By building spaceports overseas, Beijing wants to flout the current rules, and write its own.
In January, Hong Kong Aerospace Technology Group, a Chinese company, signed an agreement with the government of Djibouti to build a rocket launch facility in Obock, a small port town in the country’s north. If completed, it would mark the first instance of a launch facility funded by China or a private Chinese company in foreign territory. Building a spaceport is a difficult endeavor, and building such a facility on foreign soil is even more complicated. While challenges may ultimately stall or scupper the arrangement, the potential site in Obock serves an important case study for how China or other actors could expand their geopolitical playbook to circumvent the international space governance regime.
China regularly exports space-related applications as tools of global influence, and the potential investment in Obock fits into Beijing’s broader efforts to project power on the African continent. The burgeoning space industry there offers huge potential for investment, job creation, and economic growth. However, given the limited strategic utility of a single launch facility in the Horn of Africa, it seems that China may have ulterior motives for its interest in foreign spaceports. Specifically, because Djibouti is a nonparty to the major treaties governing outer space behavior, China may see this new partnership as an opportunity to enable a potentially rogue actor and reshape global expectations of responsible behavior in space. Worryingly, should Beijing follow this model, there’s not much the United States or likeminded states could do to rectify the situation—if not in Djibouti today, then potentially elsewhere in Africa, Central America, South America, and beyond.
Over the past decade, Chinese state-led and commercial demand for access to outer space has surged, but the supply of viable launch facilities hasn’t kept up. Beijing has expanded launch facilities and options at home, and now, commercial entities seek to add foreign nodes to this network.
A spaceport in Obock may be attractive to China because launches close to the equator are more fuel-efficient than those from higher latitudes. Even with this benefit, given the inherent logistical challenges of operating a single commercial space facility on nonallied soil thousands of miles away from mainland China, this investment would be unlikely to provide the obvious strategic value that China’s overseas military bases offer. It would, however, give China a stage to present its alternative interpretations of international space law and create a haven for satellite operators looking to act outside the confines of the existing system.
As a party to most of the major space-relevant international legal instruments, China must abide by certain limitations on its behavior. For example, it is barred from stationing nuclear weapons in space, may not claim sovereignty over celestial bodies like the Moon, and must provide aid to astronauts in distress, among many other obligations. China fulfils these obligations through domestic regulation of private sector space entities, but it is not clear how these rules would apply to or be enforced on Chinese commercial operators overseas. Djibouti’s lack of experience with any form of space law does little to raise hopes for effective oversight of activities originating from its soil.
China may be interested in using a future launch site at Obock, or prospective spaceports in other countries without strong space regulations, to sidestep or outright reject rules it does not want to follow—likely without consequence. For example, under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST), China has a duty to consult with others prior to conducting activities that might “cause potentially harmful interference” with other state parties’ peaceful use of space. Even if a state fails to consult with others prior to potentially harmful activities, states party to the OST must abide by the principle of due regard for others. However, there is no precise global understanding of what “due regard” means in this context. The OST leaves the task of defining the criteria of the obligation to the individual state parties—which creates a convenient opening for states hoping to blur the lines of compliance.
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