I am a space lawyer and an international space policy expert. Until I began working with Forethought about 18 months ago, I was focused solely on immediate space governance issues (space debris and space traffic management in near-Earth orbit, space security efforts to restrain militarization and weaponization of space, the application of the laws of armed conflict applied to space operations, and the imminent competition for lunar resources). I now work on space governance from a longtermist perspective, but a lot of my writing is still aimed at a broad, non-EA audience, to raise literacy about current, near-term and longer term issues.
Below is a post I originally wrote for my Substack "Space Citizens", but thought it might be of interest to an EA audience so I’m cross-posting it here.
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Somewhat drowned out by the sound of the “bluenami” in the US midterm elections, a Presidential proclamation was released last week, under the unabashed title “American Declaration of Freedom in Space”.
Obviously, the title is intended to echo the 1776 Declaration of Independence, and the proclamation opens with the aspiration to forge “an interplanetary civilization founded on the enduring and inalienable rights of freedom and individual liberty.”
The “Declaration of Freedom in Space” is a very far cry from this declaration of independence, but it sure tries to look similar. Credit: US National Archives
The 1776 declaration finds that “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” are the inalienable rights, so one wonders what happens to happiness in this interplanetary future?
And are we all ok with a vision of “ensuring American space superiority for all eternity”??
Yes, that’s what it says. That is a sentence I tripped over, stopped and stared at for a long time.
Are other nations thinking about stretching their influence forever more into space? Far from being something we can scoff at and ignore, these “grand strategies” for space should be taken seriously, at least for their near-term impact on geopolitics here on Earth, if not for the potential trajectory they set our future generations on.
So here I'm comparing this American proclamation with China's recent "Position on Strengthening Outer Space Governance", the role of space and geopolitics in Canada's new National Security Strategy, and Europe's desperately short time horizon to 2040.
A presidential proclamation doesn’t usually have any legal weight. They’re most often ceremonial, or commemorating special events, or announcing a new national day of something. They can sometimes have legal or policy effect, but this one seems to be posturing more than anything else.
Trump wants his name on things that seem like a legacy, and declaring that “The nation that leads in space will shape the future of humanity — and that nation will be the United States of America” is very much on brand for him.
Yet there are some parts of this proclamation we should take notice of.
In fact, I agree with whoever actually penned this document, that the actor (nation or company) that leads in space will shape the future of humanity. I often beat the drum that what happens in space is just geopolitics in another domain, and that whoever has the lead in certain technologies like robotics and AI, is likely to have a dominant lead in what comes next in space, which will affect us here on Earth.
It’s why I write a lot about the new race to the Moon. And it’s why some of my work has recently turned to understanding the potential impact of transformative AI on power relations in space.
(Photo by Jesse Wilkens on Unsplash)
The proclamation, which went under the radar except for space governance nerds, is a manifesto for enduring American superiority in space. Not just for the coming decades, nor just the rest of this century. It’s for eternity.
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Continue reading the full article here:
https://spacecitizens.substack.com/p/the-nation-that-leads-in-space-will
