbit and declares space the province of all humankind. Yet it sets countries up with a problem: the treaty forbids any nation from claiming territory in space, while granting each nations state jurisdiction over the objects it launches. The effect is sovereignty without ownership: states and the companies they license control satellites, orbital slots, and the data they gather, even as no one is accountable for the domain itself. But it was never designed for a sky full of private mega-constellations and dual-use military assets. No binding space treaty has been adopted since 1979. The rulebook, in other words, predates the personal computer!
The gaps are now operational, not academic. The Outer Space Treaty is reinforced by four companion agreements:
- the Rescue Agreement, requiring states to assist astronauts in distress and return them safely
- the Liability Convention, which sets rules for compensation when space objects cause damage
- the Registration Convention, mandating that states register objects they launch; and
- the Moon Agreement, which restricts military activity on celestial bodies and calls for an international regime to govern future resource extraction.
Obligations to act with "due regard" for others, and fault-based liability for collisions, were never given concrete definitions, so they are almost impossible to enforce. And when something does go wrong, the harder problem is proof: with thousands of objects maneuvering through the same orbits and attacks that can be quiet and deniable, attributing a collision or a cyber-intrusion to a specific actor is often impossible, and without attribution there can be no accountability. There is no air-traffic-control system for orbit: each operator largely sets its own collision-avoidance rules, even as tens of thousands of satellites crowd the same shells of space. And there is the debris. Anti-satellite weapons tests alone have scattered thousands of trackable fragments into orbit, a large share of which are still up there, each one a bullet circling the planet at orbital velocity.
The danger is a chain reaction: a collision that creates debris, which causes further collisions, until the most valuable orbits become unusable for generations. National regulators are trying to fill the void piecemeal: the United States now requires defunct satellites to be brought down within five years, and a market for active debris removal is emerging. But orbit is a global commons. Unilateral rules cannot govern a domain where one nation's negligence threatens everyone's access, and the major space powers have shown little appetite for a new binding treaty.
And the gaps are not only physical. As orbit fills with sensors, a harder question trails the hardware: who owns what space sees? A satellite's imagery and signals are raw material for the digital economy, yet the rules for them are thin. The data may belong to the company that gathers it, fall under the jurisdiction of the launching state, or concern people and places that had no say in its capture. The United Nations' remote-sensing principles were drafted for a handful of government agencies, not a commercial market in planetary-scale intelligence. In practice, access is decided by who holds the capability and the capital, raising real questions of privacy, equity, and transparency that no current treaty answers.
Nor is the world negotiating as one. Governance itself is fracturing into rival camps. The United States anchors the Artemis Accords, a non-binding framework now signed by 68 nations, while China and Russia lead a competing bloc around their International Lunar Research Station, joined by roughly a dozen states. Beijing and Moscow have also pressed their own weapons-ban treaty at the United Nations, which Washington rejects as unverifiable. Europe, India, Japan, and a widening circle of newer spacefaring nations move between these poles. The deeper danger is not just that the rules are outdated, but that the major powers are quietly writing parallel rulebooks, none of which binds the others — and any regime that excludes China and Russia governs only the orbits that matter least.
What We Should Do
Managing this new frontier does not mean smothering it. The goal is to keep space open, profitable, and peaceful and that requires governance that moves at the speed of the industry it oversees. We suggest these six priorities to guide us.
- Build rules of the road for orbit. We have air-traffic control for the skies and maritime law for the seas; orbit needs the same. A civil space-traffic management system built out from the U.S. Office of Space Commerce's nascent TraCSS program and shared internationally — ideally migrating to a neutral international steward over time — should, within this decade, provide authoritative tracking data, collision warnings, and right-of-way conventions that every operator is expected to follow. The same system should also serve accountability: shared, authoritative tracking makes it possible to establish who did what in orbit, so that a collision or an act of interference can be attributed and answered for rather than denied.
- Update the treaty without waiting for a new one. A grand replacement for the Outer Space Treaty is politically out of reach, and far slower than events demand. Instead, adopt the model that works for climate and the oceans: a recurring "Conference of the Parties" convened under UN COPUOS to let nations agree on concrete, incremental standards — definitions of "due regard," deorbit timelines, resource-use norms — without the impossibility of formal amendment.
- Make debris mitigation enforceable and universal. Deorbit mandates, building on the FCC's five-year rule, design-for-disposal requirements, and a ban on debris-generating weapons tests should be the global baseline, agreed multilaterally rather than exported by one regulator or left to a patchwork of national rules. Fund and incentivize active debris removal now, while the problem is still merely expensive rather than catastrophic.
- Formalize the commercial-defense partnership and its limits. If private constellations are now strategic infrastructure, governments owe their operators clear rules: when commercial capacity can be commandeered, how companies are compensated and protected, and what legal status a private satellite has if it is attacked. Resilience should be bought through partnership, not improvised in a crisis.
- Lead through alliances, not isolation. No single nation can police orbit, and the spacefaring democracies are stronger setting standards together. Coalitions among the United States and its allies, with the Artemis Accords as the nucleus, should align licensing, data-sharing, and behavioral norms to build a critical mass of responsible actors that newcomers must either join or be measured against. But coalition-building cannot become bloc-building: the rules that matter most — debris, traffic, and no weapons of mass destruction in orbit — are worthless unless they also bind China, Russia, and their partners, which means keeping channels open through the UN even as alliances set the pace.
- Set common rules for space data and fair access. Alongside physical traffic, the framework should govern the information satellites collect: who owns it, how privacy and national interests are protected, and on what terms it is shared. And because slots, spectrum, and launch capacity are finite, and already allocated through bodies like the ITU, access to them should stay open enough that capability and capital alone do not decide who benefits from orbit. Access meant for all of humanity should not narrow into a preserve of the few.
Conclusion
We are living through the most consequential change in humanity's relationship with space since the first satellite crossed the sky. The frontier that nations once visited to prove a point is now where they bank, communicate, navigate, and defend themselves and, increasingly, where they may fight. The private sector has given us an extraordinary gift of capability and cost. National security has made that capability indispensable. What we lack is the governance to match.
The choice before us is not whether to embrace this new era (it is already here) but whether we will steward it wisely or let it descend into congestion, debris, and conflict. The decisions we make in the next few years will determine whether low Earth orbit remains a thriving commons or becomes a contested ruin. We built the rockets that opened this frontier. We are fully capable of writing the rules that will keep it open. We should do so now, before the window closes.
The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.
Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief
