Small Powers Find Strategic Room in the New Space Race

A new conceptual analysis published in Frontiers in Political Science argues that the era of commercialized, democratized space activity has not flattened the hierarchy among nations, but has relocated it. Marina Yue Zhang of the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney examines how small and middle powers—states that lack comprehensive control over the technological, infrastructural, and rule-setting nodes of the space system—can nevertheless carve out meaningful strategic room for maneuver in what researchers call Space 4.0. The answer, she contends, lies not in self-sufficiency but in the deliberate management of interdependence.

Space 4.0 describes the shift from government-monopolized space programs toward a decentralized ecosystem driven by modular technologies and multi-actor participation. The numbers behind this transformation are striking. The global space economy, estimated at 660 billion US dollars in 2024, is projected to exceed 1.5 trillion dollars by 2035, while more than 15,000 active satellites are expected to orbit Earth by 2028. Some 134 countries now engage in space technology and services. Lower launch costs, small satellites, and commercial providers have widened access dramatically, yet the analysis stresses that this democratization is conditional rather than absolute: financial, technological, and institutional constraints still shape what new entrants can sustain.

The article’s central conceptual move is to distinguish strategic agency from strategic autonomy. Agency is the capacity to act purposively under constraint—the ability of a weaker state to enter partnerships, build niche industries, or promote governance norms even amid intense great-power competition. Autonomy, by contrast, is an outcome: the capacity to preserve meaningful options and limit vulnerability to coercion, lock-in, or denial. The two must not be conflated, Zhang argues, because a successful technology partnership can expand an actor’s room for maneuver while simultaneously creating new dependencies that narrow future choice. Agency is a necessary but insufficient condition for autonomy.

To explain how agency might be converted into autonomy, the framework integrates three theoretical traditions through analytic eclecticism. Science and Technology Studies explains how space technologies are socially constructed, politically embedded artifacts rather than neutral tools. International Political Economy explains bargaining power under asymmetric interdependence, where control over critical network nodes can become a source of coercive power. Constructivism explains how legitimacy and identity shape participation in governance. Each tradition supplies one foundation: capability, bargaining, and legitimacy.

These foundations are activated through three strategic practices. Niche specialization converts selective technological capability into capability leverage: instead of replicating complete industrial chains, small and middle powers concentrate scarce resources in technologically valuable domains where their contribution becomes difficult to replace. Israel’s emergence as a world leader in small satellites illustrates the point—geopolitical realities forced a focus on less-efficient launches with smaller payloads, and that constraint became a niche advantage. Agile hedging converts market embeddedness into bargaining leverage by diversifying procurement, partnerships, and supply-chain positions to preserve credible alternatives. Norm entrepreneurship converts legitimacy and rule-making participation into influence, as states position themselves as architects of emerging governance frameworks rather than passive recipients of great-power rules.

None of these practices works alone, the analysis argues. Strategic autonomy emerges from their coupling and continuous recalibration. South Korea provides the clearest illustration of all three operating together: the creation of the Korea Aerospace Administration in 2024 and the launch of Space Policy 2.0 align technological development with economic and security goals, while public-private partnerships and participation in US-led space supply chains generate capability and market access. At the same time, Seoul engages selectively with regional institutions, favoring the Japan-led Asia-Pacific Regional Space Agency Forum while avoiding the China-led Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization. Yet South Korea also faces what scholars describe as a sandwich dilemma—deep economic interdependence with China coexisting with technological and security alignment with the United States—so its autonomy remains selective rather than complete.

New Zealand demonstrates the capability-dependence loop in a smaller system. Rocket Lab gives the country a commercially valuable domestic launch niche, while the Technology Safeguards Agreement with the United States enabled access to technologies and partnerships essential to that capability. The arrangement increases New Zealand’s strategic relevance and commercial agency, but it also embeds the niche within US regulatory and technology-security requirements. Australia shows a different combination: its move from passive consumption toward sovereign satellite capabilities reflects economic development and balancing objectives, yet reliance on allied space systems can create strategic exposure and potential entrapment in a US-China contingency. In both cases, agency grows even as autonomy stays bounded.

The framework also identifies recurring tensions that make autonomy partial and contingent. Space technologies are inherently dual-use, so the commercial integration that accelerates capability development can simultaneously create points of external leverage through supply disruption, technology denial, or regulatory restriction. Diversification, meanwhile, may amount to managing a portfolio of dependencies rather than escaping dependence altogether—its value depends on whether credible alternatives remain available. And normative advocacy can outrun implementation capacity: the European Union’s sustainability agenda, embedded in the EU Space Act through mandatory trackability, debris-mitigation plans, and cybersecurity risk management, coexists with continuing gaps in launch capacity and fragmented capital markets. Zhang frames these tensions as a strategic trilemma: small and middle powers cannot costlessly maximize technological sophistication, economic efficiency, and normative leadership at the same time.

Geopolitical conditions matter as much as domestic strategy. The article proposes competitive pluralism as a boundary condition: room for maneuver is greatest when great-power rivalry creates credible alternatives without hardening into closed blocs. Under low competition, hedging has little strategic value because suppliers and institutions remain broadly accessible. Under intermediate competition, rival suppliers, standards, and institutional venues permit strategic choice, enlarging bargaining space. But when rivalry hardens—through export controls, alliance pressures, and incompatible standards—the range of viable alternatives shrinks, and diversification risks becoming a choice among dependencies rather than a means of preserving genuine switching capacity.

The broader implication reframes secondary-state agency in high-technology geopolitics. Strategic autonomy in Space 4.0 is selective, relational, and reversible—an institutional capacity to manage trade-offs while preserving meaningful options, not a destination of independence. For policymakers, the practical shift is from autarky toward option value: concentrating public resources where specialization creates spillovers and bargaining value, using procurement to sustain multiple credible suppliers, and pairing open architectures with security screening and regulatory capability. As a conceptual analysis, the article offers propositions about mechanisms and boundary conditions rather than tested causal estimates, and Zhang notes that the claims require further country-level, process-tracing, and longitudinal testing. But its core message is clear: for smaller states in orbit, influence rests less on escaping interdependence than on organizing and recalibrating it.

Subject of Research: Strategic autonomy of small and middle powers in the commercialized, geopolitically contested Space 4.0 era

Article Title: Strategic autonomy in orbit: how small and middle powers navigate technology, markets, and norms in Space 4.0

Article References: Zhang, M. Y. (2026). Strategic autonomy in orbit: how small and middle powers navigate technology, markets, and norms in Space 4.0. Frontiers in Political Science, 8, 1962640. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2026.1962640

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpos.2026.1962640

Keywords: Space 4.0, strategic autonomy, small and middle powers, niche specialization, agile hedging, norm entrepreneurship, space commercialization, US-China competition, South Korea, New Zealand, Rocket Lab, space governance