The authors frame the problem against a backdrop of global instability. Conflicts worldwide have nearly doubled since 2020, according to the Armed Conflict Index, and the erosion of longstanding norms of international behavior threatens the baseline of stability that made cooperative space governance possible in the first place. In their view, the governance institutions and their built-in circuit breakers, developed during the Cold War, no longer effectively serve their intended functions. The warning is notable because it comes not from scholars of war or international relations, but from working astronomers whose science is conducted both in space and through it.

Space has never been far from warfare. The first human-made objects to leave Earth’s atmosphere were V-2 rockets in the Second World War. The launch of Sputnik 1 in October 1957 is remembered as the debut of the first artificial satellite, but its real achievement was demonstrating Soviet rocket technology capable of delivering nuclear weapons across tens of thousands of kilometers. Seventeen years later, the Soviet Salyut 3 space station test-fired an aircraft autocannon, the first and so far only space-to-space weapon known to have been deployed in orbit. The following decade, the Soviet Union planned, though never successfully tested, the Polyus uncrewed weapons platform, equipped with a megawatt carbon-dioxide laser and a self-defense cannon.

The arms race in orbit continued on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The United States and the Soviet Union began testing antisatellite, or ASAT, weapons in the early 1960s, and by the early 2000s China, India, and Israel had carried out successful tests of their own. In the 1980s, the United States proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative missile-defense program, popularly nicknamed Star Wars. Four decades later, the authors note, its ghost has returned, rebranded as the Golden Dome. Previous efforts to ban warfare in space achieved only modest results. The Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, signed by the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom, effectively ended high-altitude nuclear tests, including detonations in space, but broader prohibitions stalled. After the United States announced SDI in March 1983, Soviet premier Yuri Andropov denounced the program as an ultimately offensive military action and initiated an effort to frame a treaty banning military weapons from space, a push his successors maintained until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. More recently, after a series of destructive ASAT tests in the 1990s and 2000s, a United Nations working group adopted a non-binding resolution in 2022 calling for a general prohibition, a result opponents downplayed as insufficient to prevent an arms race in outer space.

The Outer Space Treaty, formally the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, binds its 118 state parties to promises not to appropriate territory in outer space through claims of sovereignty, not to deploy weapons of mass destruction in space, and to use space in the interest of maintaining international peace and security and promoting international cooperation and understanding. But the treaty was framed primarily by the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective clients and allies at a time when they were the only two launching states in the world. The voices of developing nations and sovereign Indigenous peoples were wholly shut out of the process, a historical exclusion that continues to shape whose interests the treaty serves.

The authors argue that the treaty’s structural weaknesses are now exposed. It has no real enforcement teeth and no mechanism to definitively resolve disputes among state parties, who increasingly look to new agreements outside the OST framework, a shift that may signal the end of the multilateralism that has characterized international space policymaking for the past six decades. Whatever success the treaty has achieved rests on behavioral norms that member states pledge to follow, an arrangement the authors compare to the League of Nations, which failed to prevent the outbreak of the Second World War. The treaty, they write, attempts to conjure an ethics of agreements that stands counter to the ethics of deterrence prevailing among global superpowers. It is not at all clear, they add, that the treaty can stand up to new uses of space not anticipated by its framers, including the growing privatization of space exploration.

The shifting balance of power compounds the problem. Russia, once an epicenter of advanced science and space exploration, has been reduced to episodic and unpredictable actions on Earth and in space, while recent chaotic and seemingly arbitrary United States decisions affecting science, health, and economies, along with abrupt withdrawals from longstanding treaties and agreements, have eroded American standing on the global stage. The authors point to decades of decreasing funding in infrastructure, research, and technological development, with dramatic declines in the scientific workforce and in the funding of key scientific agencies, leaving little agency left in United States institutions. They raise the possibility that NASA could become a mere contracts manager or another paying customer on private rockets. Although they call it speculative at best, they note it is possible that major powers are already deploying nuclear weapons in space in contravention of the treaty’s Article IV, and they recall that such deployments did happen in the historic past, including the United States Starfish Prime nuclear test of 1962, which wreaked havoc on both the space and terrestrial environments.

As a potential path forward, the authors advocate what they call an ethics of Nature, an approach aligned with the terrestrial Rights of Nature movement that acknowledges traditional Western legal and diplomatic frameworks are insufficient to prevent Earth- and space-based catastrophes. True sustainability, they argue, requires redefining humanity’s relationship with outer space through a lens of reciprocity and recognizing the environment’s intrinsic value beyond human exploitation. Without this shift, current frameworks risk fostering adversarial competition for resource extraction and orbital dominance. The approach is a founding principle of the recently established Center for Space Environmentalism. Still, the authors are pragmatic about the treaty’s role, writing that institutional frameworks can be wholly inadequate yet functionally irreplaceable, and that in their opinion the Outer Space Treaty remains the best option to date. Any alternative legal framework, they argue, must address the consequences of rogue actions from bad actors, accept that deterrence and accountability will have mixed results, and make environmental impacts a condition of licensing or approval.

The geopolitics of space are already visible in low-Earth orbit and beyond. The United States accounted for more than half of all low-Earth-orbit launches in 2025 and operates the clear majority of active payloads currently in orbit, giving it outsized influence over the domain, current and future. Yet the authors note that the United States government has ceded ground under its Article VI supervisory responsibilities to the demands of private commercial space actors launching from its territory, leaving unclear the channels for regulatory oversight and operational accountability. Meanwhile, the Moon and cislunar space offer an uneasy preview of future competition. Five nations, the United States, the former Soviet Union, China, India, and Japan, have landed on the Moon, with first-timers India and Japan touching down within six months of each other between August 2023 and January 2024. China currently leads in humanity’s planned return to the Moon, and the authors argue that the treaty’s language favors nations that arrive first, allowing them to claim prime real estate for science, resource exploitation, and bases, while subsequent nations are relegated to sites and activities that do not interfere with existing operations.

The authors close with a broader philosophical appeal. Outer space, they write, is humanity’s shared heritage, and it is where our shared future lies as well. Despite being written in the very different world of the mid-1960s, the treaty contains timeless principles of peaceful exploration, goodwill, and trust among spacefaring nations engaging in scientific activities that benefit all peoples. Invoking Immanuel Kant’s view that goodwill reflects an unwavering willingness to act on our deepest convictions beyond the reach of clever conditions or context-dependent outcomes, they point to thriving examples of cooperation: the peaceful management of Antarctica as a global scientific commons, collaborative support among astronauts on the International Space Station regardless of geopolitical tensions, and growing partnerships between Indigenous communities and research facilities on their ancestral lands. The urgent need to improve tracking and mitigation of space debris remains a final arena requiring coordinated transparency and accountability, particularly because countries that are not space actors, especially in the global South, may become the unwilling final resting place of falling debris generated by a few Western nations. The story of humanity in space, the authors conclude, is still being written, and it will require innovation and determination from institutions and communities alike.

Subject of Research: The inadequacy of the Outer Space Treaty for governing modern space militarization, commercialization, and environmental protection

Article Title: The Outer Space Treaty won’t save us from ourselves

Article References: The Outer Space Treaty won’t save us from ourselves. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3389/frspt.2026.1748406

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frspt.2026.1748406

Keywords: Outer Space Treaty, space law, space militarization, antisatellite weapons, space debris, space governance, Rights of Nature, low-Earth orbit, lunar exploration, space privatization, geopolitics, Center for Space Environmentalism