Governance Is Always Late to THe Party

servicing spacecraft Emerging in-space activitiers like satellite servicing pose governance challenges. (credit: Astroscale) Governance is always late to the party. Here's why that's not an accident. by G. Theresa Quitto-Dickerson Monday, May 4, 2026 Consider the governance position of nearly any operator who has completed an on-orbit servicing mission in the last three years. The hardware performed. The asset transferred. By every technical measure, the operation succeeded. And by the time the paperwork caught up, legal scholars were still sorting out which liability framework applied, whose safety standards governed the handoff, and whether the jurisdictional question had ever been formally resolved. This is a representative scenario: one that has repeated, in some configuration, across multiple missions and multiple actors in the emerging in-space services market. Nobody was surprised. This is how it goes. When governance lags, the instinct is to blame awareness. That diagnosis isn't wrong, but it’s incomplete. The commercial space industry has operated under a quiet assumption for decades: governance will arrive eventually, and in the meantime, industry moves. Standards bodies convene after incidents. Regulators draft rules after markets form. Frameworks appear after the operational reality has already hardened into practice. The sequence is so familiar it barely registers as a problem. It is a problem. A structural one, and a well-documented one. The gap is not a knowledge failure When governance lags, the instinct is to blame awareness. Policymakers didn't understand the technology fast enough. The fix: more technical expertise in government, more briefings, faster rulemaking. That diagnosis isn't wrong, but it’s incomplete. The deeper issue is architectural. Research on space traffic management and orbital debris governance has documented a recurring dynamic: when serious public problems new to government arise, there is often a lag between the problem and a coherent national response, with agencies defaulting to existing roles even as the problem outpaces them. This isn't bureaucratic failure in the individual sense. It is what reactive governance systems do by design. The clearest operational illustration is the conjunction data message, or CDM. When two objects are projected to come within concerning proximity, operators receive a notification: a potential collision is developing. The operator assesses, decides, maneuvers, or doesn't. There are standards. There are norms. The system works within its own logic. But notice what that system does not do. It does not ask why that orbital regime became crowded enough for conjunctions to multiply. It does not ask whether the licensing decisions that placed those objects there reflected any shared risk-reduction framework, or only individual risk-mitigation calculations made in isolation. The governance responds to the geometry of two objects already on a concerning trajectory. The conditions that produced the trajectory are upstream of where the rules live. Risk mitigation and risk reduction are not the same thing. Space governance has built sophisticated infrastructure for the former. The latter remains largely unaddressed, and research now suggests that mitigation alone is no longer sufficient to maintain the usability of near-Earth orbits. That last point is not an assertion. A 2021 NASA Office of Inspector General report, cited in recent cislunar governance research published in Space Policy, found that the rapid and uncoordinated growth of near-Earth space activity has led to orbital debris generation that will necessitate active remediation, because mitigation alone can no longer hold the line. We built the infrastructure for managing the problem after it arrives. The infrastructure for keeping it from arriving at all is still missing. The circular space economy is the test case In-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing. Active debris removal. On-orbit resource utilization. Reusable upper stages. Life-extension missions. None of these are speculative — they are contractual, operational, and increasingly multinational. The circular space economy is happening now, at a pace that the surrounding governance infrastructure was not designed to match. Risk mitigation and risk reduction are not the same thing. Space governance has built sophisticated infrastructure for the former. The latter remains largely unaddressed. A 2024 global governance analysis found the existing framework, built on five UN space treaties drafted for a different era, now contains an absence of clear coverage for property rights, liability in collision, and licensing of novel activities. Individual nations have responded by creating their own distinct policies, producing a fragmented regulatory landscape that commercial operators must navigate mission by mission, jurisdiction by jurisdiction. What makes this domain particularly instructive is that the signals of governance friction are visible before the friction becomes hazardous. Operators are negotiating liability across jurisdictions that haven't formally defined the activity. Standards bodies are producing technical recommendations with no corresponding policy hook. Vocabulary mismatches exist between what industry calls the operation and what the regulator's mandate covers. These aren't edge cases. They are the current operating environment. And they are legible, if the analytical infrastructure exists to read them. What structured signal detection makes possible A pre-decisional approach to governance readiness treats regulatory misalignment as a detectable condition rather than an inevitable surprise. The logic isn't new: stress-testing in financial regulation developed precisely because point-in-time assessments proved structurally blind to systemic preconditions. The application to space governance is still developing, but the signal categories are already observable in current operations: vocabulary gaps, where operators and regulators describe the same activity in incompatible terms; standards-to-policy misalignment, where technical consensus exists but carries no enforcement mechanism; jurisdictional friction, where novel operations cross authority lines drawn for a different era; coordination lag, where multiple actors hold relevant authority but share no decision timing. The circular space economy will not wait for that infrastructure to be built through the conventional cycle of incident, response, and rulemaking. That cycle has a well-documented structural ceiling, and we are approaching it. None of these require classified data or proprietary records. They are present in public comment processes, standards body deliberations, licensing dockets, and the working group discussions already happening in communities like CONFERS, where practitioners are, among other things, generating exactly the kind of early signals that a governance-ready system would be designed to receive. The question is whether the analytical approach exists to convert those signals into extended lead time for governance actors, rather than the compressed reaction windows the current system produces. The circular space economy will not wait for that infrastructure to be built through the conventional cycle of incident, response, and rulemaking. That cycle has a well-documented structural ceiling, and we are approaching it. The signals are already there. The governance frameworks that could act on them earlier are not. That is not a technology problem or an expertise problem. It is a design problem. And design problems, unlike incidents, can be addressed before they become emergencies. G. Theresa Quitto-Dickerson is a doctoral candidate researching governance infrastructure and decision architecture for novel space activities. Drawing on two decades of federal and industry experience in program execution and policy, she works at the intersection of space governance, workforce systems, and commercial space policy. She participates in the CONFERS Circular Space Economy Special Interest Group and has an abstract under review for IAC 2026. Contact: theresa@quittodickerson.space | quittodickerson.space Note: we are now moderating comments. There will be a delay in posting comments and no guarantee that all submitted comments will be posted. Home Subscribe to our weekly newsletter email address