Introduction
“[W]e will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” With that charge from President Trump's second inaugural address, and with assets including SpaceX, the Artemis program, and the United States Space Force behind it, the U.S. is entering perhaps the greatest era of space exploration and development in history. In this administration, space innovation has become a major research and development priority for the nation. Private astronaut missions to the International Space Station (ISS), Low Earth Orbit, and the Kármán line all showcase the American desire to travel to space, and one day to stay.
The growing great power rivalry between the Chinese Communist Party and the U.S. has extended into each nation’s space industry. China has started to build out its own satellite megaconstellations, rivaling those of SpaceX’s Starlink infrastructure. Barred from the ISS and other space project cooperation with the U.S. by the Wolf Amendment, which prohibits NASA from cooperating with the Chinese space program, China built its own space station, Tiangong. Launched in 2021, Tiangong has since added several new modules, while the ISS is 27 years old and long past its prime. Plans to expand Tiangong’s infrastructure continue to develop, and as the commercial race to replace the aging ISS lags behind, Tiangong could potentially be the only space station in orbit if the ISS were to break down or be retired before any commercial successors became ready. NASA’s Commercial LEO Destinations program, which aims to have at least one commercial company place a space station in orbit before 2030, has been plagued by program changes and low funding. While the U.S. has secured launch dominance with SpaceX, China is not far behind in its own launch capabilities, with reusable rockets close to China’s grasp.
And once again, the U.S. is in a race to the Moon. This time, China is planning a crewed landing by the end of the decade, if not sooner, and the U.S. is determined to beat them there. This time the race to the Moon goes beyond just crewed missions, extending into lunar development. China is striving for a quickly expanding research station providing economic growth, coupled with the nation’s special economic zones. Special economic zones were the key to China’s rapid industrialization in the 1980s, catapulting the country out of poverty and transforming it within a few decades into an economic superpower rivaling the U.S. in industrial might and military capacity. Utilizing special economic zones to rapidly industrialize the Moon would all but ensure China’s domination of space power over all other nations. The U.S. in turn is striving for its own lunar base. With both nations planning by the end of the decade to return humans to the lunar surface, America’s space program has no time to waste.
To maintain dominance in space, the U.S. national space program and its private-industry counterparts must work together. To win this space race, the U.S. government must be proactive in enabling innovations in space technology, and focus the industry on setting foot on and maintaining a presence on the Moon by the end of the decade. This extends to interactions with other nations and their regulatory relationships with American companies. Many space companies do business around the globe and must operate within the confines of international regulations. Lately, regulations on space travel imposed by the European Union have been hostile, and favor domestic competitors over American companies. With the Moon habitation race between the U.S. and China on course for a photo finish, the U.S. must ensure that its allies who collaborate on the Artemis program are not hindering the American space industrial base through detrimental policy decisions.
In the past few decades, nations across Europe have contributed to some of the biggest wins in space technology; the ISS is the shining example of multinational cooperation in building and deploying space infrastructure. While most of the big, headline-worthy space missions in the past few years have been of U.S. or Chinese origin, the EU was a serious contender in the space industry as recently as the early 2000s. But since then, the EU has taken a backseat to large scale-space missions, focusing instead on regulation and sustainability. As a result, the EU has driven private industry away, and crippled the ability of its remaining assets to effectively build and deploy space infrastructure at the speed of the U.S. or China.
Retreating from the world stage on space matters is well within the rights of the EU as a sovereign entity. Relying on the services of the U.S. space industry to achieve any space objectives is also not inherently unwise, so long as the terms of commerce are fair. However, the recent modus operandi of the EU has been to overregulate, overtax, and retaliate against international service providers. Recent draft legislation signals that American space industry providers would be targeted by the type of restrictive regulation that has significantly harmed the European space sector. The EU’s recent Space Act proposal would do harm to U.S. space companies and cause these companies to leave the European market entirely. Because the European space sector is limited in its own capabilities, the nations of the EU would suffer greatly from the massive gap in space technology that an exodus by U.S. companies would create. The EU Space Act is bad for U.S. space companies, but it is even worse for the member states of the EU. It must be reconsidered.
This paper provides an overview of the EU Space Act, identifies a number of serious flaws with it, and argues that both the European and American space systems would be better off if the EU followed the American model of space regulation.
