The American Space Law Society is launching its first project: the Space Political Compass.
The SPC is an exercise to extract the existing debates and disagreements within space policy and identify, classify, and explain them. The hope is that this interactive quiz drives interest, engagement, and a wider education around the ideological divides shaping space, and that people come away with a clearer sense of where they stand and where everyone else does.
Space has often been thought of, and aspired to be, a realm free from politics. This is a fantasy. Where humanity goes, politics, law, and society follow. As space grows as a field of study and as a serious industry, there is real utility in understanding the positions one can hold about the ambitions and goals of any space program, and at least as much utility in understanding where others are situated. Discussing the future of the human space program is useless if everyone is talking past each other.
Astropolitics has a growing scholarly literature, but no one has mapped its internal divisions, the actual positions people hold and disagree about. That is what the Compass begins to do. This is the nascent stage, and the Compass is expected to change and adapt as the field itself develops.
The current implementation is the interactive layer, the quiz, along with first-pass synopses and bios of the ideologies it identifies. Those synopses are deliberately incomplete. They are the substrate from which deeper work on each ideology will grow, in the form of histories and analyses of their philosophical roots, published over the coming weeks and months.
Alongside the Compass, the Society is announcing its astropolicy initiative: a sustained program to research, define, and publish work in the field. The Compass is its first product. Longer essays, archival research, and original analysis will follow. There is currently little accessible scholarship on the taxonomy of astropolitical thought. We hope this work becomes a firm foundation from which greater understanding of the field can be built.