The Trillion-Dollar Frontier

On 12 June 2026, SpaceX completed the largest initial public offering in history, raising a reported $75 billion and attaining a valuation measured in the trillions. The offering generated extraordinary attention from industry, investors, and financial media. Yet its significance extends far beyond financial markets. As commercial activity beyond Earth accelerates and unprecedented levels of investment are channeled toward a handful of leading space companies, new urgency attaches to a question that international law has yet to resolve: How will the benefits of the growing space economy be distributed? Will international law help shape that distribution, or merely ratify the outcomes already set by those first to act?

Few companies have done more to influence the future of space activity than SpaceX. Founded by Elon Musk in 2002, SpaceX set out to dramatically reduce the cost of human access to space through reusable launch technology. Two decades on, it has become the world’s leading commercial launch provider, and, through its Starlink constellation, it also operates over 60 % of all active satellites in orbit and serves as a major provider of global satellite communications. Its ambitions, however, extend far beyond launching and connectivity. SpaceX is investing heavily in Starship, a fully reusable transportation system designed to support lunar missions, deep-space exploration, and ultimately a sustained human presence on Mars. According to the company’s recently issued prospectus, these initiatives form part of a broader vision of a future lunar and interplanetary economy encompassing interdependent systems of communications, orbital artificial-intelligence data centers, lunar and asteroid resource extraction, local manufacturing, energy production, and other commercial activities. The influx of capital resulting from the company’s record-breaking IPO may now bring that vision closer to realization, further consolidating the influence of a dominant commercial actor over the trajectory of human activity in outer space.

International Law and Its Reactive Orientation as Played Out in the Space Regime

SpaceX’s growing influence unfolds against an international legal framework that has long defined outer space as “the province of all mankind,” to be explored and used “for the benefit and in the interests of all countries.” These principles are embedded in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST), the cornerstone of the international space regime, and are echoed in subsequent space treaties. Yet beyond articulating these broad principles, none of these treaties provides meaningful guidance on how they should be implemented in practice. Fundamental questions regarding the permissible scope of space activities, the obligations accompanying them, and the distribution of benefits arising from them thus remain largely unresolved.

This gap is no accident; it is a product of the reactive logic that has shaped the international space regime since its inception. As we have shown in detail elsewhere (see here and here), international space law, like many other international legal regimes, has evolved predominantly in a reactive fashion, responding to existing problems and immediate concerns rather than anticipating and directing future developments. Drafted against the backdrop of the Cold War and the early space race, the OST was principally concerned with preventing superpower rivalry from extending to a new frontier, chiefly by precluding sovereignty claims over celestial bodies and restricting the militarization of space. This reactive orientation produced a state-centered regime that addressed observable threats and foreseeable near-term developments while sidelining possible longer-term scenarios.

Among the issues deemed too distant at the time and therefore left largely under-regulated were the rights and obligations of private actors that might eventually engage in commercial activities in outer space. The OST’s only direct treatment of private actors appears in Article VI, which provides that states shall authorize, supervise, and bear international responsibility for the space activities of non-governmental entities located in their territories. Beyond this general provision, the OST and subsequent treaties offer little guidance regarding the regulation of private activity in space. A related development left unaddressed by the international space regime is resource extraction. While the OST prohibits the appropriation of celestial bodies, it remains silent regarding the ownership of water, metals, minerals, and other valuable resources extracted from them—a possibility that was speculative at the time of drafting but hardly unimaginable.

When Law Lags, First Movers Lead 

To be sure, international lawmakers—in the space domain as elsewhere—have good reasons to prioritize the regulation of previously observed problems or highly likely near-term developments over remote and uncertain ones. Yet this reactive pattern often causes international law—whose treaty and customary rules are notoriously slow to emerge and evolve—to lag behind technological, economic, and geopolitical transformations unfolding at an ever-accelerating pace. The widening gap between rapid real-world developments and slowly evolving international legal frameworks, in turn, creates opportunities for early movers to establish practices and secure strategic advantages before international rules emerge. By the time international law eventually responds, it may have to accommodate realities that have already become economically and politically entrenched. In some cases, national authorities may step into the regulatory vacuum left by international law, advancing domestic rules to govern activities whose effects extend far beyond national borders. The distributive implications of such unilateral measures can be considerable, often favoring powerful states and non-state actors that are best positioned to move first, reap benefits that remain beyond the reach of others, and shape the conditions under which later entrants must operate. These domestic rules, in turn, are likely to shape the practical and normative baseline from which future international legal developments proceed.

This dynamic is well illustrated by the space-related regulatory arrangements that the United States has advanced over the past decade in areas where international law remains unsettled, and by the commercial activities these arrangements have facilitated. One such framework is the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015, which recognizes the property rights of U.S. entities in resources extracted from asteroids and other celestial bodies, notwithstanding competing interpretations of the applicable international legal framework. This position was further reinforced by a 2020 Executive Order that encourages international support for the recovery and use of space resources while rejecting the characterization of outer space as a global common. Also in 2020, the United States launched the Artemis Accords, which establish principles intended to govern future lunar activities, including resource utilization. Although framed as implementing and reaffirming the OST, the Accords endorse an interpretation of the treaty that permits the extraction and use of space resources without requiring the establishment of an international benefit-sharing regime. Collectively, these legal arrangements have helped shape the legal environment within which companies such as SpaceX operate.

Hardening Facts in Space 

SpaceX, of course, had already derived considerable benefits from this set of legal arrangements well before the IPO. The IPO, however, may amplify SpaceX’s ability to reap those benefits by providing the financial resources to pursue its commercial ambitions on a much larger scale. No less importantly, the IPO substantially expands the range of investors and institutions with a financial stake in the durability of those same legal arrangements, potentially intensifying subsequent pressures on international law to accommodate—rather than reshape—the existing trajectory of commercial space development.

These developments sit uneasily with the OST’s basic commitment that outer space shall be “the province of all mankind” and that its exploration and use shall be carried out “for the benefit and in the interests of all countries.” The U.S.-led frameworks governing commercial space activities facilitate the acquisition, utilization, and commercialization of space resources by actors already possessing the technological and financial capacity to access them, while doing little to secure broader benefit-sharing, protect the interests of latecomers, or reduce environmental and other externalities. These concerns become more pressing as the SpaceX IPO opens new channels of investment into activities ranging from resource extraction and orbital infrastructure to artificial-intelligence computing and permanent settlements, potentially accelerating the establishment of facts on the ground—or rather facts in space. As those facts become bound up with the financial expectations of a broad base of shareholders and institutional investors, they may prove increasingly difficult to unsettle. The main task for international space law is therefore to complement its predominantly reactive approach with a more proactive engagement with private sector responsibility, benefit-sharing, and long-term stewardship in space before the basic distributive architecture of the emerging space economy hardens into place. To the extent that the SpaceX IPO marks the beginning of a larger wave of commercial activity and public-market investment beyond Earth, the window of opportunity for fulfilling this task may already be narrowing.