AI+ Space: America’s Dominance of the Next Strategic Frontier
Key Insights from the AI+ Space Summit, December 2–3, 2025
Hello, I'm Ylli Bajraktari, CEO of the Special Competitive Studies Project. In this edition of SCSP's newsletter, we summarize some of the key takeaways from the AI+ Space Summit that we hosted in Washington, DC on December 2-3. This was our 8th AI+ Summit - a strategic series that we launched a year ago with the goal of forging visions for how the United States can continue to dominate the frontier of AI and the opportunities that AI is unlocking.
The contemporary space domain, and the opportunities around it, is being fundamentally reshaped by a rapidly expanding commercial ecosystem, artificial intelligence (AI), and geopolitics. During two days of conversations, tech demos, and innovation talks by U.S. Space Force Commanders, national security experts, founders of new space companies, scientists, and global space leaders it was repeatedly stated that space is now the nervous system of the modern world and that AI and autonomy are rapidly unlocking new opportunities for science, economy, and national security in space. America’s commercial sector is leading the way, but maintaining overall American leadership in space will require a national vision, a plan of action, and a forum where government, industry, and science come together.
We Have Entered a New Space Era
Space has become indispensable to the American way of life and is increasingly becoming the nervous system of the modern world. While U.S. military leaders have recognized space as vital to warfighting since the early days of the Cold War of the last century, the domain has also become essential to U.S. economic prosperity. All 16 sectors of U.S. critical infrastructure, as designated by the Department of Homeland Security, depend on access to space, a quarter of the U.S. gross domestic product relies on space, and space products and services are projected to be a trillion-dollar market by the end of this decade.
As the importance of space has grown over the past decades, so has the congestion in and competition for dominance of the space domain. In 2019, when the U.S. Space Force was established, approximately 25,000 objects were being tracked in space; as of this past August, this number had increased to 48,500 objects. The number of satellites has grown from 1,500 in 2019 to over 13,000 in 2025, with predictions of 100,000 soon. This growing presence and the resulting congestion make it much more challenging to operate in space and to launch new objects without collisions, placing a premium on the importance of AI-enabled space situational awareness. The Space Force’s updated Data and Artificial Intelligence Strategic Action Plan reflects this reality, positioning AI at the center of everything from space traffic coordination to predictive analytics for launch infrastructure.
Congestion aside, space is also becoming more competitive and contested. China and Russia are building formidable capabilities to deny access to or operations in space. These capabilities include reversible jamming, directed energy, direct ascent anti-satellite weapons (ASAT), and potentially weaponized objects in orbit. Russia is also developing ASAT capabilities with nuclear weapons that, if detonated, could disable a large number of assets in space.
China: A Competitor with Ambition, Vision, and Plans to Win the Space Race
Beijing views space as an inseparable continuation of its security, economic, and scientific ambitions and has developed a comprehensive strategy to pursue space dominance. China is not lacking results. Six months ago, China refueled its first spacecraft in orbit. Chinese satellites have practiced dogfighting in space. China also succeeded - on the first attempt - landing a rover on Mars in 2021, allowing it to take pictures and showcasing to the world that American technology is no longer the only scientific venture on Mars. This accomplishment built on another of China’s historic firsts - successful landing on the far side of the Moon in 2019. One Chinese startup has developed methane-powered launch vehicles and demonstrated novel capabilities, including launching mini-satellites and orbital maneuvering with potential military applications.
China’s control over the supply chain dimension is similarly troubling. Critical components such as microelectronics and radio frequency (RF) components, elements such as Gallium, and synthetic compounds, such as Gallium Arsenide, remain heavily dependent on Chinese suppliers. China has “weaponized the periodic table,” controlling not just mining but mineral processing, in addition to its manufacturing dominance. Yet, Beijing is not only exerting influence through monopoly; Chinese entities have also sought to acquire assets from financially distressed space companies, gaining access to sensitive technologies and intellectual property.
China considers space as a key means of gathering, moving, and exploiting information, similar to undersea cables and other communication technologies. Beijing further sees space technologies as a building block for the 21st-century economy: it is pursuing a lunar research station and manned moon landings for the diplomatic influence to drive international space standards by 2035, and achieve market advantage.
China is not the only state actor with ambitions for space. Europe, Israel, Japan, India, Taiwan, and the UAE, to name a few, are scaling their ambitions for and activities in space. As the U.S.-China competition intensifies, dilemmas will likely emerge over what technologies and standards will other countries adopt, or whether to pursue sovereign space capabilities - mirroring the phenomena around AI frontier models.
AI Poised to Supercharge Commercial Space Expansion
The competition in space is no longer just between states. Commercial interests are increasingly the most dynamic aspect of the space domain, with advances in AI poised to further accelerate this competition. While increased cadence of launches, growing LEO constellations, and space-based surveillance get the most attention, new commercial space opportunities are expanding rapidly. Private companies are developing and fielding new capabilities for in-space refueling, leveraging AI to augment space awareness, capturing space-based energy for use both in space and on Earth, deploying compute at the edge, developing AI-enabled robots for sophisticated space exploration, and even preparing for orbital data centers and manufacturing, signaling the emergence of next-generation space infrastructure. These developments reflect the early stages of what Will Marshall, the co-founder and CEO of Planet Labs called “planetary intelligence,” a unified network in which sensing, compute, and communication operate as one integrated system, all on-orbit.
These commercial endeavors are also having a strategic impact. Private technologies now support military missions, humanitarian responses, global environmental monitoring, and high-priority national security operations. Commercial satellite imagery enabled Ukraine to track Russian military operations, conduct damage assessments, and direct strategic strikes with precision previously reserved for national technical means. Multi-agent AI training systems use “red agents” and “blue agents” to simulate adversary responses and train Space Force operators. Looking ahead, space solar power could deliver energy 24/7 to any location on Earth, an attempt to solve the massive energy demands of AI infrastructure.
A Path to Ensuring U.S. Leadership in Space
Since the 1957 “Sputnik Moment” and ensuing space race through the 1960’s, the United States has enjoyed an advantage in the space domain - for security, commerce, and science. Sustaining this leadership now requires a focused vision, sustained investments, and a close partnership between the public and private sectors. Some ideas the AI+ Space Summit surfaced to address these challenges included:
Established a national forum for space policy. During the first term, the Trump Administration re-established the National Space Council that had been disbanded in 1993, and over the course of four years leveraged it effectively to drive significant institutional, policy, regulatory, and budgetary changes to America’s approach to space. The Council continued the work during the Biden Administration. At a time of dynamic developments in space economy, security, and scientific exploration, a forum to articulate a long-term vision for America’s leadership in space, remove regulatory bottlenecks hindering commercial space expansion, identify areas for further investments, and bring together the best of public and private sector is critical to advance America’s interests in space. (Note: On December 18, 2025, President Trump signed a new Executive Order on “Ensuring American Space Superiority” articulating a space policy to enable U.S. leadership in space exploration, security, and commerce.)
America is leading in space launch, but launch infrastructure is under strain. America’s leading gateways to space - Vandenberg SFB and Cape Canaveral SFS - have managed an impressive growth in space launch activities, setting world records in annual space launches for the last three years in a row. With launch cadence expected to increase in the years ahead, so are demands to (a) modernize launch infrastructure, (b) overhaul decades-old systems, (c) strengthen safety and resilience, including from physical and cyber threats, (d) integrate AI for predictive analytics, and (e) deepen partnerships with commercial launch providers.
AI and autonomy as force multipliers. AI and autonomous systems have the potential, already being demonstrated, to unlock tremendous new opportunities for national security, science, and economic growth in space. As the scale and speed of activity in orbit rapidly exceeds the ability of human operators to manage, AI must enable significant augmentation of America’s spare awareness, anomaly detection, collision avoidance, and counter-space operations. Across intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, AI-enabled sensors at the edge can provide efficient, real-time analysis of observations from space in space. AI and autonomy can further enable spacecraft, rovers, and future deep space missions to make decisions independently, from prioritizing scientific targets to adapting to unexpected conditions. A number of companies are already actively seeking to leverage advantages that the domain offers (solar power, continuous cooling, and ample real-estate) to make compute more efficient and sustainable, including by fielding data centers in space.
For more details, please explore the full AI+ Space Summit sessions on our YouTube channel.
It's interesting how you describe space as the nervous sytem of the modern world. Could you elaborate a bit on how AI autonomy especialy changes that dynamic?