Unlocking Cooperation: Space Diplomacy

JOEL ROSENTHAL: Good morning, everybody. I am Joel Rosenthal, president of Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, and we are delighted to see you all here this morning. I want to welcome you all to what we are now branding as our Global Ethics Hub here in New York City for today’s event on space diplomacy, which we see as an important emerging geopolitical issue with a very important ethical dimension which raises some important ethical questions we are going to talk about together this morning.

As an organization focused on applied ethics in public policy, we believe that if we can get the ethics right or at least make our ethical principles explicit it will lead to better policy and better lives for everybody. In the spirit of collaboration on the topic of space, I am honored to welcome the accomplished members of our panel today. It is my privilege to introduce them.

Moderating our discussion will be Zhanna Malekos Smith, senior associate for the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, and she is joined by Diane Howard, former director of commercial space policy for The While House’s National Space Council; Mai’a Cross, director of the Center for International Affairs and World Cultures at Northeastern University; and Ann C (Anncy) Thresher, assistant professor of philosophy and public policy at Northeastern University. Welcome.

Lastly, I want to extend my gratitude to Professor Ron Sandler and his team at Northeastern University’s Ethics Institute for co-organizing today’s event with Carnegie Council, and I am now going to pass it over to Ron, who is going to further introduce and get us started. Thanks, Ron.

RON SANDLER: Thanks, Joel. Good morning, everybody. We are thrilled to be partnered with Carnegie Council on today’s event. Space is an increasingly prominent part of our work at the Ethics Institute, and the reason for this is that, as I am sure everybody in this room is aware, what happens on Earth is now deeply intertwined with what happens in space: space-based systems are crucial to communication and navigation; Earth-based infrastructure is expanding for space operations; space is crucial to environmental monitoring, climate research, and weather predicting, including extreme weather events; and on and on.

The upshot for us we think is that how well we do on Earth with respect to well-being, sustainability, prosperity, security, and so on increasingly depends on how well we do in space, how well we do in space depends on cooperation, and cooperation depends on diplomacy and ethics. However, at present there is not a mature, robust, space ethics ecosystem with well-established guidelines, resources, and normative rules.

Likewise it will not do to take some ethics framework from some other domain like environmental ethics, bioethics, or artificial intelligence (AI) ethics, which is itself still emerging, and just apply it to a space-based context. The reason is that there is too much that is distinctive about operating in space—the governance, landscape, actors, issues, and technologies. While we can learn from and draw from these other ethical fields, we need to develop a space ethics ecosystem that is fit for purpose, and to do that we need dialogue between researchers, the public sector, civil society, and the private sector, and that is why discussions like today are so important.

Again, we are grateful to be partnered with the Carnegie Council on today’s event, and like all of you I am looking forward to the discussion, and I will turn it over to you, Zhanna. Thank you.

ZHANNA MALEKOS SMITH: Thank you and good morning, everyone. It is a great honor to introduce to you our very distinguished guests to unpack what is space diplomacy.

Before we begin, I would like to invite us to think about a space story, retreating back to the days of yore as a child, the French novella The Little Prince, a story of space exploration where the Little Prince visits various planets in the solar system including Earth and in doing so makes observations about what love, friendship, loss, and growing up mean.

There is one quote from that story that I think really ties in some of the themes that we will be exploring today. The young Prince comments in his visits, “What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it holds a well,” and what this quote is referring to is that even in the most austere and challenging environments beauty and hope can still spring forward. I think if we draw a parallel to space, what makes outer space beautiful is that it has this well for diplomacy, which we heard Ron talk about just a moment ago, about cooperation and unearthing that potential.

I would like to turn it over to our distinguished panelists to first address from your various perspectives, what does space diplomacy look like, and what do you think are the greatest challenges currently facing it?

MAI’A CROSS: It is great to be here. For me space diplomacy is about the day-to-day interaction among people who are engaged in space. There is a diverse range of actors who are involved in space diplomacy, from formal diplomats to public diplomats to scientists, astronauts, private companies increasingly, and so forth.

It is this day-to-day dialogue and deliberation that helps to foster trust, mutual understanding, transparency, interoperability, and a greater understanding of what all the countries that are space-faring, which now amount to over 90 countries, are doing in space to try to avoid conflict and promote peace. The goal of space diplomacy is international cooperation, and the day-to-day interaction involves quite a bit of communication to mitigate misunderstandings that could spiral into potential conflict.

There are so many challenges; one thing I would point to as to why space diplomacy is different from maybe regular diplomacy that we see on Earth, is that the new Space Age and potentially competition in space or even conflict in space is accelerating. Space diplomats have to deal with so many different areas that are new, and some of the potential for conflict reflects the conflicts on Earth. Historically space has been somewhat insulated from the conflicts on Earth, but we still have to think about that.

I would say that one of the biggest challenges is China and its ambitions in space going forward, stating that they want to catch up with the United States by 2045—it looks like in some areas they will catch up quite a bit faster—but also more conflictual rhetoric about potentially breaking the norms in space, and the same applies for Russia as well.

I suppose other ways in which we need space diplomacy is in thinking about the future—going back to the moon and on to Mars, thinking about space mining, and the growing commercial economy. All of this will require coordination and transparency, keeping tabs on activities in space.

Finally I would say that one of the biggest initiatives from my view that is promising in space are the Artemis Accords, which were spearheaded under the United States during the first Trump administration and has grown to incorporate over 50 signatories. It is meant to be an update to the Outer Space Treaty (OST), and the question is, how far can it go to incorporate all of the new activities? We need space diplomats badly in this area to continue to build that so that space remains peaceful and more cooperative.

ZHANNA MALEKOS SMITH: Outstanding. Could you give a brief thumbnail sketch of the Artemis Accords?

MAI’A CROSS: The Artemis Accords are a set of principles rather than a formal treaty. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 is formal and binding and has over a hundred signatories, but the Artemis Accords are a first effort to think about the future in space that will be commercial and that will involve likely permanent settlements on celestial bodies like the moon and maybe eventually Mars.

Some of the principles enable actors to think about how we can do this, and I would point to a couple of things. One is the notion of “safety zones,” where if an actor country or a private company sets up some research facility on the moon there would be an understanding that they would be in that zone without claiming sovereignty or claiming ownership, but they can protect that area so they can act independently while others are setting up similar zones.

Also, there is the question of resource extraction. We cannot bring everything from Earth to outer space every single time; it is just too costly and there won’t be enough resources to make that sustainable, so the Artemis Accords also start to address principles around using resources in locations in space, which will be particularly important for the future. The idea is that these countries all sign on bilaterally with the United States, and then when you have enough signatories there will be much more serious legalistic or regulatory deliberation on what new kinds of rules in space will be. To me this is one of the biggest breakthroughs since the Outer Space Treaty, where there is actual discussion of what could be the parameters of regulation and operation in space going forward.

ZHANNA MALEKOS SMITH: That is an excellent summarization. Thank you. I will turn it over to Diane, and we will circle back on resource extraction.

DIANE HOWARD: I will make a few points about the Artemis Accords. It is a political commitment. First of all, its DNA is in an international effort that predates it that started at The Hague and included people from government—they didn’t really speak a lot but instead observed—and a lot of people form civil society and academia. You can also see that DNA in the Chinese effort, which is the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). Not only is it a political commitment to all the principles that Mai’a helped unpack for you, but it also fleshes out what Article IX, the longest Article in the Outer Space Treaty, says. There is a lot in there, and this helps unpack it.

I want to make a few points about space diplomacy as well. First, I think it is always good to look at the Outer Space Treaty as our foundational Magna Carta, if you will. I think it is very helpful when we think about the fact that when Ambassador Goldberg presented the Outer Space Treaty to the United States Senate for ratification it was presented as an arms-control treaty. I think we need to remember that. It came out of some very raw post-World War II sentiments and understandings—“With great power comes great responsibility”—so you can see the seeds of the ethics that have driven the way we have developed our activities in outer space in that treaty.

I think it is also very, very useful for us to remember some of the early drafters, in particular Eilene Galloway, who was very much a part of the effort to begin the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, which formed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). You also can see seeds from its preambulary material in the Declaration of Principles from 1963 and also the Outer Space Treaty in 1967.

She was invited into that work by then-Senator and ultimately President Lyndon Baines Johnson, and the reason she was invited in was because she had done an awful lot of work on atomic energy. She was asked to help them figure out a way forward for something where the impacts would go beyond geopolitical boundaries. There was technical benefit but also a downside, so there was this yin and yang, if you will. That is why international cooperation was developed as a tool, and those are the seeds of space diplomacy. I think it is very helpful for us to remember those things.

I would also say that it is good to remember that in particular with space diplomacy—because we are not talking about areas where you have sovereigns who deal with governments and governmental Track 1.0 diplomacy—there are not such clearcut sovereign distinctions. It is inherently international, but it is also inherently interconnected, so whatever impacts one has a profound impact on many. That is another thing that drives the way we look at things.

Lastly I will say that because of this fact that it is very interconnected and because of the fact that it is not the same traditional perspective on sovereignty that we find in other terrestrial diplomacy—usually when we talk about diplomacy we are talking about it in international relations terms, and I think it is very helpful in space diplomacy for us to think about the fact that another definition of diplomacy is that it is an art, the art of dealing with people in a respectful and sensitive way. That comes in handy when you are talking about space things in space forums in particular because it is for the benefit of all of mankind, so developed and developing countries have had acknowledged stakes in this discussion from the very earliest days.

ZHANNA MALEKOS SMITH: Excellent. Thank you, Diane. Anncy, over to you.

ANN C THRESHER: I will just ratify everything you have both said. I will add to it that I think it is important to think about space diplomacy particularly now. As we set up what space is going to look like over the next several decades to centuries, the choices we are going to make here in these initial conversations are going to set the scene for the way we are going to develop outward beyond Earth, and those will have implications for people who live and work in space on, say, space colonies on the moon or on Mars or even beyond that.

There are a lot of complex ethical things that we need to be talking about and setting up a framework for now: What are workers’ rights like in space when you live and work in an area where your company may own access to the air you breathe or the resources that support you in space? What sort of technologies are we going to be developing and relying on as we move out into space, and how do we want those used both in space and brought back here to Earth? We know from the original space race that the technologies that went into getting us to the moon had profound implications on the way we live here. Think about the Global Position System, for example, and satellites.

There are complicated things we need to set up now that require international cooperation because if one group sets up a bunch of norms and regulations that are not respected by others across the globe, what you are going to get is an arms race, where if America sets up regulations on, say, quarantine between here and space, trying to avoid contamination of the moon or Mars from bacteria here on Earth, what will happen is that companies will go to other places that don’t have that sort of regulation, so it requires us to think on a global scale about how we want to build space going forward and what sort of conversations we need to have right now to avoid problems in the future in space.

ZHANNA MALEKOS SMITH: Anncy, that sounds fascinating. I would like to pull a little more on that thread as it applies to workers’ rights in outer space and the public safety and health risks posed to the workers in the nature of their work on the larger human space community. Can you talk to us a bit more about frameworks? If you had that decision-making authority, what would you like to see as responsible innovation here and considering the off-target effects or second- or third-order implications?

ANN C THRESHER: There are a lot of possible ways that working in space could go. We are seeing a lot of push toward the idea of moon bases as a starting point for moving to Mars. There is a lot of enthusiasm for Mars as a place for humans to live and work, and that is going to require as a starting point a lot of new technologies to support these sorts of things. Particularly in places like biotech we are looking at circular air systems, growing crops on Mars, and growing crops on the moon. That is going to require a lot of genetic technologies and advancements in genetic engineering, which is going to in turn come back to Earth.

We are already seeing a lot of pushback to things to things like genetically modified organism crops on Earth. How do we think about these technologies that are going to be necessary? We are going to have to think very practically about doing a lot of tangling and messing with genetics in these areas that are going to have repercussions here on Earth when we think about growing crops and the ways we think about control over nature at a very fundamental level.

There are interesting ways these technologies will come back here and move outward, but beyond that there is often a push in the sciences and with the excitement of things like space to think about the ways we are going to change the world—“We are going to make the world a better place; we are going to go out there”—and we have these wonderful ideas of what it will be like to live and exist as a space-faring civilization, but we cannot lose sight of the fact that there are these fundamental rights in play as well. Humans have rights to free speech and access to resources, and it can be easy to think that the outcomes justify whatever we are doing to get us into space. We need to be careful about that.

From my own work I think a lot about this when it comes to the environmental impact of space and space resources. In the drive to get us out into space we cannot forget that there are serious environmental impacts to things like spaceports, and we cannot justify a lot of damage here now in the name of getting us out there faster and quicker. We have to balance out these considerations.

ZHANNA MALEKOS SMITH: Festina lente—make haste slowly.

You mentioned access to resources, and I would like to pivot to our governance and global affairs experts here to dig deeper into that subject of how we can build trust amongst nations so that when we are engaging in work that is extracting resources from outer space we are balancing equity concerns of space-faring nations or aspiring space-faring nations having access to those resources as well for both exploitation and also ensuring that there is no exclusion.

MAI’A CROSS: I think this is another reason why we need space diplomacy and new cooperative frameworks around how to use these resources because so much of what is available in space if you were to bring it back to Earth is incredibly valuable, so valuable that it could actually destabilize the global economy. Thinking about what will happen when some of these very valuable minerals are brought back and how to make sure that everyone benefits and participates in space going forward is the challenge.

Building trust and interoperability frameworks where new space-faring actors can be involved I think is key. One of the things that worries me from an international relations perspective is that you see the emergence of two blocs of space actors, the one led by the United States with the Artemis Accords and the other, as Diane mentioned, the ILRS moon base that China is planning to establish. The latter has several signatories, but their goal is over 50 signatories.

When you think about developing countries, smaller countries, or newer space-faring powers getting pulled between these two emerging blocs, it is very concerning. The only country that has signed on to both is Thailand, but you can imagine if each country is looking at these agreements and trying to figure out what the best way is, when their main goal is to have these resources and participate in space. It is quite difficult.

There has to be much more of an effort to think about space as a priority across the world and looking to the future thinking about space as a “global commons” and emphasizing those principles in the Outer Space Treaty. The Outer Space Treaty does not go so far as to proclaim space a formal global commons, and it is kind of weird to think about it because we are just Earth and space is not, but to approach it in this way and reemphasize that there is no sovereignty in space, as Diane mentioned, I think is key.

I will say that many of these smaller, developing countries have space diplomats already and are participating in various fora, they are part of these discussions, and they want to be heard. They want to be part of these governance structures.

DIANE HOWARD: First of all, there are also two factions, some who see space as a global commons and others that don’t. Not to do a smackdown here, but I am of the latter camp and not the former camp.

Space is many things. It is an area, it is things that happen in that area, et cetera, and I do not see it as just a green in the town square that we leave alone. I think it is more of a managed resource or a managed commons, if you will. I want to throw that in there.

I also want to bring to everybody’s attention the fact that there are some things that are going on right now at the international level at the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) in Vienna in both the Science and Technical Subcommittee and also the Legal Subcommittee.

The Science and Technical Subcommittee, which is basically the birthplace of long-term sustainability guidelines, has a good track record for Track 1.0 right now; for Track 2.0 it is a slow struggle because the more countries that you have the more stakeholders there are, and you are right, a lot of them have diplomats. Some of them wear many hats, and space is just one of many; some of them are diehard space enthusiasts, and they are all actively involved, and we do everything by consensus.

There is a relatively recent Action Team that was put into place at the Science and Technical Subcommittee to work on lunar activities including resource utilization, not necessarily even “Do we bring it back to Earth because of this destabilization issue,” but also, “How can we equitably find a way to use these things in a way that goes forward?”

There is also work that is being done in the Legal Subcommittee. I am certainly not offering that this is all that should be done, but attention is being paid by many people.

I would also like to bring to everybody’s attention that one of the things in the Artemis Accords that goes a little bit further than what Article IX did is that it talks about sharing the scientific data. That is a beginning. We are trying to find ways. What are we comfortable with?

At the end of the day, when we have these two ways forward, we don’t benefit if we make them poles. What we do is we benefit if we look at them and see what the common ground is, so maybe not a global commons but common ground. Let’s find that common ground and let’s build upon that.

I personally was very heartened to see that Thailand signed on to both because I think that is a very positive message, and I think we should be trying to build these bridges and find this connective tissue between these two things and find these things that make it more possible for us to do the things we want to do in space.

I brought up before some of those Cold War sensibilities in the early days of the Outer Space Treaty, and back then we used to talk about things in terms of mutually assured destruction, but I think it is a much more positive frame for us to think about things now as “mutually assured benefit,” and if we look at mutually assured benefit we find ways that all of these other countries can get involved. They don’t have to be launch-capable, they don’t have to have the biggest and baddest tech, but there must be some way for them to get involved.

The last point I will make on that is that I don’t know what China is doing, but I can tell you that in the United States there has been a great deal of work to implement those Artemis Accords. At different international meetings that take place on a yearly basis, the State Department and NASA, who are the folks in the U.S. government who sit on top of the Artemis Accords effort, have been convening the signatories for the Artemis Accords and doing things like tabletop exercises to try to figure out how they can all get involved in some of these different efforts in a way that is fair.

ZHANNA MALEKOS SMITH: Diane, all those themes, I saw Anncy’s face light up, and I want to give her a chance to weigh in, and then Mai’a back over to you if you would like to respond to any of Diane’s points.

ANN C THRESHER: I just want to add on top of this that we often think of space as “It’s big, it’s massive, there’s all this stuff out there,” but in fact one of the most important reasons to think about diplomacy very carefully as a “world” is that there is not actually that much in terms of resources out there that we can immediately access from Earth. People think of the moon as this big, open space to colonize and settle, but there are not that many locations on the moon that are actually appropriate for space bases. You need somewhere that has a dark area where you can keep frozen water as a resource, you need somewhere that has light immediately adjacent to that so you can get solar power, and there are very limited spaces where you can actually do that sort of construction on the moon.

The same thing goes for things like low-Earth orbit. We are seeing now this proliferation of satellites in low-Earth orbit and worries about collisions and space debris, and we are coming to realize that space is not as big as we initially thought it to be, so there are these important questions about how we collectively manage and use these resources, and if it ends up becoming a “resource race,” that is going to be very bad for everyone. You don’t want groups sort of running at the moon or running at Mars to try to claim the resources before other groups get there. That is the worst-case scenario here.

There is at least in the public consciousness, encouraged by some actors in space, a sort of Wild West mentality—“Space is there to be conquered, for us to take the resources and claim our 'manifest destiny' in the stars” sort of thing—and we need to think about it as a much more collaborative and cooperative endeavor, something that we think of maybe as a managed commons or a public commons, but the commons aspect of that has to be front and center to the conversations we are having in space.

MAI’A CROSS: I definitely agree with Diane, and I think you could call it different things. Last month the Council on Foreign Relations released a Task Force report on U.S. space policy and recommended “reaching for the stars” so to speak in declaring space a global commons because there is that need sometimes for a more aspirational element. Along similar lines we could call for an international space agency where all countries could coordinate under one umbrella with different types of tasks. Thinking ahead, these types of analogies are helpful in mitigating what is actually a very severe sense that space might be on the edge, that the potential weaponization of space is close.

I often emphasize the more aspirational ideas of what we can do to emphasize cooperation in space diplomacy, but I also look at the more low-hanging fruit of in the next few years what might be possible to mitigate the tension because people in militaries around the world, including the U.S. Space Force, will say that if space is not weaponized yet it is almost weaponized.

If you look at the dual-use nature of technology, China has a robotic arm on a satellite that it claims will be for practicing removing space debris, but it could also be used for destroying other satellites. Russia has threatened putting a nuclear weapon in space. The U.S. military has also emphasized the need for offensive capabilities.

While we have focused so far on what I think we fundamentally like, which is all the potential of space, bringing in that other side means that we have to balance the narrative with something that captures the imagination, whether it is global commons or an international space agency, and to push people somewhat away from the other kind of thing.

Thinking about low-hanging fruit, despite the fact that the United States has a law against having NASA automatically cooperate with China—it has to get permission to do so—maybe there are ways to open that up more because in practice the United States has not cooperated with China at all on space. If you want to have space diplomacy that functions and mitigates the severity of potentially two blocs of space actors, you have to think about how China and the United States perhaps could take steps that don’t involve technology sharing and do not threaten military concerns but still enable them to work together, like the Soviet Union and the United States in the Cold War.

For example, astronaut exchanges on space stations could be low-hanging fruit. It is still very challenging, but at least it is something that is symbolic and allows for some level of cooperation, or the establishment of a secure hotline that allows actual communication on whether satellites are about to crash so you can actually steer them apart.

It’s this kind of complex strategy of thinking of both—what might be the dream of the future in space with cooperation, peace, and diplomacy—while tackling the current threat that this line could be crossed into weaponization. Some would say it is already weaponized. I think the standard definition of space being weaponized is that you have a weapon in space that can either target Earth or another asset in space. While the dual-use dimension plays with that line, I would still say that we have not crossed the line, so a pressing goal for space diplomacy right now is to avoid any rhetoric that says that space is already weaponized so that you give it away before there is even a chance to prevent it.

ZHANNA MALEKOS SMITH: Mai’a, I am going to jump on your comment earlier of balancing the narrative. In systems engineering there is a brainstorming exercise called the “six thinking hats,” where every member of the team has a hat and a persona. If you have the blue hat, for example, you are the moderator. I am going to put on my black hat, which is the pessimistic thinker who pokes holes in ideas here and add a little bit of friction to the panel and ask:

We have heard today about the importance of cooperation and conversation—Anncy mentioned it as well as Mai’a and Diane—and how communication and transparency help build trust. In the present environment, where the appetite for multilateral cooperation is diminishing and there is more friction being introduced, how can multilateral cooperation hope to have a chance of survival here? Is there an appetite?

DIANE HOWARD: It’s not an easy question. We are dancing around what we call “transparency and confidence-building” measures. Truthfully Article IX in the Outer Space Treaty I do regard as one of the original transparency and confidence-building measures.

I would posit that Viasat would take exception to your statement that maybe space is not weaponized yet. I think that there are many different kinds of countermeasures that go on, reversible and nonreversible, all sorts of things. Viasat was severely impacted on the first day of the Ukrainian war a little over three years ago, and it had a ripple effect, if you will, because there is this connectiveness, and, as Joel and Ron mentioned earlier, the impacts on Earth are far-reaching, so there is definitely this ability. Work is going on because that is happening. The last thing that we want is war. What we want is deterrence, and that is where diplomacy comes in.

None of this feels completely satisfactory because there is a lot of talking and is it multilateral, but the conversations are multilateral, so there are conversations going on in Geneva in the Conference on Disarmament, and there is also an open-ended working group that has been working on how to better define what threats are in space. Because of this dual-use issue, you can say, “No weapons in space,” but wait a minute, if they are dual-use, what does that really mean? If we are going to say we are not going to do something, we need it to be something that is actually actionable and verifiable, that you can tell when someone is or isn’t being compliant. That is a challenge. That is not so easy.

These discussions are looking for ways to better notify what you are doing, what your intentions are, “you” being a state and not a person, and I think that is what we need to continue to do in multilateral fora, but let’s not fool ourselves. We are right at the cusp, so we need to very mindfully take a step back and continue the discussions and be as candid as possible about what we — the United States — are doing because I think that is what leadership looks like.

ANN C THRESHER: To take a slightly different tack to this as well, I think it is worth remembering that while we often think of diplomacy as happening at the state level, countries negotiating with each other, space is something that is being increasingly considered by industry and science. Science is one of those traditional areas. Scientists talk to each other, regardless of what the broad-scale politics of different countries are. Chinese scientists are still talking often to the American scientists, who talk to the Russian scientists, and they are all publishing papers.

I do a lot of work with astronomers thinking about astronomy collaboration. That still goes on even when there are tensions. It can be more complex in places where America and China are trying to prevent information transfer, but diplomacy happens at those levels as well.

I think we need to remember it is not just about these big things, but this broader conversation is happening. We can lean on those aspects of space as an area for academic research, scientific research, and industrial expansion to give us these hinges that can help when broader stuff breaks down.

ZHANNA MALEKOS SMITH: Channels for supporting the resiliency of that.

DIANE HOWARD: That is a wonderful point, and I am so glad you brought that up because traditionally I mentioned Track 1.0 diplomacy, government to government, but more and more we are seeing an awful lot of not just business to business or private sector to private sector, which is 2.0, but 1.5. When I was at the National Space Council we would do a full-fledged comprehensive dialogue—the first was with Japan, and then we did them with France—and started bringing in industry, not just industry to industry, the 2.0, but also bringing industry in to talk to the government so that everybody could hear the challenges.

It is useful and something actually that the United States has helped drive forward at the international level by bringing in private sector advisors to COPUOS and helping a lot of the private sector come and do technical presentations because we need them. That is an excellent point.

ANN C THRESHER: I will add as well. I think there is one reason to think very proactively about building interdisciplinary collaborations and conversations in this place, so being really proactive about bringing industry, science, and the government into the same physical areas, putting them in all in the same room together to have these conversations. This can make a huge difference in the way we progress diplomacy at all of those levels.

DIANE HOWARD: Often the scientists and industry are the operators, the people who are actually doing things, and I do believe that the best policy and the best regulations ultimately come out of operation. Having those stakeholders as part of the conversation from the beginning is a very, very powerful thing.

ZHANNA MALEKOS SMITH: “It takes a village” approach to build that.

ANN C THRESHER: Multidisciplinary.

ZHANNA MALEKOS SMITH: Exactly.

MAI’A CROSS: I absolutely agree. I do a lot of work on transnational networks and knowledge-based networks, and that is where you are describing all of this activity, and I think that is absolutely right. In international relations there is this whole area of “science diplomacy,” and I would say space diplomacy fits there. Space diplomacy also fits in the economic and military realms, as we have talked about.

The fact that it is such a vibrant landscape of science and technological development and effort to make all of these breakthroughs is so important because it helps to soften the more militarized rhetoric and competitive rhetoric that you hear coming from governments.

Sometimes when you are in certain fora where there are more military officials present, they talk literally about space as the “next battlefield,” as a sort of foregone conclusion. I like this conversation because we are emphasizing just how broad the space community is, and really most people do not see it as the next battlefield. I think that is very promising for space diplomacy.

ZHANNA MALEKOS SMITH: We are going to soon open it up to audience Q&A, so please have your questions ready.

Before we transition—I have not taken off my black hat for conflict—I want to focus more on the weaponization of space, particularly the exploration of counter-space weapons. How do we balance national security interests in space with accelerating commercial expansion. Are the two constantly in tension with one another? Is there a homeostasis balance?

Mai’a, with your background, I am curious about how you think we balance these two areas.

MAI’A CROSS: Some it I have already touched upon, and I would say there is a difference between weaponization and militarization of space. Space has long been militarized in the sense that militaries rely on satellites for information and intelligence for actions on the battlefield, and that has long been the case.

As Diane also mentioned, there is a debate over weaponization, and I tend to stand short of saying it has crossed the line because it is important to hold onto space as a peaceful domain, which is established in the Outer Space Treaty. Also the Outer Space Treaty prohibits nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction in space.

For me the two are interconnected as so much of what we have talked about is. The national security dimension requires that there are some deterrence efforts being made, and U.S. leadership has been important in space. I think there are many other actors who are important, especially the European Space Agency, which emphasizes space as a peaceful domain. In a sense NASA would not be where it is without the contributions of the European Space Agency.

When we look ahead to Artemis, which is on the other side of balancing security versus science, Artemis, which is the return to the moon and then to build Gateway, a permanent orbiting station around the moon, involves already many international players, so I think emphasizing how necessary and valuable space is to people on Earth and how those operations are exciting and have all this potential for breakthroughs is a way to mitigate the more tough national security rhetoric about space as a military domain for war fighters and so forth.

ZHANNA MALEKOS SMITH: I like that you distinguish between militarization and weaponization.

DIANE HOWARD: I am going to say that it comes down to balance. I will tell you that particularly in the world of licensing of remote sensing in the United States, operators find that balance between commercial development and innovation and also national security concerns that are very real. I think you can look at the update to those regulations for 2020 to see how that balance is being developed.

I will also bring to your attention the fact that export controls are another way that we do balance. The United States is not the only country on Earth that has export controls, but I can tell you that because of the importance of the international cooperation at Gateway and for the Artemis program there were some export control reforms back in 2014. There was another attempt to modernize those reforms in 2019 that was never completed—it was during COVID-19 and a lot of things happened.

We picked that back up while I was at the National Space Council, and we will see what happens with that. There were some notices of proposed rulemaking and all the comments came in. There were like 43 different comments on the docket. I think there is a wait-and-see attitude right now to see what the current administration wants to do with respect to this, although it would be a good thing for industry, but again it strikes a balance between national security and allowing our industry here in the United States to do business with other countries.

There are carve-outs, however. There was a carve-out for the International Space Station to allow that to develop the way it did because certainly that is the poster child for international cooperation and to allow that to continue for Gateway, for Artemis, and for commercial destinations.

ANN C THRESHER: On top of this—this is not necessarily a new topic in the space industry—going back to the early days of things like astronomy where astronomers often traveled with military groups when they were doing experiments such as traveling into Africa on military expeditions, there is a long connection between space and the military.

Even today we think of science as very separate from the militarization stuff and astronomy is this abstract topic, but a lot of the same stations that do observations for black holes, for example, during the night are used by the military during the day for monitoring space and other things around the globe, so there is this deep, interwoven aspect of space and militarization that is worth bearing in mind as we go forward. These are longstanding ties, and we need to be proactive and thoughtful about the way we go forward if we want to start to separate these out in some sort of meaningful way.

ZHANNA MALEKOS SMITH: I would like to now open it up for audience Q&A.

ALEX WOODSON: Hi. I’m Alex Woodson from Carnegie Council, just monitoring questions in the virtual chat, and there are some great ones.

The first one: “To get involved in a career in space policy, is it better to come from the technical side first or from the international public policy side? Which is better for young people starting out?”

There is also a question about the role of developing nations in space diplomacy. What is the role of developing nations that do not have the capacity for space diplomacy, and how can larger nations help in that effort?

ZHANNA MALEKOS SMITH: Diane, would you like to take the second question about space diplomacy for developing nations, and then I will open it up to everyone on space career paths?

DIANE HOWARD: I was at a space event at the Swiss embassy a few years ago, and they were showing all of the different things that they could do. They had this little widget on this spectrometer and this gizmo over here. I am not suggesting that they are a developing nation, but I came away with an epiphany: “Wow! You don’t have to be the launch provider; you don’t have to be the program manager, even; you just have to find a place to put your thing in there.”

I know NASA put together a fantastic moon-to-Mars architecture about two or three years ago where they started with what their end state was and then worked it back and saw the different things they were able to do and all the gaps, all the things that they needed. They put it out not just to industry but to the international community.

I thought that was absolutely brilliant because this is the way that developing countries can find what their widget is, their way in. It does not have to be all yours, although there is a certain national interest in becoming more and more space-capable, but I think that is one of the beauties of the Artemis Accords, that there are so many countries that have signed on that are not who we think of when we think of “space countries.”

There is room for everybody. Everybody has something that they bring. Maybe you know how to mine, maybe you know how to harden something, maybe you have some background in how to set up your workforce, whatever it might be. Look at the moon-to-Mars architecture as a model going forward for finding ways to plug in whatever your interests or capabilities are.

ZHANNA MALEKOS SMITH: I love that as a very concrete example.

Mai’a and Anncy, would you like to weigh in on career development?

ANN C THRESHER: I think it really depends on what area of space diplomacy and work you want to get into. From my perspective, I have a physics degree and come from a slightly more technical background and I have ended up in ethics. I also have a philosophy degree and I am an ethicist.

I will say that I think one of the underdeveloped areas right now is the ethics of space. We are thinking a lot about this and trying to build more, but there are just not a lot of people thinking and doing this kind of work right now. As Ron said at the beginning, there is a wide-open area of deep and complex ethical considerations for space that we need to be thinking about very proactively.

I think it is possible to come from a lot of different directions. In fact, one of the unifying factors of those who work in space is that they come from a very random and interesting set of backgrounds. There is no unifying path at this point. Part of the strength of the area is that there are so many diverse people and groups coming into here with very diverse perspectives, so I think it is about finding the thing that you find interesting or the path that you think will get you to the expertise you want to bring to the conversation going forward.

ZHANNA MALEKOS SMITH: Follow your heart.

MAI’A CROSS: Adding to what Anncy and Diane said, there are so many fields that intersect with space, and one of the big fields that Anncy and I and others at our team at Northeastern have written about recently is the intersection of space and biotech. This report is going to be published by the Carnegie Council in a couple of months.

When you think about space and the future, one of the biggest trends is that the cost of launch has decreased dramatically. One estimate says that from 1965 to today the cost of launch has decreased by 99 percent, which means that it gives opportunities for developing countries to pay for launch capabilities and so forth, but with the decline in the challenge of just launching it means the next frontier in enabling long-term human exploration in space is biotech because we need to be able to create closed-loop systems where people can handle the introduction of various diseases, can have oxygen production, food production can be protected from radiation, and so forth, and all of this comes from biotech, which in itself is this field at a point of rapid breakthrough and acceleration. In our report we talk about how the genomic and space revolutions are colliding right now.

That is just one example of how you can think about it. Many careers intersect with space these days. It is pretty exciting.

ANN C THRESHER: I will add onto that as well. There is the biotech aspect, but as I gestured at earlier there is a lot of environmental impact to the space race. As we build more spaceports and telescopes, all of these things are being built away from human populations. We don’t want people living next to rockets.

That tends to mean they go into places that are United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization World Heritage (UNESCO) sites or adjacent to them or are adjacent to environmental reserves. There is a deep environmental impact to this industry. Even people working in climate change, biology, and ecology have a place in the space conversation at a very fundamental level. You would be surprised at how many different fields intersect in this area.

ZHANNA MALEKOS SMITH: Inherently interdisciplinary.

DIANE HOWARD: Even food science.

ZHANNA MALEKOS SMITH: I would like to make sure we get questions from you and respect each section here. I would like to get the first one here from this side, and then yours, sir, and then over here. Be mindful of the clock.

QUESTION: Hi. My name is DeLaine Mayer. I was interested in the conversation that we were having on the best policy coming out of operations. I teach a course on the geopolitics of outer space at NYU, but my foray into the work was through the Space Resources Program at Colorado School of Mines, so some of the technical background blended with policy and geopolitics.

Something that I think is interesting is that one of the unique vantages from space is that you have deeply engineered technical systems. You can look at the international docking adapter for the International Space Station, so during the Cold War, when you have fraught political tension on Earth, but through diplomatic, scientific, and technical cooperation, you are able to design something incredible.

I am wondering, as a unique maybe workaround in a very multipolar conflict-driven geopolitical arena if technical interoperability or almost standard-setting for deeply technical systems is another avenue for cooperation for space environments.

DIANE HOWARD: Absolutely yes. Standards are definitely fundamental. I have been writing about standards since before we have been talking about them as much as we are, but truthfully they are the linchpin to making all of this work, and that is why I said what I said about believing that things that come from the operators are a whole lot more actionable than things that are just good ideas because they are good ideas that are coming out of practice.

In fact, you can see where even Space Policy Directive-3, which is about space traffic coordination, relies upon development of standards but then also sharing those in the standards community. Bottom-up is a regulatory theory, and I don’t think there is a better example of bottom-up than standards development.

QUESTION: Angel Angelov, consul general, Bulgaria. First, to build on your answer to the question about the possible role of less-developed countries, indeed in 1979 my country started developing a spaceport with a third country after the Soviet Union and United States worked on that, so it is a good example for how countries that are not even Switzerland could find their niche and contribute to this.

There is a consensus that we have to avoid mistakes from the past, speaking about exploration of outer space. When you think about mistakes you are thinking obviously about the way the world was colonized, the mistakes down in Africa, and the mistakes that brought on the First World War and in a way the Second World War. Obviously speaking about conquering space, we have to keep in mind those lessons.

Mai’a was saying that the Americans have their Artemis Accords—Bulgaria is a signatory to it—and the Chinese have their own. That reminds us of the Cold War, when the United States and Soviet Union were pulling in different directions.

Here comes the main question, about the role of the United Nations: All of you were referring to the Outer Space Treaty, the COPUOS, which was created after the Sputnik launch, and the attempt with everything there to be consensual, except when you elect new members, and then you send it to us in New York to figure out how to get Israel or Armenia as members.

My question is: Can we get the United Nations back at the center of this discussion?

DIANE HOWARD: I will say that right now it is not just COPUOS that is looking at some of these different things like sustainability and also weaponization/militarization. You also have the International Telecommunications Union looking at things and you have a number of other organizations, some of them scientific, some of them not. I think there are a lot of stakeholders. Even the International Civil Aviation Organization has some skin in the game because you have to get through national airspace to get there.

I think the conversation cannot be just at COPUOS. I think there has to be that connective tissue that I talked about between these different centers of gravity.

At the same time, I think also there needs to be mindfulness: What are your lanes? That comes from agreement between the organizations. There is scholarship that is about networks and when you have jurisdictional overlap, and there are ways to manage that, and I think that is useful.

You brought up a very good point, and that point was the consensus issue. It is something that developed when we had 20 or 21 members of COPUOS back in the very late 1950s, and now we have over a hundred. It is very difficult when you have one-state-one-vote, so it is a hard one. Maybe that is something that we need to look at because you are right, the workaround has become to kick it to New York and let them deal with it.

That is my answer. It is not so satisfying, but I think right now we are at that point where you have quite a few different organizations on the international level that are I don’t know about jockeying for position, but they are involved and coming from a place of mutual concern. That is a good thing, but those multilateral conversations and those bilateral conversations, which always happen in the margins and are very, very important, need to continue.

QUESTION: I am Eleonore Fournier-Tombs. I lead a research team at United Nations University on AI governance. Thank you so much for this amazing panel; I took so many notes.

My question is about AI. I am interested in hearing from you if you can think of any crossovers between what is happening right now in AI governance and space governance. One example I am thinking of is the questions around satellites and increased capacity for image recognition and some of the privacy considerations around that. I am wondering if you can think of other areas both in the AI governance and in the space governance.

ANN C THRESHER: I can at least address the initial point there, which is where these things overlap. Satellite monitoring is absolutely a great area, where we are starting to see this interplay between data we are collecting in space about Earth and the capabilities of AI.

I do ethics review for research proposals as part of my job, and I have seen proposals, for example, for, let’s say, satellites to monitor illegal fishing operations, and you can use AI to start to recognize when two ships meet up that probably shouldn’t be meeting up because they are transferring fish across because they don’t want to declare it when they get to port, that sort of thing, but there are deep privacy concerns. The satellite capabilities that we have let us see people on top of these ships not aware they are being monitored and all these sorts of things.

There are deep complexities in the ways AI allows us to monitor refugees wandering around the place. It can recognize refugee trains and report back to governments that may be hostile to these groups. There is a lot of complexity.

One of the things that is very true about space data is that there is a lot of it, huge amounts of stuff being collected from space about Earth and about space from Earth, and AI lets us filter through that quite quickly, but it has these deep implications in the way we sort, monitor, and think about keeping an eye on humans from space that I think is very fundamental.

I think you’re right. This is one of those deep issues that are emerging. I don’t have any good examples of stuff beyond the monitoring and privacy aspect. That is something we have to be thinking about proactively.

DIANE HOWARD: I would encourage you to look on the University of Valencia’s website. They did an event last week, “AI and Data Governance in Outer Space.” There were quite a few very good papers that talked about this intersection. I cannot remember all of the smart things that they said because that is not exactly my wheelhouse, but I would invite you to look at that.

ANN C THRESHER: I will add as well, one of the interesting parallels is not how AI and space interact, but we can look at the parallels in the way we are trying to develop AI governance on Earth as a model for space governance, both positively and negatively. One of the big challenges right now is that the technology is racing ahead of us and we are not prepared for the regulation and the ethical implications of this technology.

We want to be as proactive as possible right now in this space because we are sort of on the cusp of that happening in the space regime. We need to be really proactive because we don’t want to end up in some of the same areas in AI where no one is ready for it and we are just attempting to put something on top of what is happening right now in ways that we are not keeping a lid on that problem.

ZHANNA MALEKOS SMITH: Building off of that, I would say, yes, collaboration and being proactive and leaning into that cooperation can help counterbalance the challenges that we talked about earlier of how you promote multilateral cooperation and continue to fortify these fora that help support keeping that line of communication open and knowing that the light is still lit there for hope.

One more question?

QUESTION: My question concerns the Artemis Accords and the concept of safety zones. You talked about locations. To build a moon base there are not that many locations because they all have to be in permanently shaded regions. I know India landed their lander in 2023 on the South Pole and basically everybody is going to race to the South Pole.

One of the things I see as a flashpoint is that China does not recognize the safety zones. They think it is just a land grab by the United States. The United States and China are already having issues about intellectual property. If a company lands robotics and China does not recognize it, and under the OST any country has the ability to “inspect” wherever they are at, any celestial body. How do we rectify that if China is like, “Oh, we’re just going to go and check on this semi-autonomous robot,” and they are checking it to see what the robot is doing and getting technical information? How do we rectify that clash that may come because they don’t recognize safety zones and stuff like that?

MAI’A CROSS: It is a great question, and I do think this is why we need space diplomacy and we have to work out in advance the ethics of these new situations that we have to resolve.

I mentioned that a hotline with China would be helpful. I was talking about satellites, but a similar situation is this scenario on the moon where there are robotic pieces of equipment or actual astronauts on the moon and having the ability to communicate to avoid misunderstandings and avoid damage would be useful.

We do already have some principles: If a government harms or damages property that is from another government or private company within that government, there is a responsibility to pay for damages, so there are principles there.

Another dimension there that also exists and which could be beefed up is rescuing each other’s astronauts. If these are not just rovers on the moon but we are talking about astronauts who might be in trouble, there is this sense of the protection of human dignity and that you do have that responsibility because you would want the other government to also help your astronauts, your equipment, and so forth.

I think at the end of the day, especially when you look at who is actually doing the science and operating this technology, they all have an interest in wanting it to work well and to avoid conflicts so that everybody can make these advancements and discoveries at the same time.

DIANE HOWARD: Mutually assured benefit.

MAI’A CROSS: Exactly.

ZHANNA MALEKOS SMITH: On that uplifting note, ladies and gentlemen, please join me in thanking our wonderful panel here. It has been a fascinating discussion.