PHOTO: Ivana Cajina on Unsplash
One day, I don’t know when, but one day, there will be more humans living off Earth than on it
– Michael Griffin (Former NASA Administrator)
Michael Griffin predicts that within 1000-2000 years, more humans will live off Earth than on it, through colonies on the Moon, Mars, and beyond. He also argues that the US should lead the expansion, since whoever leads will shape the values of the future majority, and he believes Western civilisation is the best model to carry forward. What was once Griffin’s 2006 speculative exploration is now a question of plausibility. Between reusable rockets, AI-driven autonomy, and commercial sectors moving faster than any states or policies can track, who gets to decide what remains contested? From Interstellar to Project Hail Mary, popular films and fiction have shaped public perceptions on the possibilities of space technoscience, setting the agenda for what is desirable. Yet, few of the narratives question the governance setting underneath –the governance vacuums, resource conflicts and inequities. But behind the story lies this neglected question: are space resources public or private – and who really benefits from it?
Space resources are transnational commons, not owned by any state or entity, yet their legal status remains obscure. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty bars “national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means” (Article II), while committing states to use space “for the benefit and in the interests of all countries… and the province of all mankind” (Article I). The growing political and commercial interest in space resources has turned the uncertainty into an active debate across several fronts: who controls access, who bears the environmental cost, who can afford to benefit, and who holds enforcement authority. This article unpacks each in turn.
Who controls access to space?
PHOTO: Greg Rakozy on Unsplash
If there ever was an access battle for space exploration, the private sector is on the verge of winning it outright. This has precedent. The 1925 Air Mail Act had the US government work with private carriers to stimulate demand for commercial aviation, rather than build state aviation infrastructure. Space policy has followed the same logic: states are fuelling private launch capacity rather than building their own infrastructure. To provide the legal certainty necessary for such private investment, the US, Japan, Luxembourg, and the UAE have adopted domestic legislation, recognising private entities under their jurisdiction as having property rights over space resources.
This shift has not de-escalated the geopolitics of space – it has simply changed its shape. The 1990-1991 Gulf War is often called the first ‘space war’ because the US extensively used satellites for reconnaissance, navigation, and communications, though outer space itself played only a minor role in the conflict. The Russia-Ukraine war, by contrast, demonstrated how space-based infrastructure can become a target within cyber conflict, potentially making it the first ‘space-cyber war.’ Hence, today’s rivalry looks bigger and different, with states now competing by empowering commercial actors rather than confronting each other directly – a form of grey zone competition.
The US-led Artemis Accords, with over 70 parties, broadened the scope of commercial property claims through safety zones –areas around lunar operations to prevent damage or collision. Moreover, emerging spacefaring nations treat matching up to the established players as a strategic priority. India and other developing nations now treat space as a sector of national security and technological standing. Russia’s proximity satellite manoeuvres, intensifying US-Russia-China contest over lunar resources and 2024 US intelligence disclosure, all point to the rising tensions. Starlink adds a sharper illustration where a commercial, US-nationality satellite has become central to Ukraine’s self-defence against Russian aggression, by providing terminals and reconnaissance drones with no alternative provider, and Russia has responded that commercial space infrastructure used for military purposes could become a target of retaliation.
The statistics make this dependency between private actors and geopolitical race concrete. SpaceX alone accounted for an estimated 75 per cent of global payload to orbit in 2025, concentrating a critical capability in the hands of a single company answerable to a single government. Over 100 countries now have at least one satellite, yet most depend on foreign rockets to reach orbit, and this dependency is illustrated by the fact that in 2023, the US conducted 114 orbital launches, while Europe launched only three. The trend is accelerating, with Starlink’s planned 42000 satellite constellation in low-Earth orbit framed around bringing high-speed internet to remote populations, exposing how much of the world’s connectivity infrastructure now runs through a few commercial actors. This dependency cuts both ways: the same commercial actors indispensable to state security can end up as targets of rival states or used by their own governments to strike at rivals. The harder question is this; what if the state initiates the targeting, and a private actor, an armed non-state group, is able to weaponise space rather than just compete for it?
Who actually benefits?
PHOTO: SpaceX Falcon Heavy Demo Mission on Unsplash
NASA’s 2014 ‘Planetary Sustainability’ initiative promised a future in which “the resources of the solar system are available to the people of Earth.” Since then, US-led Artemis Accords have framed space development as oriented towards benefiting humanity. Yet this language sits within an Outer Space Treaty with a conception of environmental integrity built almost entirely around preventing weaponisation, not around who actually gets to share the resources being promised.
The tension becomes evident when examined through commercial law. The SPACE Act of 2015 permits US citizens to profit commercially from space resources without claiming formal ownership. But the ambition behind the legislation runs deeper, raising pointed questions about equity once it concentrates in the hands of monopolies or individual billionaires. Private space companies increasingly shape who benefits from the space, with space tourism explicitly exposing the dynamic. With tickets costing hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, the access to orbit is now a function of wealth.
Here, the fix starts with taking the Outer Space Treaty more seriously. States should develop clearer rules on transparency, equity, and benefit sharing so that if private companies profit from space, they can be required to show that their use extends beyond the wealthy elite. Space tourism already has consequences for safety, the environment and legality. Without reform, it stays exactly as what the New Glenn and Starship 36 explosion suggests it to be: a risky, weakly regulated luxury industry capitalising while rejecting accountability.
The governance gap
Beneath the equity discussion sits a structural problem. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty makes the state responsible for the space activities of private companies operating under its jurisdiction, requiring it to supervise anything launched within its territory. As of June 2026, 118 states have ratified the Treaty. Yet despite this legal binding, it provides neither dedicated enforcement authority nor automatic sanctions, with compliance resting on states and diplomacy. These are Cold War-era rules, drafted for a world of two competing superpowers, not for a rules-based world order with billion-dollar space ventures. This governance gap has a deeper consequence. It lets capitalism extend outward, unaltered, treating orbit as the next frontier.
Alongside, the states don’t consider the environmental stakes – rocket fuel use tripled between 2019 and 2024, while reusable launches have lowered the cost but increased the launch frequency. This rebounding effect intensifies the warming and threatens the ozone layer. Licensing and sanctions through policy will need to be based on genuine environmental impact assessments, by tracking the consequences of space activity on Earth, not just in orbit. Again, with all this in mind, no international authority can compel sovereign states to honour agreements they no longer find useful, leaving governance permanently based on self-interest rather than obligation.
Given the trajectory of the space sector over the coming decades, halting activity altogether is not a plausible option. Rather, the challenge is how to govern the competing uses sustainably. Local disputes can be resolved through trust and social networks; global ones cannot, as diverging interests and distance make consensus difficult. Polycentric governance responds to this problem by letting smaller groups of willing actors pursue stronger solutions to specific problems, rather than relying on one major actor. Current initiatives, such as the Paris Peace Forum’s Net Zero Space initiative and the European Space Agency’s Zero Debris Charter, both targeting 2030, illustrate this approach by bringing actors together around sustainability goals. Yet, they need to integrate Earth-based sustainability into their frameworks, not just the orbital environment above it.
Toward a hybrid Model: cooperation over control
Polycentric governance has gained attention in recent years as a decentralised, multi-actor approach for managing shared resources, including as a framework for outer space. Outer Space, however, presents an additional governance challenge: the consequences of the space activities undertaken today can affect future generations through environmental impacts such as space debris and pollution, raising questions of equity that most governance systems have failed to address. Non-binding institutional arrangements among space actors are already growing, letting different actors explore new grounds. Yet, experimentation alone cannot answer the distributive questions space development raises. The challenge is to ensure that polycentric governance does not fragment into competing regimes but instead builds coordination across actors to support sustainability.
Long before space became commercially viable, economist Elinor Ostrom challenged the assumption that shared resources must either be privatised or centrally controlled to avoid any conflicts of interest. Her research demonstrated a middle path with local, adaptive institutions; no single global authority can manage shared resources sustainably. Brian C. Weeden and Tiffany Chow have extended this understanding to orbit itself, comparing near-Earth space to a parking garage: finite, shared, and prone to congestion, but manageable through cooperative rules rather than absolute control by one actor.
The space sector is neither purely state-led nor purely commercial, but a hybrid in which states rely on private actors and become dependent on them for key capabilities. The US’s Golden Dome missile defence initiative captures the tension of this model clearly: a core sovereign function depends on private vendors, raising real questions about accountability, coordination and strategic dependency. Dispersed responsibility risks pushing polycentrism into splintering rather than cooperation. This questions the lens through which space competition should be understood. While the objectives are framed through geopolitical terms, the means of achieving them are economic – a competition for capital, infrastructure, and commercial control.
This, in turn, requires not a single global authority or commercial actor governing orbit, but genuine cooperation rather than mere decentralisation. Shared monitoring by the states, enforceable norms, and common dispute resolution mechanisms are increasingly necessary in an era of intensified great-power competition. Building on the UN Sustainable Development Goals, an exclusive-space-oriented goal could promote sustainability, planetary connectivity, and fair, regulated access to outer space for all nations.
Is it narrowing?
PHOTO: Willgard on Pixabay
The risks ahead are far from abstract: low Earth orbit is crowded, and debris keeps accumulating. If left unaddressed, this could move closer to Kessler Syndrome: a chain reaction in which each collision leads to more debris, and more debris leads to more collisions. Geopolitical competition only catalyses the problem: states are already racing to claim orbital space for solar power constellations, with no governance regime strong enough or having the authority to slow them down.
The Outer Space Treaty called outer space the ‘province of all humankind.’ In reality, it has always been for those who came first, had money, and had resources. It hasn’t changed since 1967. But what has changed is the accumulation of orbital debris that could lead to serious costs, a few companies dominating infrastructure and a governance vacuum that both private and state actors are exploiting. Polycentric governance will not fix everything by itself. But it is the better alternative: a framework built for commons no single actor can own. As the world navigates toward better governance in the decades to come, the only question is whether that work happens in time – before the window closes.
