Washington D.C.

On April 30, 2026, eighty plaintiffs filed a federal complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas against Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (“SpaceX”). The case, Aguilar et al. v. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., No. 1:26-cv-00485, alleges that repeated Starship launch and landing operations at the Starbase facility in Cameron County have […]

The strikes conducted against the IRGC Aerospace Force Headquarters in Tehran in March 2026, followed days later by the bombing of a building at the Iran University of Science and Technology (“IUST”) on March 28, have introduced a crucial question for the global commercial space industry: at what point does a civilian aerospace facility lose

The commercial space industry operates at the precise intersection of private enterprise and state sovereignty. It is therefore uniquely vulnerable when those sovereignties come into direct conflict. The escalating geopolitical tensions between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran present a case study in how diplomatic friction translates, with considerable legal consequence, into

It is not unbeknown to the public that NASA, for over a decade now, has been working to get humans back on the Moon. This has been a long and challenging journey that has successfully culminated in the Artemis II launch to the Moon this year. On the other side of the aisle, SpaceX and

European space security officials are increasingly concerned that two Russian “inspector” satellites have been used to collect communications associated with multiple European satellites, including traffic linked to government and military users. This has evidently been a sustained pattern over several years, with the alleged consequence being intelligence collection and a clearer mapping of how European

For much of the last century, national security was treated as a sovereign stack: intelligence, armed forces, and state-controlled strategic infrastructure. The private sector mattered, but mainly as a supplier. That separation is thinning across the world. In a period defined by gray-zone pressure, cyber disruption, and sustained geopolitical competition, private firms increasingly operate the

On 29 January 2026, China formally unveiled its next five-year roadmap for its space sector. Led by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (“CASC”), the plan sets out a coordinated national strategy spanning space tourism, orbital digital infrastructure, satellite megaconstellations, deep-space exploration, and space resource development. Unlike earlier plans that focused primarily on launch

On 27 January 2026, India and the European Union closed negotiations on a landmark Free Trade Agreement that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen publicly branded the “mother of all deals” (“FTA”). The scale of the FTA is hard to overstate. The EU estimates that tariffs will be eliminated or reduced on 96.6% of

Blue Origin has announced TeraWave, a high-throughput satellite communications network positioned for enterprise, government, and data-center customers rather than mass-market consumer broadband. What is TeraWave? TeraWave is a planned multi-orbit satellite network consisting of approximately 5,408 satellites in low-Earth and medium-Earth orbit. Its architecture pairs radio-frequency links for broad coverage with optical inter-satellite connections capable

On 13 January 2026, NASA and the US Department of Energy (“DOE”) announced a memorandum of understanding to develop a lunar surface nuclear reactor by 2030, a milestone that could fundamentally change the strategy for sustained human presence beyond Earth. The joint initiative aims to deploy a fission surface power system capable of producing safe,