Space Agenda 2025: Introduction

Space Agenda 2025 is an effort by the Center for Space Policy and Strategy (CSPS) at The Aerospace Corporation to highlight and provide insights into some of the major space challenges facing policymakers. Written primarily for U.S. government and space sector leaders, this compendium of 16 chapters offers an accessible introduction to space policy issues affecting national security, civil space, and commercial space developments.

CSPS published a previous edition of Space Agenda in 2020.  In the four years since, there has been significant progress on space-based applications, including improved communications capabilities as well as increased use of remote sensing, to understand and address climate change. Today, space technology brings us closer together and gives us more understanding of our world than ever before. The myriad of services enabled by space technology offer new opportunities to strengthen national security and improve the human condition. Moreover, an infusion of commercial space capabilities into the civil and national security space sectors has caused a rethinking of government space systems architectures. But these trends are not yet fully consolidated and U.S. space leadership remains under challenge, making this a critical time for policymakers to shape the future.

While the Agenda does not cover every major space-related challenge, CSPS has analyzed and described 20 of the most pressing space issues across three broad categories: strengthening leadership and competitiveness, catalyzing commercial space, and charting future value. An issues map in the following introductory chapter, Framing Space Agenda through Strategic Foresight, provides a visual framework of these issues and adds a temporal dimension (behind the curve, emerging and urgent, and planting seeds). The chapter lays out these three categories along with the associated issues, critical questions, and descriptions. The chapter also points to the Space Agenda papers that align to each issue and also references previously published CSPS work that is relevant to the topics. The intent is for Space Agenda 2025 to provide a framework to support and inform sound policy development across the space enterprise.