ASTROAARDVARK

Category: Deep Dive

  • Deep Dive – The Moon Is No Longer a Legal Abstraction

    How Artemis II, competing lunar blocs, and a fractured UN process are forcing the hardest question in international space law: can states defend what they build on the Moon without claiming it?

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    On 6 April 2026, four astronauts aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft completed a seven-hour crewed flyby of the Moon — the first time human beings had ventured that close to the lunar surface since Apollo 17 in 1972.¹ Artemis II was, by any measure, a triumph of engineering and nerve. It was also, quietly, a declaration of intent. Within days of the mission’s splashdown on 10 April, geopolitical commentary across capitals from Washington to Beijing to Vienna converged on the same uncomfortable observation: the Moon is being divided before anyone has agreed on the rules for sharing it.

    That tension — between the physical reality of competing lunar programmes and the legal fiction of a shared celestial commons — sits at the heart of what may become the defining international law dispute of the next decade, since the practical measures states will inevitably take to protect their lunar installations and resource operations may, in effect if not in name, constitute the very territorial appropriation that the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST) forbids. This hypothesis is already being tested, in real time, by events on the ground — or rather, in low lunar orbit.

    Two Moons, One South Pole

    The geography of the lunar crisis is specific. The Moon’s south polar region contains permanently shadowed craters rich in water ice — a resource of enormous strategic value, since water can be converted into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket propellant, potentially turning the Moon into a forward logistics hub for deep space operations.² The elevated crater rims nearby receive near-continuous sunlight, reducing the lethal thermal swings that degrade lunar hardware. There is, in other words, a very small number of very good sites on the Moon. And two separate blocs of nations are racing toward them on incompatible legal footing.

    On the one side: the Artemis coalition, now comprising 62 signatories including the most recent, Latvia, which joined on 20 April 2026.³ The Artemis Accords commit signatories to transparency, interoperability, and — critically — the establishment of “safety zones” around ongoing operations to prevent “harmful interference.” Section 11 of the Accords invokes OST Article IX’s “due regard” obligation as its legal basis, but critics have long argued that zones which exclude other actors from specific lunar locations are, functionally, a form of occupation — the very thing Article II of the OST prohibits “by any other means.”⁴

    On the other side: the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), the China-Russia initiative that as of April 2025 had attracted 17 states and over 50 research institutions.⁵ In late March 2026, the Russian Academy of Sciences approved the concept for Russia’s segment of the ILRS, formalising Moscow’s commitment to the joint project.⁶ China, meanwhile, has confirmed that Chang’e-7 — targeting the south pole to search for water ice — is scheduled for launch in August 2026.⁷ A crewed Chinese lunar landing is planned by 2030, with a basic ILRS model to follow by 2035.⁸ Neither Russia nor China has signed the Artemis Accords, and neither acknowledges an obligation to respect safety zones established under a framework they regard as a unilateral American construct.

    The collision risk is not metaphorical, it is topographical. Both programmes are targeting the same narrow band of real estate at the lunar south pole. As “The Space Review” observed earlier this month, “operational experience, site characterisation data, and infrastructure placement all matter” — and “a company or state does not need to claim ownership over a lunar region if it can establish enough infrastructure, enough hazard rationale, and enough diplomatic expectation that others keep away.”⁹

    The Question Nobody Wants to Answer

    Into this geopolitical pressure cooker, President Trump dropped Executive Order 14369, “Ensuring American Space Superiority,” signed on 18 December 2025.¹⁰ The Order calls for Americans’ return to the Moon by 2028, a permanent lunar outpost by 2030, and — in language that would have seemed fantastical a generation ago — nuclear reactors on the lunar surface by 2030. It also directs the administration to ensure “the ability to detect, characterise, and counter the full range of security threats to U.S. space interests.” The phrase is artfully vague. But it frames the protection of lunar activities explicitly as a matter of national security, not merely operational safety.

    Japan has moved in a similar direction. Its Ministry of Defense released the first Space Domain Defense Guidelines in July 2025, establishing satellite protection capabilities, mission assurance doctrine, and counter-C4I (command, control, communications, and intelligence) capabilities as pillars of national security.¹¹ The Guidelines explicitly contemplate operational measures to protect space assets against interference — a framework that, as lunar operations mature, will inevitably be read to cover surface installations as well. Japan simultaneously participates in the Artemis programme, has national space resources legislation in force, and is a co-lead on the LUPEX rover mission (with India) now planning to prospect for water ice at the south pole no earlier than 2028.¹²

    So, the questions legal scholars, government advisors and counsel best solve very quickly are, under what conditions does a “security measure” protecting a lunar base, a resource extraction site, or a water ice processing facility cross the line into conduct that, as a Frontiers in Political Science study published in January 2026 put it, “gradually undermine[s] the non-appropriation principle… rather than reinforcing it”?¹³ Who decides? And what happens when there is no agreed answer before the first operational confrontation?

    Vienna, April 2026: The UN Tries to Keep Up

    The COPUOS Legal Subcommittee held its 65th session in Vienna from 15-22 April 2026 — an almost cinematic coincidence with the final days of the Artemis II mission. With 110 member states in the room, the Working Group on Legal Aspects of Space Resource Activities convened a pre-session on April 13 and presented its updated draft set of recommended principles for space resource activities, produced by Chair Steven Freeland and Vice-Chair Ayman Mahmoud Mohamed Ahmed.¹⁴ The European Union, in its formal statement to the Subcommittee, welcomed the progress and noted that the May 2026 Space Resources Week in Luxembourg would provide “multidisciplinary insights” into the Working Group’s continued deliberations.¹⁵

    That is, to put it diplomatically, a measured response to an urgent situation. The Working Group’s mandate runs to 2027, and its draft principles, while significant in their aspiration to rise “above their decades-old legal and political impasse,” as a January 2026 EJIL:Talk! analysis characterised them,¹⁶ are recommendations — not binding law. More pointedly, they address resource activities. They do not yet directly tackle the harder question at the thesis’s core: not whether states may extract resources, but whether — and how far — they may defend the infrastructure through which they do so.

    The gap matters because operational timelines are already outrunning governance. As a Space Policies Institute analysis published on 6 April 2026 noted with unsettling clarity: “crewed Artemis landings from 2028 will establish safety zone precedent before ATLAC [the Action Team on Lunar Activities Consultation] reports in 2027.”¹⁷ The precedent will be set before the principles are adopted. Practice will precede law — and first-mover norms, once embedded in infrastructure and investment, are extraordinarily difficult to dislodge.

    Safety Zones and the Vocabulary of Possession

    The legal architecture of this problem is worth inhabiting for a moment, because the words matter enormously. Article II of the OST prohibits national appropriation “by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.” The drafters’ catch-all phrase — “any other means” — was deliberate. It was intended to close loopholes. Fifty-nine years later, the loophole being tested is operational: a state that deploys a nuclear power reactor, a water-ice processing plant, and a crewed habitat at one of a handful of viable south-pole sites, surrounded by a declared safety zone of operationally justified radius, has not claimed sovereignty. It has, however, made that site functionally unavailable to others — perhaps permanently. Open Lunar‘s 6 April 2026 analysis of “Designated Lunar Areas” framed this tension as lucidly as any legal commentary has managed: “reserving an area exclusively for one actor, even under the guise of safety, constitutes appropriation if it prevents others from accessing that area indefinitely.”¹⁸

    The Antarctic Treaty System offers, perhaps, a helpful parallel. Its Article IV freezes territorial claims for the Treaty’s duration — a model of constructive legal ambiguity that allowed states to operate in proximity without resolving their underlying disputes. Whether a similar “freeze” architecture is available for the Moon — and if so, what institutional form it would take — is among the most consequential unanswered questions in contemporary international law.¹⁹

    Who Loses If the Question Goes Unanswered

    Every jurisdiction that authorises lunar surface activities — or aspires to — has a direct stake in the outcome.

    The EU Space Act, proposed in June 2025 and currently navigating the legislative process, mandates disposal plans, collision avoidance obligations, and real-time data transmission for spacecraft, but conspicuously contains no provisions limiting liability for space object damage and no liability cap for state recourse claims against operators.²⁰ That silence will matter the moment a safety-zone incident triggers a damage claim.

    Australia — the only state party to both the Moon Agreement and the Artemis Accords — faces a version of this dilemma in uniquely acute form: its own legal commitments are, on a strict reading, irreconcilable. Its 2025 reforms to the Space (Launches and Returns) Act 2018 streamlined domestic regulation while leaving the deeper treaty tension untouched.²¹

    Luxembourg, which has staked its economic future on becoming Europe’s hub for space resource activities, sits in an equally complex position. Its 2017 space resources law grants operators ownership rights over extracted materials — a provision that presupposes the legal clarity to operate and defend the infrastructure that does the extracting. That clarity does not yet exist in international law. The Space Resources Week scheduled for Luxembourg in May 2026 will bring together the global space resources community at precisely the moment when the need for that framework is most visible and least satisfied.²²

    Space.com captured the broader mood in a February 2026 feature that asked, simply, whether current space law can handle the new space age.²³ The answer, as most serious practitioners privately concede, is: not yet, and not without deliberate effort. Considering the events unfolding before our eyes, the question is not whether the law must evolve. It is whether the evolution can happen fast enough, and with enough normative coherence, to prevent the first operational conflict on the lunar surface from being resolved not by treaty interpretation, but by the weight of installed infrastructure and the implicit threat of force.

    A Thesis as a Mirror Held Up to a Crisis

    The author of this article is currently working on a thesis that would create a necessary new legal framework for defending lunar activities, addressing security, safety zones, and the non-appropriation principle in international space law.

    Academic research does not move at the speed of rocket programmes. But the best of it does something operational analysis cannot: it holds the conceptual architecture of a problem steady long enough to examine its load-bearing joints. By anchoring the defence-of-activities debate in rigorous doctrinal analysis — treaty interpretation under the Vienna Convention, travaux préparatoires of the OST, comparative regime study — and by tracking its evolution against live state practice at UNCOPUOS, in national legislation, and in the operational choices of the Artemis and ILRS coalitions, it sets out to produce what the field most urgently lacks: a structured, legally precise account of where the line between lawful protection and unlawful appropriation actually lies.

    That account will not, by itself, stop a confrontation at the south pole. But it may provide the conceptual tools without which any attempt at negotiated settlement would be incoherent. In a domain where the stakes are simultaneously commercial, strategic, and existential — where water ice is also rocket fuel, and where a solar panel array on a crater rim is also a military asset — precision matters. The Moon, Artemis II reminded us this month, is no longer a legal abstraction. It is a destination. The law had better be ready when we arrive.

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    1. NASA, “Artemis II Flight Day 4: Deep-Space Flying, Lunar Flyby Prep,” April 3, 2026; Space.com, “Artemis 2 Splashdown,” April 10, 2026.

    2. The Space Review, “Strategic celestography and lunar competition: Artemis, CLEP, and the south polar region,” April 12, 2026.

    3. NASA, “Artemis Accords,” updated April 20, 2026 (Latvia as 62nd signatory).

    4. Open Lunar Foundation, “Safety Zones for Lunar Activities under the Artemis Accords,” 2022; Kluwer Law, “Safety Zones for Sustainability on the Moon,” Air and Space Law, 2023.

    5. China National Space Administration / Moon Village Association, “China, Russia reveal roadmap for international moon base,” October 2025.

    6. TASS, “Russian lunar station segment creation under project with China greenlighted,” March 31 / April 1, 2026.

    7. Asia Times, “US-China space race shifts into a higher lunar gear,” April 9, 2026.

    8. TV BRICS, “Chinese scientists present advanced technologies for construction of lunar research station,” December 28, 2025.

    9. New Space Economy, “Lunar Development or Lunar Exploitation? The Business Fight Over the Moon’s Future,” April 2, 2026; The Space Review, April 12, 2026.

    10. White House Fact Sheet, “President Donald J. Trump Launches a New Age of American Space Achievement,” December 17, 2025; Greenberg Traurig, “Executive Order Ensuring American Space Superiority,” January 25, 2026.

    11. Institute of Geoeconomics, “Japan’s Space Domain Defense Guidelines: Background, Key Points,” August 13, 2025; Japan Ministry of Defense, Outline of Space Domain Defense Guidelines, August 7, 2025.

    12. NASA, “NASA’s Water-Hunting Tool Will Help Scout Moon’s South Pole,” March 23, 2026.

    13. Frontiers in Political Science, “Colonizing the moon in the post-terrestrial era? Challenges for the governance of lunar activities,” January 28, 2026.

    14. UNOOSA, LSC 2026 session page and Working Group documents, April 13–22, 2026; UNOOSA, Updated draft set of recommended principles for space resource activities, March 24, 2026.

    15. EU Delegation to Vienna International Organisations, “EU Statement at General Debate of the 65th Session of COPUOS Legal Subcommittee,” April 14, 2026.

    16. EJIL:Talk!, “UNCOPUOS and the Quiet Transformation of Space Resources Law,” January 15, 2026.

    17. Space Policies Institute, “Lunar Safety Zones: When Deconfliction Becomes Possession,” April 6, 2026.

    18. Open Lunar, “Regulation Without Appropriation: Building Coordination Infrastructure for the Moon,” April 6, 2026.

    19. JD Supra, “The South Pole and the Law – The Future of Antarctica Treaties,” March 30, 2026.

    20. Willkie Farr & Gallagher, “Shooting for the Stars: An Ambitious New EU Space Act,” 2026 edition.

    21. Bird & Bird, “Space and Satellite Wrap-Up — Legal and Regulatory Developments in 2025,” January 6, 2026.

    22. EU Delegation Vienna, EU Statement, LSC 65th session, April 14, 2026.

    23. Space.com, “Can current space law handle the new space age?” February 8, 2026.

  • Why the US is so unhappy with the EU Space Act, and what to do about it

    Context:

    The European Commission formally published the proposal for a regulation on the “safety, resilience and sustainability of space activities” (the EU Space Act) on 25 June 2025. Adoption is not expected before “late 2028,” given the complexity and the broader competitiveness and sovereignty agenda into which the Act fits, and application would likely start from 2030, with a transitional period (around two years) for some obligations. The United States views the EU Space Act as a strategically important but structurally problematic instrument that risks creating de facto trade barriers and regulatory extraterritoriality, while the EU frames it as overdue internal market harmonisation and a bid for strategic autonomy in space. The way forward will likely hinge on whether Brussels can narrow or better justify the most controversial downstream data and jurisdictional provisions without undermining its core objective of a single European space market.

    Analysis:

    From a US perspective, the EU Space Act lands at the intersection of industrial policy, trade law and alliance politics. US concerns cluster around several themes.

    American Concerns

    The US has formally warned that the Act would impose “unacceptable regulatory burdens” on US providers of space services to European customers, potentially undermining decades of civil, commercial and security cooperation. In
    particular, obligations tied to environmental requirements, large constellation design, and downstream data handling are seen as raising the cost of doing business for US firms that currently dominate many of these segments.

    Firstly, technological and operational requirements designed around mega‑constellations, plus obligations for “gatekeeper” data intermediaries, are perceived as targeting the business models of US operators in low Earth orbit, even if the Act is formally origin‑neutral and even though US commentary stresses that, in practice, only a handful of American firms will be directly caught by certain constellation‑specific provisions, which they characterise as “unfair and unacceptable.”

    Secondly, Washington has singled out the anti‑circumvention and downstream data economy provisions, which require “primary providers” of space‑based data to ensure their data originates from EUSA‑certified satellites. US agencies and industry argue this effectively conditions EU market access for cloud‑based
    ground segment and analytics services on compliance with EU upstream authorisation, even where operations and infrastructure are largely outside Europe.

    Thirdly, US submissions argue that the draft Act would require European rules to apply to American companies operating outside Europe, especially where they serve EU customers or interface with EU‑authorised systems. They warn that vague territorial scope language and the “Union Repository of Space Activities” could pull non‑EU operations into an EU compliance perimeter that goes beyond what is justified under traditional market‑access logic.

    Furthermore, US officials have warned that the combined effect of restrictive market access, national‑security provisions and data‑related conditions could “imperil” NATO‑wide cooperation, including on satellite communications, space weather, debris mitigation and joint missions with ESA and EUMETSAT. The concern is not simply commercial; it is the risk that EU‑centric rules make burden‑sharing, interoperability and joint procurement more complex.

    Lastly, the Office of Space Commerce has argued that the current draft contradicts the spirit of the 2025 US‑EU framework agreement, which aimed at reducing non‑tariff trade barriers in space commerce. To Washington, the Act looks less like harmonisation and more like a new layer of regulatory friction imposed just as the US is pursuing an explicitly pro‑competition, deregulatory strategy at home.

    For US industry, the calculus is straightforward: the EU is a critical growth market for launch services, EO data, satcom and cloud‑based space infrastructure, yet the proposed framework appears to raise entry costs and regulatory risk without clear reciprocal benefits.

    European Arguments

    Within the EU, the Space Act is presented as the legal keystone of a single European space market that can support both strategic autonomy and competitiveness. The EU has presented several core arguments that align the regulation with broader EU legal and economic principles and explain the necessity to regulate in just this form.

    The European Commission relies on Article 114 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), EU’s cornerstone, as the legal basis, arguing that divergent or absent national space laws fragment the internal market and justify EU‑level harmonisation of launch, satellite operations and core service‑provision rules. Many member states either lack dedicated space legislation or apply heterogeneous authorisation and safety regimes, which the Commission says creates market disparities and regulatory arbitrage.

    Also, Brussels frames common rules on collision avoidance, debris mitigation, environmental standards and resilience as necessary to guarantee a level playing field and to reduce systemic risk in the European orbital footprint. The Union Space Authorisation (EUSA) and the Union Repository are positioned as tools to centralise oversight and ensure that commercial operators do not free‑ride on the risk management efforts of more stringent national regimes.

    Policy documents and expert commentary stress that Europe’s share of upstream space activities is under pressure, while the downstream segment is increasingly dominated by agile, well‑capitalised non‑EU players, especially US firms. The Act is thus justified as part of a broader industrial push to avoid a situation where critical space infrastructure and data services are controlled from outside the EU, limiting Europe’s ability to act autonomously in crisis scenarios.

    EU officials also argue that extending the framework into the downstream data economy is necessary to prevent circumvention and to ensure that all economic actors who monetise space‑derived data are subject to comparable quality, safety and, where relevant, environmental requirements. Without such rules, a purely upstream focus could be easily bypassed by routing services through lightly regulated intermediaries or third countries.

    At the same time, internal EU scrutiny has sharpened. The Council Legal Service’s January 2026 opinion accepts the Article 114 basis for launch, operations and collision‑avoidance provisions, but questions the proportionality and Treaty compatibility of the downstream data economy rules. It specifically notes that requiring primary providers to verify that all data originates from EUSA‑certified satellites may be disproportionate absent stronger evidence and explanation, and flags ambiguity in territorial scope, free‑movement clauses and voluntary environmental labelling. All member state delegations have therefore kept scrutiny reservations ahead of the 21 April 2026 working party, making it clear that the downstream and jurisdictional elements are not only a transatlantic issue but also a matter of intra‑EU constitutional balance.

    One point of relative stability is the core EUSA authorisation scheme, which requires EU and third‑country operators to register in the Union Repository within a 12‑month period. The current compromise text preserves this requirement and includes the possibility of equivalence decisions and derogations for third‑country service providers where no EU substitute exists. For Brussels, this is where the Act’s outward‑facing logic is clearest: a single EU authorisation regime that recognises comparable third‑country frameworks via equivalence, while ensuring that all operators active on the EU market meet baseline technical and safety standards. For Washington, however, the concern is that equivalence may become a discretionary political tool and that registration into an EU repository exposes US operators to overlapping and potentially conflicting oversight.

    The Legal and Political Fault Lines

    For space lawyers and industry leaders, three fault lines matter most: proportionality, extraterritoriality, and the interface between trade and security.

    The Legal Service’s proportionality critique of the downstream provisions echoes earlier disputes over the scope of EU digital regulation. The central questions are whether tying downstream data providers’ compliance to upstream EUSA certification is necessary and appropriate to achieve internal‑market objectives and whether the EU’s reliance on Article 114 TFEU can legitimately extend to behavioural obligations on data “gatekeepers” whose main activities might resemble cloud, analytics or telecom services more than classic space operations. If the working party or, later, the Court of Justice considers the current design excessive, the downstream regime may be narrowed, refocused on clearly space‑specific risks, or justified via stronger evidence of internal‑market distortion.

    The US criticism that the Act would effectively apply European rules to American companies operating outside Europe taps into broader concerns about EU regulatory extraterritoriality, familiar from GDPR and digital platform regulation. The features particularly sensitive to US stakeholders are the breadth of “establishment” and “targeting” criteria for when the Act applies to non‑EU
    operators serving EU customers or operating EU‑licensed satellites, the requirement that primary providers ensure data originates from EUSA‑compliant
    satellites, which could force non‑EU analytics or cloud providers into de facto upstream compliance even if they never seek an EU authorisation themselves, and the possibility that vague national‑security carve‑outs could be invoked in ways that entangle ESA, EUMETSAT or bilateral US–EU programmes. Without clearer guardrails, US policymakers will continue to characterise the Act as an attempt to export EU regulatory preferences into global space commerce.

    The EU is explicit about its desire to reduce strategic dependence on non‑EU providers in key space segments, particularly downstream services where US firms currently lead. For Washington, this looks like industrial policy via regulation at a time when the US is promoting deregulation and competition to accelerate commercial space. This tension is sharpened by security considerations: NATO members are exploring larger roles for commercial constellations and EO services in defence. If EU rules are perceived as sidelining US providers or complicating joint procurement, space regulation risks becoming a new dividing line in the transatlantic relationship, rather than an enabler of shared resilience.

    Pathways to Cooperative Solutions

    For EU–US space cooperation to thrive under an EU Space Act, both sides will need to adjust expectations and design more sophisticated legal interfaces. Several concrete avenues stand out.

    A first step would be to bring the downstream provisions into clearer alignment with proportionality and to reduce their trade‑restrictive effects. This may be achieved via refocusing obligations on genuinely space‑specific risks – instead of a blanket requirement that primary providers verify all data originates from EUSA‑certified satellites, the Act could target high‑risk use cases (e.g., safety‑critical navigation, collision‑avoidance data, debris remediation services) where upstream certification has a direct functional link to downstream risk. Or via moving from strict origin‑verification to risk‑based due diligence – data intermediaries could be required to implement proportionate due‑diligence processes, with stronger obligations where they exercise control over mission design or data acquisition, and lighter obligations where they simply process already regulated streams. Another option is clarifying that general‑purpose cloud and IT infrastructure are not inadvertently re‑regulated as “space” services. Here, explicit carve‑outs or guidance could reassure US cloud and hyperscale providers that they are not subject to duplicative authorisation merely because they host EO data. For practitioners, a key question will be whether these adjustments are made at the working party stage or left to delegated acts and guidance, which would increase legal uncertainty but preserve political flexibility.

    The draft already contemplates equivalence decisions for third countries whose regulatory frameworks are comparable and provide for ongoing supervision. To reassure the US and other partners, the EU could codify clear criteria and timelines for equivalence, including technical, safety and oversight benchmarks that are transparent and not easily weaponised. Or mutual‑recognition arrangements could be explored where US authorisations are recognised as
    functionally equivalent for specific classes of activities, subject to joint inspections or information‑sharing. Finally, the existing 2025 US‑EU framework can be used as an umbrella under which equivalence decisions are negotiated, linking them to shared objectives on innovation and security rather than treating
    them as unilateral EU acts. For CEOs and counsel both in the US and the EU, the presence of a credible equivalence regime will be central in assessing whether to structure EU‑facing operations via local subsidiaries, joint ventures, or cross‑border service models.

    Additionally, both EU and US stakeholders would benefit from precise jurisdictional boundaries. It would be most useful to clarify that non‑EU operators are caught only where there is a clear and substantial connection
    to the EU internal market, such as targeting EU customers or operating satellites under EU jurisdiction. Obligations relating to activities wholly outside EU territory and jurisdiction should be limited, except where explicitly justified by international obligations (e.g., registration, liability) or concrete risks to EU space infrastructure. The Union Repository, after all, has an informational and coordination function, not a general licence to supervise all aspects of non‑EU operations. Well‑drafted recitals and implementing guidance can be powerful tools here, especially for courts and regulators interpreting the Act over time.

    To placate NATO, security and defence carve‑outs could be aligned with alliance needs. Given US fears that vague national‑security provisions could be used to discriminate or to interfere with NATO and ESA programmes, both sides should invest in joint governance mechanisms. For example, a dedicated EU–US (and potentially NATO) consultative body on the security aspects of commercial space regulation could be established, tasked with reviewing measures that may affect alliance capabilities. Agreeing that certain joint missions and programmes fall under tailor‑made arrangements, insulated from general commercial rules where appropriate, but still respecting minimum safety and sustainability standards, would also be helpful. And the Act’s derogation mechanisms should be used transparently for cases where no EU substitute exists, particularly in security‑relevant services, with clear criteria and sunset clauses. This would help ensure that the Act strengthens, rather than complicates, transatlantic resilience in orbit.

    At the end of the day, both the EU and the US have a strong interest in preventing regulatory fragmentation in space, especially as other powers advance their own frameworks. It would do well to jointly champion technical standards for space safety, debris mitigation and sustainability in multilateral fora, while allowing regional variations in implementation; to co-ordinate positions on issues like in‑orbit servicing, active debris removal, space traffic management and high‑capacity constellations, helping avoid incompatible obligations that split markets; to use bilateral dialogues to stress‑test new regulatory proposals against concrete cross‑border use cases before they are locked into legislation. For industry and counsel, this presents an opportunity to shape “coalitions of the willing” around best practices which can later be incorporated into binding rules on both sides of the Atlantic.