Samuel Press
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The United States’ latest executive order to dismantle regulatory bottlenecks in its commercial space sector issued on August 13, 2025, is less an isolated deregulatory gesture than a strategic move in a broader geopolitical contest for space leadership. By targeting environmental and licensing processes for acceleration—while aligning Department of Defense, NASA, and Department of Transportation procedures—the White House is attempting to fuse speed, innovation, and private-sector dynamism into a competitive advantage over both peer allies and strategic rivals.
This move is particularly significant when viewed against the landscape of the Artemis Accords—a coalition of now more than thirty nations, ranging from spacefaring powers like Japan, the United Kingdom, and Canada to emerging players such as the United Arab Emirates and Brazil. While the Accords are nominally about establishing a rules-based framework for lunar exploration and space resource utilization, their underlying function is to consolidate U.S.-aligned economic and political influence in the cislunar domain. Within this bloc, the ability to stimulate commercial innovation will increasingly differentiate leaders from followers.
The United States is betting that an aggressive streamlining of permitting—particularly for launch, reentry, and novel space activities—will unlock investment in new space-based industries, from orbital manufacturing and space-based solar power to next-generation satellite constellations. Unlike the traditional approach of subsidizing industry directly, this strategy seeks to create a frictionless environment in which private capital can rapidly scale projects.
By design, this favors nimble start-ups and mid-tier disruptors, who often lose ground under legacy regulatory regimes that favor entrenched aerospace incumbents capable of absorbing compliance costs. The creation of a dedicated associate administrator for commercial space transportation at the FAA signals an intent to institutionalize this pro-growth posture—transforming what has long been a regulatory chokepoint into a competitive accelerant.
Other Artemis signatories are pursuing their own paths.
In each of these cases, policy emphasis tends toward gradual liberalization within existing regulatory structures. The U.S., by contrast, is opting for a top-down directive to bypass structural friction entirely—reflecting both its higher risk tolerance and its perception that regulatory delay now constitutes a national security vulnerability.
The Artemis Accords’ cooperative framework masks an underlying reality: member states will not share equally in the economic benefits of the coming space boom. Those with the capacity to mobilize capital, secure supply chains, and rapidly operationalize infrastructure will capture first-mover advantages in high-value domains such as lunar resource extraction, cislunar logistics, and space-based defense systems.
By explicitly tying deregulation to national security and industrial primacy, Washington is framing commercial space not merely as an economic frontier, but as a contested strategic theater. This aligns with its parallel efforts to expand the Space Force, safeguard space assets through cybersecurity directives, and encourage public-private partnerships that integrate commercial innovation into federal mission architectures.
The U.S. approach carries inherent risks. Rapid deregulation could heighten safety and environmental concerns, create uneven compliance enforcement, and exacerbate geopolitical tensions with non-Artemis powers—most notably China and Russia—who may view streamlined U.S. commercialization as a bid for de facto space resource dominance. Within the Artemis bloc, smaller states could interpret America’s velocity as crowding out their own industries.
Still, in the calculus of Washington’s policymakers, the greater danger lies in stagnation. In an era when space technology timelines are compressing and competitors are integrating space capabilities into their economic and military strategies, delay is strategic defeat. By dismantling regulatory drag, the U.S. is signaling to both allies and rivals that it intends to lead—not merely participate—in the next phase of the space economy.If the Artemis Accords are the diplomatic scaffolding of a U.S.-led space order, this latest executive action is the industrial engine designed to keep that order in motion. The challenge for other signatories will be whether to match America’s speed—or risk being left in its contrail.
