This volume is a product of the efforts of the Institute for National Strategic Studies Spacepower Theory Project Team, which was tasked by the Department of Defense to create a theoretical framework for examining spacepower and its relationship to the achievement of national objectives. The team was charged with considering the space domain in a broad and holistic way, incorporating a wide range of perspectives from U.S. and international space actors engaged in scientific, commercial, intelligence, and military enterprises. This collection of papers commissioned by the team serves as a starting point for continued discourse on ways to extend, modify, refine, and integrate a broad range of viewpoints about human-initiated space activity, its relationship to our globalized society, and its economic, political, and security interactions. It will equip practitioners, scholars, students, and citizens with the historical background and conceptual framework to navigate through and assess the challenges and opportunities of an increasingly complex space environment.

This book presents a comprehensive geopolitical analysis of European space activities. By studying outer space as a physical and socio-economic space as well as a military-diplomatic area, the author helps readers understand outer space as a geopolitical environment. The book also offers insights into the behavior and strategies of different actors, with a special focus on the European space strategy and the nature of the European space program and diplomacy.

This book explores the privatization of space and its global impact on the future of commerce, peace and conflict. As space becomes more congested, contested, and competitive in the government and the private arenas, the talk around space research moves past NASA’s monopoly on academic and cultural imaginations to discuss how Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is making space "cool" again. This volume addresses the new rhetoric of space race and weaponization, with a focus on how the costs of potential conflict in space would discourage open conflict and enable global cooperation. It highlights the increasing dependence of the global economy on space research, its democratization, plunging costs of access, and growing economic potential of space-based assets. Thoughtful, nuanced, well-documented, this book is a must read for scholars and researchers of science and technology studies, space studies, political studies, sociology, environmental studies, and political economy. It will also be of much interest to policymakers, bureaucrats, think tanks, as well as the interested general reader looking for fresh perspectives on the future of space.

Modern technological development has been both rapid and fundamentally transformative of the means and methods of warfare, and of the broader environment in which warfare is conducted. In many cases, technological development has been stimulated by, and dedicated to, addressing military requirements. On other occasions, technological developments outside the military sphere affect or inform the conduct of warfare and military expectations. The introduction of new technologies such as information technology, space technologies, nanotechnology and robotic technologies into our civil life, and into warfare, is expected to influence the application and interpretation of the existing rules of the law of armed conflict. In this book, scholars and practitioners working in the fields critically examine the potential legal challenges arising from the use of new technologies and future directions of legal development in light of the specific characteristics and challenges each technology presents with regard to foreseeable humanitarian impacts upon the battlespace.

This book explains on what basis a nation can claim the status of space power, what are the criteria differentiating a space power from “lesser” space actors, and how their spacepower can be empirically measured and assessed. To this end, it sets forth a comprehensive multidisciplinary framework to enable a dynamic comparison of space actors and of the pathways that lead them in and out of the space powers’ club. Drawing upon a critical review of the existing literature, it conceptualises spacepower as a form of state power based on the complex interplay between the two defining dimensions of stateness, namely the well-studied dimension of capacity and the often neglected yet exceedingly important dimension of autonomy. The book demonstrates that only actors possessing high levels of both autonomy and capacity qualify as space powers. Different levels of either capacity or autonomy produce other types of space actors, including skilled spacefarers, self-reliant spacefarers, primed spacefarers, and emerging space actors. This innovative conceptual framework is complemented by an in-depth comparative assessment that collects and processes a large amount of hard-to-find data on the most active global space actors and aggregates multiple indicators into a compound, non-hierarchical index of space power visualised in the form of a matrix.