Tensions on Earth Don’t Have to Affect Outer Space Diplomacy
By Duke Today
If the United States and the former Soviet Union could cooperate on space efforts during the Cold War, then tensions between nations on Earth today don’t have to extend to diplomacy and agreements governing outer space.
That’s according to speakers at a recent webinar organized by the Space Diplomacy Lab at Duke, part of the university’s Rethinking Diplomacy program.
“Plans to have Russian-U.S. cooperation in space emerged in the height of the Cold War and continued. There's this kind of legacy of those efforts, there should be a way to keep that spirit of, ‘we can still do this,’ alive …,” said webinar keynote speaker Mai'a K. Davis Cross, director of the Center for International Affairs and World Cultures at Northeastern University.
But space diplomacy is more complicated today than during the Cold War. There’s the rapid and transformational development of space technologies available to more nations and private interests than ever, a commercial space revolution and a resurgence of geopolitical rivalries, said Space Diplomacy Lab co-founder Benjamin L. Schmitt, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, and the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy.