Who Decides? Autonomous Systems, Decision Authority, and U.S. Leadership in the Space Domain

By Sabeen Shaikh, Global TechMed Leader, Honorary Commander U.S. Air Force

Pre-publication version. This paper is shared here ahead of its formal publication; a link to the published version will be added once it is available.

Nations are extending beyond a passive use of space built on science and communication toward an active one built on resource acquisition and autonomous defense.

Autonomy is already operational. Department of War programs are extending satellite autonomy into rendezvous, proximity operations and refueling,¹ and the X-37B classifies threats and maneuvers without human input.² These systems decide at machine speed, faster than any human in the chain can review. China and Russia are fielding comparable capability.

The United States, through decades of leadership in space, has maintained a strategic advantage in the domain. To keep that advantage, it must build a governance structure for autonomous space systems that is transparent, verifiable and interoperable, one that other nations choose to adopt. This article untangles the governance gap around autonomous space systems and the strategic advantage available to the nation that creates an updated framework to close it.

Understanding Conflict in the Space Domain

The last framework for space was American in origin. President Johnson called for a treaty in May 1966,³ and in January 1967 the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union opened the Outer Space Treaty for signature. It barred weapons of mass destruction from orbit and reserved celestial bodies for peaceful purposes.⁴ Dozens of nations followed.

Space still does not function as a conventional theater of conflict. It functions as enabling infrastructure, used, as then-Gen. John Raymond put it, to "detect, track, and target forces with long-range precision weapons."⁵ Russia has jammed GPS across the Baltic since invading Ukraine.⁶ In June 2026, Defense One reported something of broader relevance. University of Texas researchers traced 75 bursts of GPS interference across Europe, Greenland and Canada to a Russian early-warning satellite in high orbit. The bursts were brief and had little practical effect. The researchers concluded they were intentional, and offered no theory about why.⁷

The intent is unclear. The consequences are not. Degraded navigation reaches commercial aviation, agriculture and emergency response, far from any theater of operations.

The Governance Gap

The Outer Space Treaty says nothing about conventional weapon systems in orbit, and nothing about interference with satellites. They didn’t exist yet. Jamming and spoofing "are attractive precisely because they operate in legal and political grey zones, making it difficult to determine when international law on the use of force is triggered."⁸ The treaty says nothing about autonomous systems either, and that is the legal environment in which they are being built and soon deployed, with no foundation for determining what they may do in space, or who is accountable when they do. The risk compounds when a machine makes the choice.

Consider one satellite approaching another to inspect it peacefully. The second reads the approach as hostile and responds defensively. Each acted within legitimate parameters. No human authorized the escalation, and nobody chose it. This is escalation by default rather than by design. Who is accountable? The engineers, the government they serve, the operators, or the system itself? None of them, currently.

Autonomous systems in space should be governed through a human-in-the-loop (HITL) design, with parameters set before deployment rather than approval sought during an event. Healthcare established this years ago. Having worked in regulated medical systems and clinical AI, I have seen the requirement in practice: autonomous surgical systems operate inside protocols set before the procedure, and nothing is deployed until its authorization boundaries are approved. Regulation preceded the technology. In space, it has not.

The Competition Is Not What It Appears

Autonomous capability in the space domain is multipolar, and not only among adversaries. China has conducted documented multi-satellite proximity operations in geosynchronous orbit and appears to have completed the first on-orbit refueling in geostationary orbit in 2025, though Beijing has never confirmed it.⁹ Beyond the GPS jamming described above, Russia maintains rendezvous and proximity operations, and U.S. officials assess that it is developing a nuclear anti-satellite capability.¹⁰ France, a NATO ally, expects to launch SPLINTER, a nanosatellite designed to undertake counterspace actions autonomously.¹¹

Capability is multipolar. Governance will not be. The second race is over who writes the rules, and rules consolidate around whoever writes them first. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission’s 2025 Annual Report to Congress warned that if the United States cedes leadership, China is "poised to advance a state-driven, opaque governance model that could embed long-term global reliance on its systems and standards."¹²

Opacity is not a flaw in that model. It is what a framework built for internal command and control looks like from the outside. A centralized, party-controlled structure makes a clear authorization pathway more likely, not less, and there is no reason to think Beijing has left the question open. China is answering "who decides" now. It is not the answer the United States would write. It will be the standard anyway, unless someone writes a better one.

Timing matters. There is a window in which the better framework can still win. After it closes, switching costs decide and quality stops mattering. For autonomous systems that window is shorter, because authorization logic has to be embedded in development rather than added afterward. Changing the framework later means rebuilding the systems, not amending a policy.

Governance as the Leadership Instrument

In 2020 the United States created the Artemis Accords, a non-binding set of principles for civil space exploration. As of August 2026 they carry 71 signatories, more than a third of UN member states and every major allied space power. Neither China nor Russia is among them. Nothing was mandated. Nations signed because the framework was credible and adoptable. They could see exactly what they were committing to.

A treaty constrains operations, and the adoption cost is far higher. So is the cost of getting it wrong. An unauthorized autonomous action costs a nation control of an escalation it never chose. The framework needs to double down on what made Artemis work: only a structure built for peace and grounded in transparency, verifiability and interoperability will attract the support of other nations.

The United States needs to adopt one built on those principles, so it becomes the standard others build against. This is how capability leadership converts into domain leadership. Allied and commercial development converges first, international law second, before any of it reaches a negotiating table. Interoperability arrives by default instead of by integration project, and every system built that way makes the next one easier. Every question that follows gets answered inside a structure the United States wrote rather than one it has to argue against.

Capability advantages expire. Structural ones compound. That is what earned leadership accumulates into. When enough of the domain operates inside the same framework, it is no longer a standard anyone chose. It becomes infrastructure. That is what dominance looks like when it is earned rather than imposed: not control asserted at a single point, but an architecture nobody can operate around.

Conclusion

The space domain is already operating at machine speed. The frameworks that authorize, guide and account for autonomous decision-making are not. Nations racing to field the capability have neglected the equal advantage of setting the precedent for governing it. That gap will close. The question is who closes it first, and whether what they build is a framework the rest of the world can verify and operate inside.

Three elements would do most of the work. (1) An authorization architecture that decides in advance which categories of autonomous action are pre-authorized and which require a human in the loop, mapped to escalation risk and built to be audited afterward. (2) Adoptability by design, with the authorization boundaries and escalation thresholds published so allies can verify them and build interoperable systems against them, rather than retrofitting for coalition use once the decisions are already embedded in fielded systems. (3) And a settled answer on commercial authority, because who commands a commercially operated constellation in a contested environment cannot be negotiated during the crisis that raises the question.

The nation that builds decision-authority frameworks rigorous enough to be credible, transparent enough to be verifiable, and designed from the start to be adopted by allies, by commercial partners, by the broader international community, leads the space domain. Not because it mandated that leadership but rather because it earned it.

That leadership does not stay static. The nation whose framework becomes the one the domain runs on is not simply first among equals, it is the domain’s center of gravity. This is the prize: not a treaty signed once, but a position that renews itself every time another nation, ally or commercial partner opts in.

Footnotes

1. Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, "A Broader Look at Dynamic Space Operations: Creating Multi-Dimensional Dilemmas for Adversaries," November 2025, https://www.mitchellaerospacepower.org/app/uploads/2025/11/DSO-FINAL.pdf. ↩

2. Space Force Association, "AI, Quantum Sensors, and the X-37B: The Tech Transforming Space Superiority Today," ussfa.org, https://ussfa.org/ai-quantum-sensors-and-the-x-37b-the-tech-transforming-space-superiority-today/. ↩

3. Lyndon B. Johnson, "Statement by the President on the Need for a Treaty Governing Exploration of Celestial Bodies," May 7, 1966, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-the-president-the-need-for-treaty-governing-exploration-celestial-bodies. ↩

4. United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, "Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies," Art. IV, opened for signature January 27, 1967, https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/outerspacetreaty.html. ↩

5. United States Space Force, "Raymond Praises Space Force Achievements, Purpose While Noting Ongoing Threats, Challenges," spaceforce.mil, April 5, 2022, https://www.spaceforce.mil/News/Article/2990049/raymond-praises-space-force-achievements-purpose-while-noting-ongoing-threats-c/. ↩

6. David Roza, "Russian Jamming Is Wreaking Havoc on GPS in Eastern Europe. But Is It Hybrid Warfare?" Air & Space Forces Magazine, https://www.airandspaceforces.com/russian-gps-jamming-nato-ukraine/. ↩

7. Patrick Tucker, "Mystery GPS Outages Traced to Russian Satellite," Defense One, June 11, 2026, https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2026/06/mystery-gps-outages-russian-satellite/414110/. ↩

8. Diplomacy and Law, "Orbital Militarization and the Weaponization of Space: Legal and Strategic Limits," https://www.diplomacyandlaw.com/post/orbital-militarization-and-the-weaponization-of-space-legal-and-strategic-limits. ↩

9. Secure World Foundation, "2025 Global Counterspace Capabilities Report," 2025, https://www.swfound.org/publications-and-reports/2025-global-counterspace-capabilities-report; Andrew Jones, "China’s Shijian Spacecraft Separate After Pioneering Geosynchronous Orbit Refueling Tests," SpaceNews, November 30, 2025, https://spacenews.com/chinas-shijian-spacecraft-separate-after-pioneering-geosynchronous-orbit-refueling-tests/. ↩

10. Center for Strategic and International Studies, "Space Threat Assessment 2025," April 2025, https://aerospace.csis.org/space-threat-assessment-2025/. ↩

11. Secure World Foundation, "2025 Global Counterspace Capabilities Report," 2025, https://www.swfound.org/publications-and-reports/2025-global-counterspace-capabilities-report. ↩

12. U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, "The Final Frontier: China’s Ambitions to Dominate Space," ch. 7 in 2025 Annual Report to Congress, November 2025, https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/2025-11/Chapter_7--The_Final_Frontier_Chinas_Ambitions_to_Dominate_Space.pdf. ↩