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As space exploration undergoes a technical, commercial, and military revolution, outer space itself has become a Wild West, governed by outdated treaties set up during the height of the Cold War. Over the past decade, the cost of reaching orbit has collapsed, satellites have multiplied, and space has become ever more indispensable to communications, commerce, and security on Earth.<\/p>\n
Yet the legal and institutional framework that governs this domain has barely evolved. Across governments, militaries, and the private space industry, a consensus has emerged: Space is \u201ccongested and contested<\/a>,\u201d\u00a0as U.S. Space Force officer Col. Corey Klopstein puts it\u2014full of\u00a0satellites, debris, and\u00a0risks of confrontation.\u00a0More troubling is the shared assumption that\u00a0as our reliance on space deepens,\u00a0congestion and competition\u00a0will\u00a0increase,\u00a0with\u00a0no path to\u00a0a\u00a0workable solution.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n As space exploration undergoes a technical, commercial, and military revolution, outer space itself has become a Wild West, governed by outdated treaties set up during the height of the Cold War. Over the past decade, the cost of reaching orbit has collapsed, satellites have multiplied, and space has become ever more indispensable to communications, commerce, and security on Earth.<\/p>\n Yet the legal and institutional framework that governs this domain has barely evolved. Across governments, militaries, and the private space industry, a consensus has emerged: Space is \u201ccongested and contested<\/a><\/u><\/span>,\u201d\u00a0as<\/span> U.S. Space Force officer <\/span>Col. Corey Klopstein puts it\u2014<\/span>full of\u00a0satellites, debris, and\u00a0risks of confrontation.\u00a0More troubling is the shared assumption that\u00a0as our reliance on space deepens,\u00a0congestion and competition\u00a0will\u00a0increase,\u00a0with\u00a0no path to\u00a0a\u00a0workable solution.<\/p>\n The backbone\u00a0of international\u00a0space\u00a0cooperation\u00a0is the Outer Space Treaty<\/a><\/u><\/span>, signed in 1967. Here too, there is a consensus among commercial actors, policymakers, and academics that the status quo is inadequate. This is in part because of timing: The Outer Space Treaty was drafted at a time when only two countries\u2014the United States and Soviet Union\u2014could reach orbit, and private spaceflight was inconceivable. Furthermore, while the treaty obliges signatories to follow certain principles, such as giving \u201cdue regard\u201d to others and practicing \u201cauthorization and continuing supervision\u201d of their spacecraft, the document fails to define these terms. That makes the treaty\u2019s core obligations meaningless in practice.<\/p>\n Ironically, the problem\u00a0is\u00a0not so much\u00a0about\u00a0substantive\u00a0disagreement. Yes, the United States, China, Russia, and the dozen or so other countries capable of spaceflight today have fundamental differences on outer space. Since the early days of spaceflight, for example, Washington has asserted that resource extraction in space, such as lunar mining, is legal<\/a><\/u><\/span> and distinct from the Outer Space Treaty\u2019s prohibition on \u201cnational appropriation.\u201d Beijing and Moscow have historically been more equivocal, although their positions are evolving<\/a><\/u><\/span>.<\/p>\n Disputes also persist over \u201csafety zones\u201d proposed under the Artemis Accords<\/a><\/u><\/span>, a multilateral set of voluntary norms advanced chiefly by the United States. China and Russia have recently refused<\/a><\/u><\/span> to sign United Nations resolutions condemning the placement of nuclear weapons in space, despite the Outer Space Treaty\u2019s ban of weapons of mass destruction in orbit.<\/p>\n Nonetheless,\u00a0these\u00a0disagreements\u00a0do not\u00a0represent\u00a0the most pressing\u00a0issues.\u00a0Eventually,\u00a0space governance could\u00a0address lunar operations\u00a0or even de-escalate increasing militarization.\u00a0Far more urgent are\u00a0the threats to basic operability in space given the explosion in the number of launches, satellites, and pieces of debris. Satellite operators need consistent and universal protocols for space traffic management, which do not exist. Rules on de-orbiting are needed to avoid\u00a0congestion\u00a0and\u00a0prevent cascading collisions that could\u00a0render\u00a0low Earth orbit unusable. Above all, the governments\u00a0and private companies\u00a0now operating\u00a0in shared orbits need reliable, institutionalized channels of communication.<\/p>\n The good news is that many of these principles are already agreed upon. The\u00a0U.N.\u00a0Guidelines<\/a><\/u><\/span> for the Long-Term Sustainability of Outer Space Activities, for example, set out voluntary best practices on data sharing, space traffic coordination, and orbital-debris mitigation. Yet while space-faring nations take care to\u00a0comply with\u00a0the Outer Space Treaty itself and mostly follow the guidelines for now, the latter lack any mandate to ensure consistent behavior. The lack of a mechanism to ensure universal compliance will be an ever greater problem as the space economy truly gets underway.<\/p>\n So\u00a0if there\u2019s\u00a0agreement\u00a0on the problem and the need to solve it,\u00a0what\u2019s\u00a0going wrong?<\/p>\n Historically, efforts to further space governance have focused on new treaties. Today, that approach is a dead end. Political tensions make international agreements a nonstarter, but more fundamentally, treaties are Big Bang events: Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed following long and complex negotiations among many parties. Amending the Outer Space Treaty poses the same problem, since even modest clarifications\u2014such as defining \u201cdue regard\u201d or refining liability standards\u2014would unravel as parties reopen the text to advance other goals and broader agendas.<\/p>\n Instead, I propose an alternative approach<\/a><\/u><\/span> to space governance: establishing a conference of the parties (COP) for the existing Outer Space Treaty. Rather than seeking a sweeping new agreement, this would allow for incremental progress within the current legal framework.<\/p>\n COPs, where a treaty\u2019s signatories meet regularly to discuss the text and its implementation, are common in other treaty regimes. Their key legal feature is that while they don\u2019t technically amend treaties, the\u00a0deliberations\u00a0create guidance that thickens the meaning of the original\u00a0treaty\u00a0obligations. In other words, when\u00a0governments\u00a0get together at a COP, they create a kind of <\/span>secondary legislation.\u00a0In the context of the Outer Space Treaty, this would allow states to\u00a0discuss\u00a0concepts such as \u201cdue regard\u201d or liability standards, reincorporate their interpretations into the treaty, and make other adjustments as needed over time<\/span>.<\/p>\n Beyond their legal function,\u00a0COPs\u00a0also\u00a0serve\u00a0as uniquely productive forums for diplomacy. Regular meetings bring together the same delegates, lawyers, scientists, and policy officials year after\u00a0year, often alongside the private sector, creating a single\u00a0place\u00a0where all key actors meet.<\/p>\n The annual climate policy COP offers a useful illustration. At the 2009 climate COP in Denmark, negotiators were gridlocked, but following immense public pressure, U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao flew to Copenhagen to hammer out a deal, with their interventions paving the way for subsequent agreement. COPs concentrate attention, elevate the stakes of success, and give unique political valence to negotiations, creating windows for progress that ad hoc diplomacy or existing U.N. committees rarely provide.<\/p>\n Given growing skepticism\u00a0around\u00a0the efficacy of the annual climate COPs<\/a><\/u><\/span>, the last iteration of which ended inconclusively in Brazil<\/a><\/u><\/span> earlier this month, it may seem counterintuitive to look to this model for lessons. Not only has the COP process been criticized by climate advocates for being too slow, but the Trump administration has also withdrawn from the Paris Agreement while expressing broader skepticism of international cooperation in other areas, such as deep-sea mining. The skepticism isn\u2019t baseless: Decarbonization imposes real short-term costs on domestic industry and consumers, and restricting seabed mining could limit U.S. access to critical minerals. Whatever one believes about these policies, they involve concrete trade-offs.<\/p>\n Space governance, by contrast, would be a simpler and less divisive COP process, with the goal of elaborating rules of the road\u00a0that most government and industry players\u00a0already agree<\/span>\u00a0would be helpful.<\/p>\n A COP for the\u00a0Outer Space Treaty\u00a0could\u00a0start with areas where consensus already exists.\u00a0The obligations under\u00a0\u201cdue regard\u201d\u00a0could\u00a0be clarified to convert existing debris-mitigation guidelines into binding commitments.\u00a0On space traffic management,\u00a0a COP could establish reporting thresholds, data-exchange formats, and interoperability standards. It could also clarify how liability\u00a0operates\u00a0in multijurisdictional missions and\u00a0operationalize\u00a0transparency obligations through standardized reporting.<\/p>\n Establishing a COP for the Outer Space Treaty would not, by itself, resolve the challenges of space governance. But it would provide a durable procedural mechanism for updating the text, converting areas of consensus into binding international law without the all-or-nothing stakes of formal amendment or new treaty-making.<\/p>\n The first-ever COP was established in the 1970s for an international treaty for the preservation of wetlands; thus, the mechanism did not even exist when the Outer Space Treaty was drafted during the previous decade. Had a COP been available to the treaty\u2019s negotiators, we could have had nearly 60 years of evolution on space law. It\u2019s not too late to start\u2014the world needs a space COP.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n