About the Author(s)
Muhammad Hamza Chaudhary is a student of International Relations at the University of the Punjab, Lahore. His research interests encompass space warfare, environmental politics, and sociopolitical issues, with a particular focus on Pakistan and broader security complexities.
As the world fights its battles with the horrifying terrors of portending nuclear proliferation, teetering arms race, and an overtly mutated hybrid warfare, it has to prepare itself for something formidably ominous: a new apt frontier of prepotency, the NewSpace Industry. From conventional triad methods of warfighting to a coercive fivefold nature of evolving war fronts, the world has ably reshuffled its diplomatic and military postures. Meanwhile, with the potent surge in NewSpace Industry and Economy, ostentatious space weaponization and modernization has become a daunting double-edged sword for the world. As it overtly bypasses the predated Outer Space treaty (OST) and slacks off the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), it fuels apparent militarization of space research, and becomes a strong proponent of space exploration.
The global military and political outlook shifted dynamically to this new frontier of dominance assertion after a global dethroning of multiple subsets of conventional warfare tactics, spearheading a new geopolitical conundrum, invigorated by space democratization. This created an inevitable schism between global proliferation regulators and private space investors, ostensibly provoking a global rebellion of cosmic investors. In the past decade, the world has seen a sharp enigma of space ‘exploration’ and ‘exploitation’, amplifying after a global expedition of space commercialization and militarization, becoming a weaponized smokescreen for cosmic mutators.
As this emerging trend marked its concerning entrance in the realm of security arenas, it ably assembled space threat multipliers and demarcated orbital exploratory limits itself; it inflamed outer space insecurities. As it has skillfully altered the existing course of space industries and missile regulations, its astronomical rampage is yet to enter the endgame: a hefty confrontation of ambiguous political markers with outer space warfare. The rapidity in space coercive activities and concealment of political objectives behind space exploration remains a jigsaw puzzle for the global security pedestal and strategic stabilizers between adversaries, making them more susceptible to emerging space trends.
This opulent group of small start-ups and large private companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin started to dominate the outer space markets, increased satellite traffic, boomed space tourism, and wounded space environmentalists. This resulted in diverting the world’s attention towards creating a new outer space rulebook, demarcating the nature of these disruptive innovations and re-conceptualizing international regulations, understanding the dark realities attached with Kessler’s Syndrome. To understand the ambit of this new frontier, space experts have dissected the actors falling within this dynamically disruptive cycle, from large corporations to small start-ups, strategically ambiguous states to new space applications, have all contributed to the exploitation of space resources, treaty loopholes, and space tourism.
The labels attached to its twofold orbit makes it difficult to determine the nature of state’s technological evolution and potential deviation from state-centric models of aerospace engineering by its private investors. This, in return, not only creates an unhealthy commercialized competition within state’s boundaries, but also extends itself beyond transnational barriers after a massive investment of millionaires: a rapid influx of private capital in geo-economics. This gradually declining potency of states over private space agencies after an influx of private capital ring alarms for international regimes and legislative frameworks over the radiating unequivocal weaponization of dual-use weapons in the global space sector.
This rising dilemma of space exploration is not an insoluble threat, but amidst the Cold War crisis, it did become an apprehensive geopolitical tool to advertise technological superiority and national prestige over adversaries, but its two-sided shade remains in an indeterminate area. The exports control and dual-use mechanisms in the Wassenaar Arrangement and MTCR has not created needless hurdles for space programs, as they intensively rely on states ‘playing by the book’ diplomatic posture with no accelerated compliance methods.
To strategically mitigate the impending dangers of space exploration and modernization, equipping states and the NewSpace Industry with fundamental basics of space explorational limits is crucial. The absence of national space legislations and domestic policies at the onset of space modernization in various states is a major concern. To curb the potential deviation of national space sectors and private entities in amplifying dual-use weapons and intensifying the dicey proportions of this upheaval fallout, national space policies should preemptively take center stage. The cognizance of new private investors and small start-ups regarding space commercialization, exports control legislations, and international restrictions highlight the abiding and congenial nature of new space players. However, the lack of in-depth discussions on the cryptic applicability of space regimes and missile proliferation risks can be dealt by conducting meetings with leading space revolutionizers, making the environment conducive for the incorporation of the NewSpace Industry into rigorous international and national policies.
Marketing the credentials of space prowess and inviting private entities to capitalize it requires a multispectral approach: configuring space research agencies, space forces, national governments, and private investors into a single policy umbrella is incontrovertibly important. Incorporating national outreach activities by inviting private companies can help in resuscitating national space programs of various nations, halted by the international community for myriad reasons. The NewSpace Industry can effectively frame those countries under the global fabric of space governance, advertently contributing to peaceful scientific uses of space orbits by collaborating with multiple states and meeting with the MTCR partners. Thus, mitigating diplomatic isolation, regional destabilization, and global hostility between divergent regional adversaries.
Although, encouraging new start-ups and companies to jump in the NewSpace Economy is seen as a counter-intuitive strategy, but it can work if the regime regulators opt an exhaustive scrutiny method. Rapid advancement has already resulted in disturbing geopolitical nature of adversaries, and failure in dealing with this new security marker might end up in dynamically altering the world’s security paradigm; aptly ending conventional warfare in the dawn of space modernization.
As an unprecedented numerical value is added in the commercial space industry after a rapid democratization of outer space, the nonproliferation regime struggles to harmonize international restrictions with issues of national and regional security. Thus, with respect to these drastically evolving warfare dynamics, the dire need of a hefty annexed integration of new amendments in the Outer Space Treaty (OST) is required. The need of an inter-regime dialogue and instituting a strict comprehensive strategy to incorporate methods adept in dealing with evolving security issues related to missile trajectories, exports control, and unconventional methods of warfare is crucial. Also, this would work intensively on the commercialized space sector; while acting as a preemptive and annexed method to prevent space arms race, weaponization of dual-use tools, and potential deviation of civilian and technological ambitions.
The novelties surrounding the NewSpace Industry are often attributed as apathetic by space environmentalists and eco-intellectuals, primarily for being too impulsive and conceited in its wealthy core, which fuels multiple concerning environmental catalysts. These green concerns surged after the drastic rise of space commercialization, which includes space debris, rocket propellants, launch sites, resource mining, and an overall unstable trajectory of space weapons. These concerns can be adeptly addressed if the global regime setters, national political entities, and private agencies engage in a win-win scenario where each party annually meets and revisits the aperture created to dissipate any diversion of space modernization to militarization, ending cyclic environmental degradation that fuels more insecurities. This, combined with the methods explained above, would create a periodic timeline of events and undergo the mutually agreed appropriate methods incorporated in the booming NewSpace Industry, targeting its covert or overt beneficiaries to create a strategically stable geopolitical environment in each frontier.