In SpaceNews, M.C. Sungaila highlights the White House’s recent acknowledgment of space as a complex system and shares how her COSMOSIS framework for space governance, first introduced in the Beyond Earth Institute Policy Review earlier this year, can be used to govern space with complexity principles in mind.
The COSMOSIS framework adopts an adaptive, emergent and holistic approach to space law, grounded in the principles of the Outer Space Treaty and Frank White’s Overview Effect. It recognizes the interconnectedness of space actors and environments and ensures that governance decisions reflect a sense of stewardship and responsibility to the cosmos, other space actors and future generations.
But it also encourages innovation and commercial space development by supporting governance experiments and letting successful solutions emerge and propagate; building in feedback loops to allow outcomes, wide-ranging stakeholder input and emerging risks to be regularly reviewed and incorporated into revised governance approaches; and horizon scanning for emerging risks and regulatory gaps and proactive adaptation and bottom-up improvisation as new developments and possibilities arise.
Examples of what this can look like are highlighted in 3 policy proposals:
* A White House level cross-agency metascience hub to work with the intra-agency metascience hubs OSTP has already recommended, to provide a big picture view of implementation around AI, space, nuclear, and quantum technology policies.
* Office of Space Commerce mechanisms through which risk profile factors can be adapted or removed in response to real world inputs during the life of a novel commercial space activity.
* Facilitating timely final certification decisions through the OSC Mission Authorization framework by establishing an ombudsperson office or mediator/facilitator role for members of the private sector or agency representatives.
Full article can be read on SpaceNews: https://spacenews.com/the-cosmosis-framework-can-ensure-that-washington-governs-space-with-its-complexity-in-mind/