Space governance you can step inside.
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Spatial governance explainers
See the regime, not the report.
Each explainer turns one contested space-governance reality — a lunar split, a treaty stress point, a spectrum fight — into something a non-specialist official can navigate. Neutral, plain-language, every claim tied to a primary source.
The explainers
Published, and built to check out.
Flagship · lunar governancePublished
Two rulebooks, one Moon: the Artemis Accords and the ILRS
67 nations have signed the U.S.-led Artemis Accords; a China–Russia-led bloc, the ILRS, is writing a competing rulebook for the same ground. Both invoke the 1967 Outer Space Treaty — and disagree about what it permits. A navigable map of who has signed what, and where the two diverge.
Open the explainer →Signal geographyPublished
The clock you can't see: GPS timing and the infrastructure that runs on it
The grid, the markets, and the approach path to a runway all set their watches by satellites — and interference with that signal has gone from curiosity to routine. Ten minutes, eleven sources.
Open the explainer →Horizon two · the research thesisPreview
The missing analog: who already lives far from home
Two mature fields — the psychology of isolated, confined places, and what service far from home does to a family — that, in our review, have not been bridged. Military and Foreign Service families may be the long-duration-habitation analog the research has overlooked. The gap is the contribution.
See the preview →Horizon two · previewPreview
The settlement question
The thesis, made vivid: when a Moon base needs a school before it needs a flag, who already knows how to live like that? A 3D notional site and the precedent that already exists.
See the preview →Next, on the same standard: the Outer Space Treaty's stress points — where a 1967 text meets 2026 facts — and the geography of an ITU spectrum fight. We publish an explainer when it's fully sourced, not before.
The Field Notes
The full papers, if you want the math.
The signal-geography work sits on applied-research Field Notes — the version with the derivations, the figures, and the complete source list. Free, citable, and typeset to print.
Field Note 01 · July 2026PDF · 11 pp
When GPS Lies
What a nation loses when its invisible utility goes dark — the economic dependence, the now-operational interference threat, and the backup the U.S. retired in 2010 while its competitors kept theirs. This edition adds two 2026 case studies — the Strait of Hormuz shipping disruption and the Denver, Colorado outage — the December 2025 Executive Order on space superiority and the live FCC PNT docket, and a four-lens (diplomatic, informational, military, economic) reading of the dependency, with questions for officials to work through.
Field Note 02 · July 2026PDF · 10 pp
The Grid Has a Heartbeat
Why the bulk power system depends on a one-microsecond GPS timestamp — with the closed-form holdover math, the inverter-disturbance record, and what the capacity market is pricing. This edition adds the 2025 NERC demand-growth and PJM auction data, a four-lens (diplomatic, informational, military, economic) reading of the timing dependency, and questions for officials.
Download the PDF ↓Field Note 03 · July 2026PDF · 9 pp
The Crowded Orbit
Why a fleck of paint moving at 25,000 km/h is a weapon, and why orbit is a shared resource filling faster than it drains. The tracked catalog (~45,670 objects) sits atop a modeled population of 1.2 million fragments over 1 cm and 140 million over 1 mm — the Kessler cascade that keeps growing for 200+ years even if launches stop. Includes a computed altitude map of the orbital “graveyard band,” the four landmark break-ups that define the risk (Fengyun-1C, Iridium–Cosmos, Cosmos 1408, Intelsat 33e), and where active debris removal stands. Every figure traced to a public primary source (ESA, CelesTrak, NASA ODPO, U.S. State Department), with a four-lens (diplomatic, informational, military, economic) reading and questions for officials.
Field Note 04 · July 2026PDF · 8 pp
Who Owns the Traffic Lane?
There is no air-traffic control for space — only collision warnings no one is obliged to obey, and a map held by one country's military. With 15,900 working satellites (two of every three flown by a single operator), this note explains the U.S. civil TraCSS coordination system, the deliberate line between coordination and management, and why the busiest orbits are governed by a patchwork with no binding global authority. Includes the 2019 Aeolus–Starlink near-miss, the 144,000-maneuver coordination load, and what a binding “ICAO for space” could look like — with a four-lens reading and questions for officials.
Download the PDF ↓How we work
The method is the trust signal.
01Primary sources only
Every claim traces to treaty text, a UN or agency document, or a named dataset. If we can't source it to the record, we don't print it.
02Neutral by design
We render the regime and every side's reading of it. We name no adversary we haven't sourced, and we take no policy position — the official decides, not us.
03Sources on the page
Each explainer ends with the documents it's built on, and load-bearing claims carry their attribution inline, so you can check it rather than trust it.
04Verified, then published
A human opens every primary source before anything ships — today the founder, with an external review bench in formation. Boundary-adjacent work waits.
A line we keep in writing
Diplo Space, Inc. is a neutral, public-interest research and education lab. It uses open-source and public-domain data to translate space-governance regimes into navigable scenarios and exercises for non-specialist officials. It takes no policy positions, accepts no foreign-government funding, and is not affiliated with the U.S. Department of State, the Department of War, or any government agency.