- Provide a chance to stop activities and actions that would degrade the space environment, and consequently impair the beneficial uses of space by all, through development of norms and rules that establish the lines between acceptable and unacceptable behaviors;
- Create space to establish better dialogue, with Russia and China in particular, about US “bright lines” in space, and mutual assurance measures that would reduce risks of misconception and conflict, as well as establish “breakers” to dangerous conflict escalation;
- Avoid the opportunity costs that an arms race in space would engender;
- Buy time (and resources, per avoiding opportunity costs) for private industry, which is in the middle of a renaissance, to develop low-cost solutions to space resiliency that can help the US national security space community get out of the situation of having space be a potential single-point failure in a conflict, as well as complicate an attacker’s abilities to degrade or defeat the advantages provided to the US military by space assets;
- Allow the US Air Force and intelligence community to figure out protection strategies and technologies for those space assets that will be more difficult to commercialize, otherwise disaggregate, or offload missions from; and,
- Allow the US government and industry the time and budgetary leeway to develop nextgeneration technologies that might keep a leading edge in space, both for commercial benefits and military hedging or advantage.
School Authors: Nancy Gallagher, Jaganath Sankaran