Washington D.C.

Capital is relentlessly pragmatic. It flows toward predictable legal frameworks and flees unquantifiable risk. For the past decade, the consensus narrative surrounding the commercialization of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) was remarkably straightforward: driven by plummeting launch costs and rapid advancements in commercial off-the-shelf technology, private enterprise would seamlessly expand the global economy into space. With

On 14 September 2026, a Russian national pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate the Export Control Reform Act (“ECRA”) through the unlawful supply of U.S.-origin aviation and aerospace components to Russia. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the scheme involved ITC Middle East FZ-LLC, a company he co-founded in the UAE in March 2022

At the Farnborough Airshow on 21 July 2026, the FAA announced that it would move to certify electric air taxis, civil supersonic aircraft, expanded drone operations, and commercial space launches, and that it would avoid being “too prescriptive” and let industry drive innovation. Since 1973, 14 CFR § 91.817 has prohibited operating a civil aircraft

On 10 July 2026, China became only the second nation, after the United States, to recover an orbital-class booster under control, and the first anywhere to do so with a net rather than landing legs. The state-owned China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology intends to re-fly the same stage before year’s end. The engineering is

On 1 July 2026, the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) released the tentative agenda for the FCC’s Open Meeting scheduled for 22 July 2026. Among the items is Space Modernization for the 21st Century (SB Docket No. 25-306), a Report and Order and Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (“FNPRM”) that would overhaul how the FCC licenses

On the evening of June 12, 2026, Anthropic received a directive from the United States government at 5:21 p.m. Eastern Time. The instruction was unambiguous: suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national, whether residing inside or outside the United States, including Anthropic’s own employees who are non-U.S. citizens. Within

Senator Ted Cruz, joined by Senator John Hickenlooper, has introduced the Nodes, Enterprise Workloads, and Hybrid Operations, Resilience, Integration, Zero-Trust, Orbital Networks Act (the “NEW HORIZON Act”). The Act would, for the first time, statutorily direct the Department of Defense (“DoD”) to operationally evaluate commercially available orbital data center services and space-based cloud computing capabilities.

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