Diplomacy in Orbit: The New Race for Space Resources and Sovereignty
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 The 1967 Outer Space Treaty was written for a world in which no private company was a serious actor beyond the atmosphere. It says, in its second article, that outer space cannot be subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by use, or by occupation. Nearly sixty years later, that single sentence sits underneath a space economy the treaty’s drafters could not have imagined: one that the World Economic Forum and McKinsey expect to grow from $630 billion in 2023 to $1.8 trillion by 2035, expanding at roughly twice the pace of global GDP. Supply chains, food production, state-funded defence, retail, and digital communications are set to generate more than 60% of that growth. The treaty’s silence on who, if anyone, may own a mined asteroid or a bucket of lunar water has stopped being an academic curiosity and become the terrain on which the major space powers now compete. More
