Spacepower theory

Abstract

Spacepower theory is useful in describing, explaining, and predicting how individuals, groups, and states can best derive utility, balance investments, and reduce risks in their interactions with the cosmos. Spacepower theory should be more fully developed and become a source for critical insights as humanity wrestles with our most difficult and fundamental space challenges and guide us toward better ways to generate wealth in space, make tradeoffs between space investments and other important goals, reorder terrestrial security dynamics as space becomes increasingly militarized and potentially weaponized, and seize exploration and survival opportunities that only space can provide. This chapter briefly reviews noteworthy efforts to develop spacepower theory and then considers ways it could help to refinecurrent US space policy and address some of the most significant challenges and issues surrounding space security, space commercialization, and environmental sustainability and survival.