Luxembourg, 5 December 2023 – We’ve been grappling with the problems – and promise – of technology, society, politics and space ever since we first could conceive of leaving our Earth.

To take a single example: Students of history know well that some of the first NASA rockets – including the mighty Saturn V that flew several astronaut crews to the moon – were led by chief architect Wernher von Braun, a Nazi scientist who came over to the United States amid the end of the Second World War.

More recently, most of the world chose to sever its space relationships with Russia after its unsanctioned invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which is still ongoing. A notable exception is the International Space Station, which continues its work with Russia for practical reasons (NASA itself says the station cannot be severed in pieces) and presumably, for policy reasons under the advice of senior leadership in the United States.

This is all of which to say that space cannot be apolitical, nor any of its activities, as – paraphrasing Aristotle – humans themselves are political creatures. We cycle through this discussion every few years in the space world, but the issue is coming up once again with the explosion of artificial intelligence (AI) activities in the last five years.