Workstreams

How seven jurisdictions regulate AI-driven space operations, and how the Outer Space Treaty 1967 and the Liability Convention 1972 interact with private governance in each. The analysis is doctrinal and comparative: statutory instruments, licensing conditions and regulatory guidance read against the treaty obligations they are meant to discharge.

Semi-structured interviews across four constituencies, followed by co-design sessions in which participants work on draft governance instruments rather than comment on finished ones. The aim is to document what operators actually do when an autonomous system commits to a manoeuvre, and what they believe they are accountable for.

Analysis of submissions to UN COPUOS and to the technical bodies where operational norms are settled, tracing which actors table proposals, whose language survives into adopted text, and which states or firms are absent from the process. This is the evidence for the claim that private actors shape global norms before public deliberation begins.

Synthesis of the three empirical workstreams into instruments a regulator or operator could adopt: an audit-ready accountability framework, model cross-border incident-reporting clauses, and a comparative duty-of-care typology. Each is tested with regulators and industry before publication, and revised against what they say would fail in practice.