Policy documents from both the White House and the Office of Space Commerce this summer acknowledge that space is a complex system, as to which forms of adaptive governance should apply. This is a move in the right direction.
But the complex systems approach they embrace — which solves problems by analyzing systems, relationships, patterns and context rather than treating actors in isolation – is not yet fully realized. I developed a space governance framework that I call the COSMOSIS complex systems approach that would encourage constraints and boundaries on a complex system while allowing the actors and the governance system to iterate and adapt in response to real world feedback.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s (OSTP) July 2026 Report, “Science: A New Golden Age,” explains that modern science evolves recursively by feedback loops across disciplines and iteratively between research and engineering as well as tools and process knowledge. The report concludes that the systems that enable science therefore should be adaptive.
The report recommends that federal agencies build a self-improving science enterprise that maps systemic gaps in grantmaking portfolios to fill the landscape of unsolved scientific and technical challenges. It also recommends creating intra-agency metascience capabilities to help each agency evaluate which of its programs actually work and where organization-wide reforms are required. The report suggests that regulatory processes should weigh benefits alongside risks, develop and adapt rules based on real-world evidence, and use regulatory sandboxes to test new technologies under controlled conditions.
But even before the Golden Age report, the OSTP treated emerging technologies as interlocking foundational parts of the same system. A series of executive orders, all generated by OSTP, set White House policy on AI (including the Genesis Mission), quantum, nuclear and space. OSTP recognized that all of these technologies are foundational to the future: They are the platforms on which other future technologies will be built. They are also nodes in a network that inform and enable each other to succeed: navigation and power in space and on the moon will rely on quantum, AI and nuclear power. Scientific research in turn will be accelerated by AI technology and discoveries in space.
The Office of Space Commerce Mission Authorization framework and opt-in program to certify novel space activities also recognizes the inherent complexity of these activities and the need for adaptive forms of governance as to them. The Mission Authorization program itself represents an effort to streamline existing disparate agency licensing decisions, with the OSC serving as a node in the agency network that includes the FCC, FAA and CRSRA. And the Mission Authorization certificate program itself is designed to evolve and adapt. OSC is expected to “rapidly iterate its process and refine requirements” in response to the experiences of industry applicants and the government. Likewise, the proposal calls for ongoing supervision to be “risk informed and proportionate to the nature of the certified activity,” rather than one size fits all.
Thus, the executive branch is embracing a new complex systems approach to science and space. To fully implement this vision, though, it must expand its complex systems governance methods. The COSMOSIS approach provides a framework for further refining these adaptive governance systems and fostering commercial space innovation.
The COSMOSIS framework adopts an adaptive, emergent and holistic approach to space law, grounded in the principles of the Outer Space Treaty and Frank White’s Overview Effect. It recognizes the interconnectedness of space actors and environments and ensures that governance decisions reflect a sense of stewardship and responsibility to the cosmos, other space actors and future generations. But it also encourages innovation and commercial space development by supporting governance experiments and letting successful solutions emerge and propagate; building in feedback loops to allow outcomes, wide-ranging stakeholder input and emerging risks to be regularly reviewed and incorporated into revised governance approaches; and horizon scanning for emerging risks and regulatory gaps and proactive adaptation and bottom-up improvisation as new developments and possibilities arise.
The framework involves seven components. First, consistent with the Outer Space Treaty and the Overview Effect experienced by astronauts who have viewed Earth from space, the overarching theme and perspective applied through the framework is interconnection and stewardship, with a focus on governance decisions that reflect a sense of responsibility to the cosmos and future generations and consider the rights and interests of all who are presently affected as well.
Second, a decisionmaking process called the Cynefin framework is applied to help leaders understand which type of environment they are dealing with for a particular space governance issue: Clear, Complicated, Complex or Chaotic. In a Clear setting, the best approach is to apply established protocols; in a Complicated setting, expert analysis is most helpful; for a Complex problem or environment, experimentation and iteration is the most appropriate response and, in a Chaotic environment, the best approach is to move quickly and then stabilize the situation. Since situations can change and move from one type to another, flexibility and resilience and multi-stage hybrid processes should also be used.
Third, it is helpful to identify various governance levels and polycentric nodes. The relevant actors and institutions across international, national, and subnational levels, including private actors, should be mapped and polycentricity should be acknowledged and allowed to foster resilience and innovation.
Fourth, treat space governance as a living, adaptive system in which diversity, redundancy and distributed decisionmaking are encouraged. This allows parallel experiments and lets solutions emerge and propagate. Regulatory sandboxes in individual states are examples of this.
Fifth, feedback loops should be built into each system so that outcomes, stakeholder input, and emerging risks can be regularly reviewed and incorporated into revised approaches. Horizon scanning mechanisms should be embedded within agencies to further monitor technological, legal and environmental trends and anticipate and adapt to new challenges. Posterity impact assessments should also be included so that potential long-term and intergenerational impacts of governance choices are considered.
Sixth, in conducting regular space governance retrospectives, multi-dimensional metrics should be used including COSMOSIS principles such as a diversity of actors and approaches, the ripple effects of interconnectedness, the ability to be resilient as marked by shock absorption and redundancy, evolution and adaptability, stewardship, emergence and the potential for bottom-up solutions, and stakeholder trust.
Finally, complex systems governance principles should be applied. This includes polycentric and layered governance, governance systems with built-in redundancies and multiple pathways for conflict resolution, refinement of approaches through feedback loops, distributed decision making by a wide array of stakeholders and horizon scanning for emerging risks and regulatory gaps that allow for proactive adaptation.
The OSTP and OSC approaches could more fully and consistently embrace this framework in three ways.
First, OSTP should not stop at intra-agency metascience hubs. Just as OSTP has been taking a bird’s eye view of the foundational technology policies across the board, it should maintain a similar role to ensure that those policies are panning out as anticipated and do not need to be adapted. Individual agencies will only be able to take a meta view of their own agency’s work, not a systemwide view like OSTP can. A White House level cross-agency metascience hub should be established to work with the intra-agency metascience hubs.
Second, OSC should similarly establish mechanisms through which risk profile factors can be adapted or removed in response to real world inputs during the life of a novel commercial space activity. This is not a one and done, top-down kind of regulatory system. The risk-tier rubric in the Office of Space Commerce Mission Authorization and voluntary certification program also should delineate the initial set of particular risk factors that might call for closer ongoing supervision, as well as the need to apply Outer Space Treaty continuing supervision obligations such as due regard and Artemis Accords framework criteria like lunar cultural heritage protection at both the certification and ongoing supervision stage.
Third, the OSC Mission Authorization framework should further facilitate timely final certification decisions by establishing an ombudsperson office or mediator/facilitator role for members of the private sector or agency representatives. Other federal agencies have these as part of their operations (FERC, the USPTO Patents Office, IRS, and the SBA, for example). No additional Congressional authorization or funding is needed for OSC or any other federal agency to implement ADR procedures like these. Such mechanisms would help expedite the approval of applications for certification and authorization of novel space activities, particularly after an initial denial of a certificate but before the formal appeals process has run its course.
To effectively manage complex systems like space and space law, and to iterate and adapt effectively, we need a framework to help define constraints and boundaries that leave room for the system’s actors to improvise as new developments and possibilities arise. COSMOSIS is one such framework. And that framework should be applied holistically and adaptively across all of the policy recommendations in the Golden Age report and the OSC Mission Authorization and opt-in Space Commerce Certificate Program.
M.C. Sungaila is a partner in the Complex Appellate Litigation Group, adjunct professor of Space Law and Policy at LMU Loyola Law School, and an AAA-ICDR panel arbitrator. Her article, “COSMOSIS: A Complex Systems Framework for Space Law” first appeared in the Winter 2026 issue of the Beyond Earth Institute’s Policy Review.
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