Superpowers, creative billionaires, and the dispute over outer space
Victor Ângelo
International Security Advisor. Former UN Under-Secretary-General Published: 5 Jun 2026
Outer space is already a paramount issue in the competition between great powers. Consequently, the deserts of northwestern China, in Xinjiang and Gobi, attract very special attention. Satellite imagery reveals vast military complexes and an extensive network of many dozens, even hundreds, of rocket launch pads, bunkers, and enormous, heavily fortified structures. Built near nuclear silos—which house China’s longest-range intercontinental missiles—this infrastructure aims to guarantee an immediate retaliatory capacity should the country suffer a first strike.
This terrestrial fortress is only half the story. The bunkers excavated in the sand are intimately linked to Chinese surveillance satellites, together forming an integrated ground and space defence system. The assets concentrated in the desert depend directly on their orbital counterparts: the Huoyan-1 early-warning satellites. These "eyes of fire", capable of detecting the infrared signature of enemy missiles immediately after their launch, open a critical three-to-four-minute window, allowing the Chinese chain of command to order the firing of weapons stored in the silos before they can be destroyed.
We are in a different world from the old space race. In the late 1950s and the subsequent decade, the focus was on the national prestige and political image of the US and the USSR. The marathon of space competition has changed. Today, it is a high-speed and high-risk race.
Space is one of the great strategic priorities of the present. Much of what resides in low Earth orbit governs our daily lives: global logistics, financial synchronization, communications, disaster response, and encrypted military operations. The country that masters the technical standards, extracts the first cosmic resources, and controls the orbital infrastructure will obtain an ambivalent power over the global economy and planetary defence, capable of serving human progress as much as military hegemony and a global disaster.
The current space arena is thus a vital geopolitical dispute, marked by four distinct political approaches. Each power runs its own race.
European priorities are concentrated on the development of space infrastructure essential to ensure strategic communications, on the Galileo (GPS navigation) and Copernicus (continuous Earth observation) projects, on the tracking of orbital debris (see the reference to Kessler below), and on research regarding robotic launches. The scarcity of venture capital and fragmentation—every country for itself—are the political issues that need to be resolved.
The United States has consolidated its reliance on public-private partnerships in the aerospace sector. Through the Artemis Accords, Washington seeks to promote international norms that favour free enterprise to maintain its supremacy, leveraging the agility and efficiency of the private sector. Artemis aims to establish a sustained human and robotic presence on the Moon, testing new technologies for the extraction of water and minerals.
China views space through a deeply integrated civil-military lens. For Beijing, it is a strategic domain subject to state control. The Chinese vision constitutes an explicit challenge to US primacy. In this context, China prioritizes the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), seeking to secure a sovereign infrastructure independent of Western systems. The exploration of the lunar South Pole has become a central objective.
Russia was once a pioneering actor. Today, despite financial constraints and sanctions that limit access to technological components, the space sector continues to be treated as a priority. It retains a highly secretive character. However, it is known to invest primarily in the research and testing of destructive anti-satellite weapons, space-based intelligence, and hypersonic weaponry. This option holds considerable strategic value, both defensive and offensive.
The explosion of space business, operating on an unprecedented financial scale, is another characteristic of our era. The current US dominance is largely driven by private giants such as Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin and, most notably, Elon Musk's SpaceX. By pioneering reusable rockets, SpaceX has drastically reduced launch costs. With a capitalization that already rivals the GDP of major states, the company has rewritten the rules of orbital geopolitics.
These private companies have ceased to be mere service providers. Today, they are central geopolitical actors, wielding enormous economic weight and playing a decisive role in American defence. But, with high economic value comes severe strategic vulnerability. In any potential conflict, the temptation to blind an adversary by destroying their early-warning and communications satellites could be limitless.
An attack of this kind—or even an accidental collision between satellites in orbit—would have devastating systemic effects. There is a risk of triggering the so-called Kessler syndrome: a catastrophic chain reaction in which orbital debris collides with other satellites, generating exponentially more fragments. This would rapidly create a global crisis, with Earth's orbit saturated by high-speed debris directly impacting multiple essential systems. It would not only affect military deterrence: it could compromise the terrestrial economy and provoke a civilizational regression of incalculable consequences.
The 1967 Outer Space Treaty is no longer fit for an era marked by thousands of objects in orbit—a continuously growing number—and by the development of anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons. The Second Space Race, which is currently underway, demands cooperation and far stricter rules—a new treaty. Space cannot be viewed merely as a competition or an extraordinary business opportunity. It is our collective survival that is at stake.
