Transnationalization and State Power in the Global Satellite Industry

Outer space has become an object of intense political, economic and scholarly interest. The contemporary politics of outer space are defined by two disparate and partially inconsistent trends. On one hand, outer space is undergoing transnationalization as private actors are increasingly pushing into a domain that had been organized among strictly intergovernmental lines since the 1950s. On the other hand, we are witnessing a new space race, where primarily China and the US are competing for access, influence and supremacy in outer space. Starting from classic and more recent theoretical debates in international political economy, we probe the relationship between transnational and state power. Specifically, we ask whether power relations constrain transnationalization dynamics; or whether the latter unfold above and beyond the global structures of political power constituted by nation states. We apply Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs) to a dataset of global partnerships in the satellite industry. This dataset consists of partnerships by public and private organizations, in both domestic and transboundary contexts, on the construction and operation of military as well as civilian satellites. We estimate an ERGM to predict tie formation in the corresponding partnership network, using two edge attributes as predictors: a) whether or not edges represent transnational partnerships, in the sense of private organizations collaborating with public organizations in a transboundary context; and b) whether or not edges connect organizations from states that do not participate in shared military alliance structures. We find that ties are significantly less likely to form in transnational contexts and significantly more likely either domestically or between states with military alliances in place. We conclude that contemporary debates on the rise of private space actors overestimate commercial factors and private-sector innovation as drivers of the emerging space economy. Instead, geopolitical factors appear to predominate, suggesting that the politics of outer space have changed considerably less than commonly assumed. Against the background of an intense scholarly debate on how and what transnational cooperation can deliver for environmental sustainability and beyond, our findings imply that geopolitical conflicts and contingencies remain major limiting factors for achieving cooperative outcomes that leverage space-based activities as global public goods in the context of multiple contemporary social and environmental crisis dynamics.