This book explores the issues arising from the evolving militarisation of space and the security challenges this poses.

This second edition has been restructured and updated in full since the first edition in 2016. Contextually, the U.S. no longer leads the Western world, long-held alliances are questioned, and decades of deliberately avoiding crossing the Rubicon into space weapons has shifted to almost casual deployment announcements by now up-and-running Space Force. Chinese civil and military space capabilities have fully matured, and European countries are undergoing a significant reset of their defense and space priorities. Japan has shifted from a non-military space posture to a security-conscious approach. Added to all this is a second Moon race, this time characterized by geopolitical jockeying between the U.S. and China to secure prime lunar geography. Unchanged is the space players’ inability to act on key long-term threats to the space environment: space traffic management, space debris, and a space arms race. These require diplomacy, which requires trust, and so progress is illusive in any more than the smallest steps, some of which then get walked backward. This book provides the context for understanding these changes, specifically regarding the international system, within which these space strategies, players, policies and programs are developed and implemented. Written in accessible language, the book explains and links relevant concepts to give readers an understanding of the space domain’s place in security studies and international politics.

This book will be of much interest to students of space policy, defense studies, foreign policy, security studies and IR.

Joan Johnson-Freese is a Professor Emeritus and former Chair of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College, Newport, RI, USA. She is author of several books on space issues, including Heavenly Ambitions: America’s Quest to Dominate Space (2009); Space as a Strategic Asset (2007); The Chinese Space Program: A Mystery Within a Maze (1998); Space, The Dormant Frontier, Changing the Space Paradigm for the 21 Century (co-author, 1997).