Aerospace Corporation Lays Out Key Space Issues for Next Administration

The Aerospace Corporation is out with a set of 16 papers identifying key space issues facing the next Administration and Congress, whoever wins the election. Space Agenda 2025 covers a wide range of civil, commercial and national security space topics focusing on how to strengthen U.S. leadership and competitiveness and offering a framework to address them.

A follow-on to a report issued in 2020 before the last presidential election, the 16 chapters in Space Agenda 2025 address what Aerospace Corp.’s Center for Space Policy and Strategy (CSPS) considers “20 critically important issues” the incoming Administration and Congress must address, divided into three categories:

CSPS provides an “issues map” to guide policymakers through the labyrinth.

While all of the issues demand close attention, during an October 22 briefing to reporters, CSPS’s Brian Weeden highlighted one they deem especially urgent — fixing the regulatory regime for commercial space.

Weeden leads CSPS’s commercial and civil policy and regulatory team. In “Space Regulatory Reform is a Wicked Problem Still Worth Tackling,” he and Victoria Woodburn argue that the “breadth of space regulatory issues that need reformation is vast.”

In the policy world, a “wicked problem” is one that’s “complex to define, has many stakeholders, different priorities, different incentives and there is no easy or clear solution or ending point,” Weeden explained.

That certainly describes not only efforts to modernize existing regulations for commercial remote sensing, commercial space transportation, and spectrum management, but the years-long effort to decide what agency or agencies should be in charge of “mission authorization” — regulating the plethora of new commercial space activities like satellite servicing or commercial space stations.

Efforts to reach agreement among the disparate stakeholders since the Obama Administration have failed and expectations of finding a solution by the end of the Biden Administration and the 118th Congress are fading. The House Science, Space, and  Technology Committee approved legislation almost a year ago, but on a partisan basis in part because the White House National Space Council submitted a proposal entirely different from the bill drafted by Republicans less than an hour before markup. The Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee reportedly is working on its own bill. Senators appeared skeptical of the White House proposal during a December 2023 hearing. The likelihood that the House and Senate could reach a compromise — one that is acceptable to the White House — in these few remaining weeks seems slim.

Weeden warns there is an “urgent need for action” to avoid negative impacts on the U.S. commercial sector and resulting loss of global leadership in space.

“We are running out of room to kick this can down the road. The next Administration needs to not only examine all the issues we mention here, but to take action. And it needs to happen early in the term. This is not something you can wait a year or two years to actually get involved in.” — Brian Weeden

The Aerospace Corporation is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC). CSPS Executive Director Jamie Morin stressed their role is to provide decision support and insight by clarifying issues and setting context. Weeden’s paper and the others offer recommendations on how to approach the many issues that will confront the next White House and the next Congress, but “we’re not here to lobby, we’re not here to push specific legislation.”

The 16 chapters are:

Framing Space Agenda Through Strategic Foresight

Strengthening Leadership and Competitiveness

• Strengthening the Industrial Base to Deliver Proliferated Defense Space Systems
• Our Most Vital Asset: Space Ground Insfrastructure and U.S. Foreign Relations
• Space-Enabled Capabilities for Connecting and Collaborating in the Arctic
• The Next Space Security Norm
• Strengthening a Solid Foundation: U.S Advantages from Commercial Space
• Why Transforming the Budget Structure Would Benefit Defense Space

Catalyzing Commercial Space

• Anticipating the New European Union Space Law
• Leverage and Preserve: Need for DOD to Strengthen Support for U.S. Commercial Space
• Russia’s War in Ukraine: Key Observations About Space
• Space Regulatory Reform is a Wicked Problem Still Worth Tackling
• Rational Exuberance: Understanding Value and Performance in the Space Economy

Charting Future Value

• The Invisible Link: Key Spectrum Issues for Space
• Space Sustainability in the Context of Contested Space
• Mind the Gap: Commercial Space Stations & the ISS
• Moonstruck: International Aspirations in Cislunar Space