The Empire Strikes Back: Comparing US and China’s Structural Power in Outer Space

This article assesses the structural power of the United States and China in the field of space governance. While much of the literature on space power focuses on their technologies and capabilities, we take a complementary approach and explore their capacity to shape the regulatory landscape. Possessing structural power has far-reaching implications for global power projection as well as for various industries, such as telecommunications, transportation, and remote sensing. To assess structural power, we gathered and analyzed three types of data: a dataset featuring 1,709 space organizations, a second dataset comprising 1,764 international space arrangements connecting them, and insights from fifty-two interviews with key space actors. Our findings indicate that the United States holds significant structural power thanks to its thriving commercial space sector and extensive international network. This has enabled the global diffusion of its preferred norms while simultaneously constraining China’s space cooperation network. Despite its remarkable technological capabilities, China has not been able to translate them into substantial global structural power. To encourage further exploration in this domain, we make available our original dataset of 1,764 space arrangements, including 970 in full-text format, inviting fellow researchers to investigate other facets of outer space governance.