The international order governing humanity’s activities beyond Earth’s atmosphere stands at a point not seen since the Space Age began. What started as a bipolar Cold War competition has evolved into a multipolar commercial and geopolitical contest, exposing fundamental inadequacies in a governance framework designed for an era when only superpowers could reach orbit. Professor Steven Freeland, Emeritus Professor of International Law at Western Sydney University and Professorial Fellow at Bond University, has emerged as one of the field’s most authoritative voices warning that the multilateral consensus model—long considered sacrosanct in space diplomacy—may be fundamentally incompatible with the velocity and complexity of modern space activity. The global space economy reached $613 billion in 2024 and projects toward $1.8 trillion by 2035, yet the institutional architecture meant to regulate this explosion remains frozen in 1960s assumptions about state-centered activity and incremental technological change. As Chair of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) Working Group on Legal Aspects of Space Resource Activities, Freeland occupies a unique vantage point to observe how geopolitical fragmentation, commercial acceleration, and existential debris risks are converging to create what he characterizes as a potentially civilization-threatening governance vacuum. (1)
The Structural Fragility of Consensus-Based Governance
The multilateral space governance regime rests on five UN treaties negotiated between 1967 and 1979, with the Outer Space Treaty serving as constitutional bedrock. This framework enshrined principles that were revolutionary for their time: outer space as the “province of all mankind,” prohibition of national appropriation of celestial bodies, restriction of weapons of mass destruction in orbit, and state liability for activities of both governmental and private entities. The UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, established in 1959 with 102 member states as of 2025, operates on a consensus model where any single nation can block progress. (2)
This consensus requirement, once viewed as ensuring legitimacy through inclusivity, has become a structural impediment to adaptive governance. The collapse of the 2023 UN open-ended working group on reducing space threats through norms of responsible behaviors illustrates the dysfunction: despite 150 nations voting to establish the process, eight states including China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua, Syria, and Venezuela blocked even procedural reports by insisting only legally binding instruments held value. The working group could not agree on a title for its report, let alone substantive norms, because fundamental philosophical differences about space security governance proved unbridgeable within consensus constraints. (3)
The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, the executive body implementing COPUOS decisions, faces severe budget constraints that compound institutional weakness. A liquidity crisis has forced UNOOSA to limit activities to core events, reduce staff mobility, and scale back multilateral engagement precisely when governance complexity demands expansion. The establishment of a trust fund accepting non-state contributions represents tacit acknowledgment that traditional government funding models cannot support the institutional capacity required for effective space governance. Internal COPUOS documents from 2025 reveal existential awareness of this predicament, warning that “if COPUOS does not respond and provide the necessary governance solutions, other actors and/or fora may wish to fill the void”. (4)
Professor Freeland has advocated for multilateral processes throughout his career, representing Australia at COPUOS for years and serving in leadership roles within the International Institute of Space Law, which awarded him its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022. Yet even as a multilateralism advocate, he acknowledges the system’s mounting inadequacies in the face of accelerating geopolitical competition and technological change. The challenge is not merely diplomatic gridlock but temporal mismatch: multilateral processes operate on timescales of years to decades while commercial space operates on timescales of months to quarters, and orbital dynamics operate on timescales of seconds. (5)
Competing Governance Architectures and Legal Fragmentation
The most visible symptom of multilateral failure is the emergence of parallel governance frameworks that threaten to balkanize space law into incompatible regional or ideological blocs. The Artemis Accords, unveiled by NASA and the U.S. Department of State in October 2020, represent a strategic pivot from universal treaties to plurilateral agreements among aligned nations. With 56 signatories as of September 2025, the Accords establish operational principles for lunar activities including transparency, interoperability, emergency assistance, registration, debris mitigation, and resource extraction. (6)
The Accords’ approach to space resources exemplifies their contentious legal position: they assert that “extraction of space resources does not inherently constitute national appropriation under Article II of the Outer Space Treaty”. This interpretation, grounded in the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015, grants American citizens and companies property rights over extracted materials while claiming consistency with international law’s prohibition on national appropriation. Luxembourg enacted parallel legislation in 2017, becoming the first European nation to provide legal certainty for space resource ownership. Both frameworks argue that appropriating resources differs fundamentally from appropriating territory, though this distinction remains disputed. (7)
China and Russia reject this legal reasoning and have responded by constructing an alternative governance architecture. The International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), formalized through a March 2021 memorandum between the China National Space Administration and Roscosmos, now includes 13 nations including Belarus, Pakistan, Egypt, South Africa, Thailand, and Senegal. ILRS plans to establish permanent infrastructure on the lunar surface for research, mining, and human habitation, with preliminary designs including a nuclear reactor by 2035 to power the station. The initiative explicitly positions itself as based on “co-consultation, joint construction, and shared benefits” principles that contrast with what Chinese analysts characterize as the Artemis Accords’ colonization framework. (8)
This bifurcation extends beyond diplomatic positioning to operational incompatibility. The Artemis Accords introduce “safety zones” around lunar activities to prevent harmful interference, but provide no standardized process for establishing, communicating, or respecting such zones. Chinese and Russian officials have likened this concept to territorial appropriation, with former Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Rogozin comparing it to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. A 2025 crisis simulation examining lunar conflict scenarios found that participants could not agree on clear rules, instead focusing on processes for developing inclusive, fair, and adaptable frameworks—suggesting that even like-minded actors lack well-formed governance positions. (9)
The practical consequence is two incompatible lunar governance systems racing to establish facts on the ground—or rather, on the Moon. The Artemis III mission targeting the lunar South Pole has been delayed to 2027, while China aims to land taikonauts by 2030. Both programs target the South Pole due to water ice deposits and near-constant sunlight that make sustained human presence viable. Former NASA Administrator Bill Nelson once stated bluntly that “it is vital for us to land on the south pole, so that we do not cede portions of that lunar south pole to the Chinese,” framing the competition in explicitly geopolitical terms. Chinese legal scholars argue that the U.S. approach threatens lunar security and safety, creating collision risks between incompatible operational frameworks. (10)
Commercial Acceleration and Orbital Sustainability
The commercialization of space has fundamentally altered power dynamics in ways multilateral governance structures were never designed to accommodate. The global space economy grew 7.8% in 2024 to reach $613 billion, with the commercial sector accounting for 78% of activity. Projections suggest the $1 trillion threshold could be crossed by 2032, with some analyses projecting $1.8 trillion by 2035. This growth is driven not by government programs but by private entities whose valuations and capabilities exceed many national space agencies. (11)
SpaceX, valued at $350 billion as of December 2024, operates over 7,000 Starlink satellites with plans to expand to 42,000—more satellites than the cumulative total launched by all nations from 1957 to 2020. Amazon’s Project Kuiper, approved by the FCC for 3,236 satellites, has launched 129 operational satellites as of September 2025 with requirements to deploy half the constellation by July 2026. The company has purchased 92 launches from United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, and Blue Origin for over $10 billion, plus additional launches from SpaceX. OneWeb, Rocket Lab ($13-14 billion valuation), Sierra Space ($5.3 billion), and Axiom Space ($1 billion) represent additional commercial players reshaping the orbital environment.
This explosive growth has created an orbital sustainability crisis that threatens the viability of space activities. Low Earth orbit now contains over 14,000 satellites and an estimated 120 to 170 million debris fragments depending on tracking capabilities and size thresholds. The International Space Station has performed multiple collision avoidance maneuvers in 2024 and 2025, with incidents occurring within days of each other highlighting accelerating close-encounter frequencies. A 500-kilogram fragment impacted a Kenyan village in January 2025, demonstrating that debris risks extend beyond orbital assets to ground-based populations. (12)
The catastrophic scenario involves Kessler Syndrome, where debris density reaches a critical threshold triggering self-sustaining collision cascades that render orbital regions unusable for generations. Each collision generates thousands of fragments traveling at orbital velocities capable of destroying functional satellites, which in turn create more fragments in an exponential growth cycle. This would sever access to space-based infrastructure—internet, GPS, communications, weather monitoring, disaster management—that has become essential to modern civilization. Professor Freeland has warned repeatedly that this outcome could “send us back to the Dark Ages” by eliminating technological capabilities now integrated into every sector of the global economy. (13)
The governance response has proven inadequate to the scale and urgency of the threat. The Outer Space Treaty establishes that nations bear responsibility for debris from their entities including private companies, but the Liability Convention uses a fault-based system without defining “fault,” creating ambiguity that allows actors to evade responsibility. Active debris removal remains in early demonstration phases with minimal operational capability. Astroscale, the leading commercial debris removal company, launched its ADRAS-J mission in 2024 to inspect debris and plans to launch ELSA-M in 2026 capable of removing multiple prepared satellites. ClearSpace, commissioned by the European Space Agency, targets launching ClearSpace-1 in 2028 to remove the PROBA-1 satellite for €100 million. These missions, while technologically impressive, operate at scales orders of magnitude below the debris creation rate. (14)
Space traffic management coordination remains fragmented across national and commercial systems. The U.S. Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS), developed by NOAA and the Department of Commerce, began beta operations in 2024 providing conjunction data messages to nine satellite operators including Maxar, Telesat, Intelsat, Planet Labs, Eutelsat OneWeb, and Iridium. However, the Trump administration proposed eliminating TraCSS funding in fiscal 2026, potentially forcing the mission back to the U.S. Space Force at a time when military space missions are expanding. The Space Force opposes this cut, arguing TraCSS’s integration of military, commercial, and international data sources provides superior orbit determination accuracy compared to single-source systems. (15)
Resource Extraction and the Common Heritage Debate
Space resource extraction crystallizes the deepest philosophical divisions in space governance: whether celestial bodies represent common heritage to be managed collectively or economic opportunities to be exploited competitively. Article II of the Outer Space Treaty prohibits “national appropriation” of outer space and celestial bodies “by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means,” but does not define what constitutes appropriation or address whether extraction by private entities falls within the prohibition. (16)
The 1979 Moon Agreement attempted clarification by declaring celestial body resources the “common heritage of mankind” and prohibiting ownership by states, organizations, or individuals. This language clearly bars commercial mining, but only 17 nations have ratified the agreement as of 2024, none with human spaceflight capabilities, rendering it essentially unenforceable. This leaves the Outer Space Treaty as the sole binding framework, with its ambiguous language subject to radically divergent interpretations that track geopolitical and economic interests. (17)
The United States has pursued an aggressively permissive interpretation through domestic legislation and international advocacy. The 2015 Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act grants American citizens and companies property rights over resources extracted from celestial bodies while asserting this does not constitute prohibited national appropriation. Luxembourg’s 2017 law on space resources provides similar certainty, explicitly stating that “space resources are capable of being appropriated in accordance with international law” while emphasizing the law “does not suggest to either establish or imply in any way sovereignty over a territory or over a celestial body”. Both frameworks rest on distinguishing resource appropriation from territorial appropriation, arguing that extracting and owning material does not equate to claiming sovereignty over the location. (18)
Russia and China reject this reasoning, arguing the Outer Space Treaty prohibits resource extraction absent collective international agreement through COPUOS. During COPUOS debates, Russian representatives have contended that all space resource laws must be made by the committee through consensus processes, directly challenging the legitimacy of unilateral national legislation. This position aligns with traditional interpretations of common heritage principles requiring international management regimes before exploitation. (19)
Professor Freeland serves as Chair of the COPUOS Working Group on Legal Aspects of Space Resource Activities, tasked with developing “initial recommended principles” ensuring such activities are “conducted in accordance with international law and in a safe, sustainable, rational and peaceful manner”. The five-year mandate reflects recognition that space resource governance requires urgent attention, but also acknowledges that achieving consensus among 102 member states with divergent economic interests, legal philosophies, and geopolitical positions represents a formidable—potentially insurmountable—challenge. The working group must navigate between states that have enacted permissive domestic legislation backed by substantial private sector investment, and states that view such laws as violations of international legal principles requiring collective decision-making. (20)
Pathways Forward: Reform, Replacement, or Redundancy
The space governance community confronts an uncomfortable strategic choice: pursue incremental reforms within existing multilateral structures that may be too slow to prevent catastrophic failures, or accept that alternative governance models will emerge through competitive state practice and commercial norms. COPUOS has established working groups and expert teams addressing space traffic management, debris mitigation, and resource activities, but progress remains constrained by consensus requirements and political disagreements that reflect deeper geopolitical competition on Earth. (21)
The Council on Foreign Relations has recommended that Outer Space Treaty signatories review and modernize the framework, particularly Article IV which currently prohibits only weapons of mass destruction in space but does not address conventional weapons, anti-satellite systems, or other counter-space capabilities. Expanding treaty coverage and refining ambiguous terms like “peaceful uses of outer space” would provide greater clarity, though achieving consensus for formal treaty amendments faces enormous political obstacles given current U.S.-China-Russia tensions. The Council acknowledges that “the current political and security environment will likely make legally binding measures difficult to achieve”. (22)
Alternative approaches involve legally binding transparency and confidence-building measures that could serve as middle-ground between non-binding political commitments and formal treaty amendments. In July 2025, COPUOS established an Expert Group on Space Situational Awareness focused on enhancing international cooperation and information exchange regarding space traffic. The UN World Space Forum 2024 emphasized the need for stronger coordination between COPUOS’s Main Committee, Scientific and Technical Subcommittee, and Legal Subcommittee to make governance responsive to evolving needs. These incremental steps represent the pragmatic reality of what multilateral processes can achieve in the current environment. (23)
Crisis simulation exercises reveal that even among aligned actors, clear governance rules remain elusive, with participants focusing instead on processes for developing inclusive and fair frameworks. The simulations identified middle powers like the United Arab Emirates as promising convening powers capable of hosting dialogues between developing and major spacefaring nations, suggesting that traditional great power leadership may be insufficient for building perceived legitimacy. The UN Office for Outer Space Affairs Action Team on Lunar Activities Consultation could serve as a venue for multi-stakeholder input including commercial entities under UN auspices. (24)
Professor Freeland maintains that multilateralism, despite its profound flaws, remains “the most appropriate way to facilitate dialogue and promote the peaceful and equitable use of outer space” because it provides open, transparent, and inclusive forums allowing all member states to contribute. The alternative—fragmented groupings operating under incompatible rules—creates dangerous risks of misunderstandings, miscalculations, and conflicts that could escalate from orbital incidents to terrestrial confrontations. Yet Freeland also emphasizes that “the geopolitics of Earth are increasingly being ‘transported’ to space, which threatens the cooperative environment that is necessary if humanity is to continue to benefit from all that space technology can provide”. (25)
Conclusion
The current state of space governance is one where the multilateral consensus model faces challenges that may exceed its adaptive capacity. The convergence of geopolitical fragmentation through competing frameworks like Artemis and ILRS, commercial acceleration driving orbital congestion toward potential Kessler Syndrome, resource extraction disputes reflecting fundamental legal philosophy divisions, and institutional underfunding of multilateral bodies creates a governance gap with civilization-level risk exposure. Professor Steven Freeland’s warnings about catastrophic consequences of governance failure reflect not alarmism but sober assessment from someone occupying central positions in global space law institutions. The question is not whether current trajectories are sustainable—they demonstrably are not—but whether the political will exists to reform multilateral processes quickly enough to remain relevant before alternative governance models emerge through competitive state practice and commercial norms that may lack the legitimacy, inclusivity, and conflict-prevention mechanisms that made the Outer Space Treaty a Cold War triumph. The window for preserving cooperative space governance is closing as activities accelerate, with the lunar South Pole emerging as the likely testing ground where incompatible frameworks will either find accommodation or collision.
Editorial Notes
Sources and Verification
This article draws from academic publications, government documents, international organization materials, industry sources, and verified journalism published between 2020 and 2025. Primary sources include the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, U.S. Department of State, NASA, Space Foundation, peer-reviewed journals, and established policy institutions. Professor Freeland’s positions are documented through his official biographies at Bond University, Western Sydney University, and the World Economic Forum, as well as published interviews and his formal roles representing Australia at COPUOS.
Research Limitations
Several aspects face verification constraints. Commercial space company valuations are difficult to verify as many are privately held with undisclosed financial information. Space debris fragment counts vary significantly across sources depending on tracking capabilities and size detection thresholds. Kessler Syndrome timing predictions remain highly uncertain and contested among experts. Competing legal interpretations of the Outer Space Treaty reflect genuine ambiguity in international law rather than determinable factual claims. Internal COPUOS deliberations and working group dynamics are partially opaque due to diplomatic confidentiality. Detailed financial constraints facing UNOOSA are documented in limited publicly available materials.
Research Gaps
This article could not comprehensively address: detailed national space law analysis across all major and emerging space nations; regional governance initiatives in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia; technical specifications of debris tracking, removal, and traffic management systems; economic modeling of space resource extraction commercial viability and market impacts; insurance and liability frameworks for commercial space activities; indigenous peoples’ perspectives on celestial body governance and resource rights; Global South nation positions on space equity and benefit-sharing mechanisms; private sector lobbying influence on national space legislation; and classified military space activities affecting governance dynamics.
Confidence Assessment
The article achieves approximately 85% confidence in factual claims based on multiple source verification. High confidence exists for: UN treaty frameworks and COPUOS structure and membership, Artemis Accords signatory counts and dates, ILRS formation and membership, major commercial space company existence and approximate valuations, Professor Freeland’s credentials and institutional roles, space economy aggregate figures from established industry reports, and basic legal positions of major space powers on resource extraction. Moderate confidence exists for: precise debris fragment counts due to tracking limitations, Kessler Syndrome threshold proximity assessments, specific market projections beyond 2030, characterization of internal COPUOS political dynamics, UNOOSA financial constraint details, and predictions about governance framework evolution. Lower confidence exists for: private company valuations lacking public disclosure, classified government space program details, non-public diplomatic communications, and causal relationships between specific governance gaps and potential conflict scenarios.
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