How Connected Communities Could Manage Space Exploration Collectively

The dominant frame for space governance is product of a particular historical moment: the mid-twentieth century ideological contest between two superpowers with nuclear arsenals, massive industrial capacity, and the political will to pour treasure into prestige projects. The Apollo program cost roughly $280 billion in today's dollars. The Soviet space program cost comparable sums. Neither was primarily about scientific knowledge. Both were about dominance signaling at civilizational scale.

That frame produced real achievements. It also produced the legal and institutional architecture under which space is still governed. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, the foundational document of international space law, was negotiated in eighteen months by three superpowers. The seventy-something other countries that eventually signed had minimal input. The treaty reflects the anxieties of its moment — nuclear weapons in orbit, military bases on the Moon — and almost nothing about what would actually happen once commercial actors entered the field, which was a scenario its drafters considered science fiction.

We are now living inside that science fiction. SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, and a proliferating cohort of smaller companies have broken the state monopoly on launch capability. Planetary Resources, now defunct, tried to stake claims to asteroid minerals. Luxembourg passed domestic legislation in 2017 granting companies registered in Luxembourg property rights over resources they extract in space — a legislative maneuver that tried to sidestep the sovereignty prohibition in the Outer Space Treaty by framing extraction as distinct from territorial claim. The United States passed similar legislation in 2015.

The gap between the 1967 framework and the 2026 reality is large and growing. Into that gap, a community-based governance model could step.

Governance is not the same as ownership, and ownership is not the same as access. A community-based approach to space would need to distinguish between these carefully.

Elinor Ostrom's Nobel Prize-winning work on commons governance identified eight design principles for institutions that successfully manage shared resources over time. They include: clearly defined boundaries (who is in the community, what resource is covered), rules adapted to local conditions, collective choice arrangements (those affected by the rules can participate in modifying them), monitoring, graduated sanctions, conflict resolution mechanisms, and recognition by external authorities. Her empirical work showed these principles operating in Swiss alpine meadows, Japanese forests, Spanish irrigation systems, and Maine lobster fisheries — all radically different in context, all sharing this institutional DNA.

The principles translate to space, though with necessary adaptation. The "community" managing a lunar ice deposit would need to be defined not by geography but by contribution and stake. The "rules adapted to local conditions" would need to account for the unique physics and ethics of off-world environments. The "external authority recognition" would need to be negotiated at the level of international law.

But the structure is available. What Ostrom showed is that you don't need either a central state or a privatized market to manage a commons sustainably. You need a community with genuine skin in the game, genuine decision-making power, and genuine accountability mechanisms.

The political argument for community-based space governance is strengthened enormously by what is already happening technically.

In 2009, a satellite cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build and launch. By 2026, you can buy a 1U CubeSat kit for under $10,000 and launch it as a rideshare payload for a comparable sum. The democratization of launch hasn't reached full maturity, but the trajectory is clear: within a generation, the capital barrier to putting something in orbit will be within reach of mid-sized institutions, not just nation-states and billionaires.

Ground infrastructure is following. The SATNOGS network, run by the Libre Space Foundation, is a global community of volunteers who operate ground stations and share data openly. It's a proof of concept: distributed, community-run space infrastructure, functioning now, built by people who decided the data shouldn't be locked behind proprietary walls.

Open satellite data platforms — NASA's Earthdata, ESA's Copernicus, Planet's open data programs — have created conditions where a community watershed council in Nepal can download the same imagery as a mining company conducting due diligence on an extraction site. The information asymmetry that once made community participation in resource governance practically impossible is eroding.

What has not eroded is the political architecture. The institutions that make decisions about space are still structured around nation-states and corporations. The communities that could bring Ostrom-style governance wisdom to bear — communities with long experience managing shared resources, anticipating second-order consequences, building durable rules across generations — are not in the room.

The idea that communities could manage shared frontiers collectively is not without precedent, though the precedents are imperfect.

The Antarctic Treaty System (1959) is the closest analogue. Twelve countries, operating research stations on the continent, agreed to freeze territorial claims, prohibit military activity and nuclear testing, and preserve the continent for scientific research. Forty-nine additional parties have acceded. The treaty has held for sixty-seven years, a remarkable record for any international agreement. The continent has not been carved up and mined. Science operates cooperatively across national lines in conditions of extreme isolation.

The Antarctic model fails in certain respects as a template for space. It excludes economic activity almost entirely — no mining, no settlement. That exclusion was sustainable because Antarctica has never attracted the commercial pressure that the Moon and Mars now face. It also excludes most of humanity from decision-making: the consultative parties are still largely the wealthy, technically capable nations that were operating there in 1959.

The International Seabed Authority (ISA), established by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, is a more ambitious experiment in commons governance. The ISA governs mineral resources on the deep seabed beyond national jurisdiction, treating them as the "common heritage of mankind." Revenues from extraction are theoretically distributed to developing nations. In practice, the ISA has been captured to a significant degree by the interests of the wealthy states and companies that have the technology to actually extract. The principle was right; the institutional design gave too much power to the few.

A community-based model would learn from both failures: it would not exclude economic activity (unrealistic), and it would not allow technical capability alone to translate into governance power.

Imagine a Distributed Space Commons Authority — not a single world government, but a federated network of regional bodies, each composed of representatives from communities that have formally enrolled: municipalities, indigenous councils, watershed cooperatives, regional governments, worker-owned enterprises. Enrollment would require demonstrated capacity for participatory governance, not just wealth or technical capability.

Decisions about extraction zones, no-go regions (scientifically or ecologically significant sites, if such a concept applies off-world), and revenue distribution would require super-majority approval from the regional bodies. No single nation-state and no single corporation would hold veto power. Technical capability would be a resource contributed to the collective, not a title to governance.

Revenue from extraction — mineral rights on asteroids, helium-3 from the lunar surface, eventually real estate on Mars — would flow into a commons fund, distributed on a formula that weights community enrollment and need, not prior technical investment alone. The Antarctic Treaty's failure to address economics, and the ISA's failure to actually distribute wealth equitably, point to the design challenge: the revenue mechanism has to be real, transparent, and enforceable.

Dispute resolution would draw on both the International Court of Justice and, crucially, on the community mediation traditions already operating within member communities. The insight from Ostrom is that effective commons governance is always partly local: rules enforced by people who know each other, contexts understood in texture, not just in legal abstraction.

Everything described above is technically feasible. The barrier is political.

The nations and corporations currently positioned to dominate space have every incentive to capture the governance framework before it can be democratized. The United States and China are in an accelerating competition for lunar resources and orbital dominance that mirrors, in structure if not in ideology, the Cold War that built the first rocket programs. The Artemis Accords, the US-led framework for lunar cooperation, have attracted forty-three signatories but exclude China and Russia, and are structured around bilateral agreements rather than multilateral commons governance.

The window for establishing community-based governance may be shorter than it appears. Once extraction begins at scale and revenue flows are established, the political economy of disruption becomes brutal. Every existing stakeholder has a concrete interest in the status quo; the communities that would benefit from a commons model have only an abstract interest in a future that hasn't materialized yet.

History suggests that windows for institutional design are real but time-limited. The Bretton Woods system was designed in three weeks in 1944, before the war ended, because the architects understood that once the postwar political economy crystallized, redesign would be impossible. The Outer Space Treaty was negotiated before anyone had been to the Moon. The moment to design governance is before the stakes are fully realized, not after.

The connected communities argument is this: the people with the clearest long-term interest in sustainable, equitable space governance are not the shareholders of aerospace companies or the defense ministries of great powers. They are the communities that will live with the long-run consequences — the communities that have already learned, through fisheries and forests and water, what happens when short-run extraction wins over long-run stewardship. Getting those communities into the governance architecture of space, before that architecture hardens, is the civilizational task.

Connection is the mechanism. Not connection as metaphor — actual institutional linkage between community governance traditions on Earth and the emerging institutional frameworks for off-world activity. The International Space Station needed seventeen countries to agree on bolt standards. The next phase needs seven thousand communities to agree on something more fundamental: who decides, and in whose interest, what humanity does among the stars.