BOULDER — Given its vastness and seemingly unlimited potential, it seems a bit silly to think about attempting to tame space with man-made regulations. But as humanity casts its gaze further into the cosmos and fills Earth’s orbit with more satellites, space craft and debris, conversations — like the one organized Monday by Silicon Flatirons — about space policy and the development of an international framework for regulations will likely become more commonplace.
Silicon Flatirons is a Boulder-based group that fosters conversations among entrepreneurs, legal professionals, students and lawmakers. The group’s two-day 2025 Flagship Conference was held this week in Boulder and was organized around the theme of “Examining the New Federalism in Technology Policy.”
The commercial space ecosystem was compared several times to the Wild West, in that laws and codes of conduct are being adopted on the fly. And just as Colorado wasn’t yet a part of the union when settlers began pouring into the state looking to make their fortune, space isn’t controlled by a recognized governing body.
“Neither orbits nor radio waves obey international boundaries,” University of Colorado engineering professor Al Gasiewski said. While “international cooperation” on a roadmap for space conduct is necessary, a single-set of rules that all humans will abide by “is way beyond the horizon” at the moment.
“We are in an era that is very exciting in terms of the commercial activities, but regulation has to catch up,” Kayhan Space CEO Siamak Hesar said.
Requiring space operators to carry certain liability insurance and remove objects from orbit after a certain period of time could be examples of simple and largely uncontroversial early regulations for the industry, panelists said.
In the absence of more formalized regulations, members of the industry must be willing to “name and shame” bad actors when they behave in ways that are detrimental to humanity’s shared causes, Colorado School of Mines space resources director Angel Abbud-Madrid said.
Rules for doing business in space should be developed with an eye toward “ensuring that regulations are put together in a way that enables innovation rather than making it difficult, especially for smaller companies to innovate in space,” Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati national security associate Sophia Galleher said.
On a certain level, it’s beneficial for the industry itself to accept at least a minimum degree of oversight if for no other reason than to avoid high-profile space disasters. “Bad press about a burgeoning space industry isn’t good for anybody,” Hesar said.
Space operators must improve their messaging not only in communications with regulators, but with the broader public as well, panelists said.
“At some point, the public will get tired of spending their tax dollars” on space research, Abbud-Madrid said, if the industry doesn’t do a better job explaining that activity in space plays an important role in the lives of regular Joes who will almost certainly never leave Earth themselves. Weather forecasts and cell phones are examples of workaday items that rely on space technology to function the way we count on them to function.
“It’s really hard to (adopt common sense regulations for a new industry) when people don’t see it as something directly impacting them,” Galleher said.
