Space power and spacepower

In recent years, the concept of "space power" has become more and more popular within academia, among the media, and in the context of official policy documents and military doctrines around the world. Nevertheless, a proper synthesis of the different and sometimes contending definitions and interpretations of this concept is still missing in the literature. Equally remarkable, there is no fixed taxonomy across different works and publications, with scholars alternating space power with spacepower indistinctively, using the two terms to refer to either actors or a set of material capacities. This chapter is an attempt to shed some light on the concept of space power by capturing the various policy, strategic, and doctrinal aspects that come into play in the use thereof. It first provides a literature review of the major works on the topic published between 1999 and 2020, with an emphasis on the four seminal studies published by Oberg (1999), Dolman (2002), Klein (2006), and Lutes and Hays (2011). It then identifies recurring elements and inherent pitfalls of the different works and eventually disentangles the normative implications on the policy and doctrinal side that originated from these works. It then introduces a multidimensional conceptualisation of space power based on the intersection of the two constituent elements of state capacity and state autonomy in the formulation of space policy.