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While the United States remains the global leader in space capabilities, its ecosystem shows fragility. Emerging space powers like Turkey, India, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates have adopted flexible, multi-vector space and defense strategies. These countries provide lessons in adaptability, resilience, and co-development in a multipolar world. They offer potential models that can enrich how Washington approaches capability development and alliance management. It is time for the United States to treat capable mid-tier partners not as challenges to American space primacy, but as co-creators of spacepower’s future.

For over half a century, the United States has defined the cutting edge of space and defense innovation. From launching Apollo to charting Artemis, American technological prowess has long shaped the global strategic order. But that dominance, while impressive, now reveals structural vulnerabilities. As the United States contends with institutional inertia, budgetary strain, and an increasingly concentrated contractor ecosystem, a new wave of mid-tier space powers is quietly rewriting the playbook — combining agility, adaptability, and ambition. The United States risks falling behind not because it lacks innovation, but because its spacepower ecosystem is rigid, centralized, and rooted in outdated alliance models. As a new generation of middle powers build more agile space programs, Washington should learn from their flexibility or risk strategic isolation in the next era of space competition. Can Washington’s space dominance survive without systemic reinvention?

From Bipolarity to Multipolarity in Space

From the end of the Cold War through the early 2010s, the United States maintained an unmatched leadership role in space and defense innovation for roughly two decades. This period of uncontested dominance is now giving way to a more complex and competitive landscape. Its technological breakthroughs, from missile defense to satellite constellations, have cemented national pride and shaped the strategic landscape for generations. Yet that dominance hides a growing structural vulnerability, increasingly exposed as great power competition sharpens and technological disruption accelerates. The future of American space leadership may depend less on preserving its technological edge and more on rethinking the ecosystem that sustains it.

Unlike the Cold War era, where supremacy was framed by binary competition, today’s space domain involves multipolar actors, diverse development models, and rapidly adaptive mid-tier states. While much attention in Washington focuses on peer rivals like China and, to a lesser degree, Russia, some of the most instructive models are emerging from countries like Turkey, India, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates.

The United States operates within an increasingly fragile structure. Over time, its defense-industrial base has consolidated heavily, with a shrinking number of prime contractors controlling an expanding share of strategic capabilities. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, RTX, and SpaceX dominate critical domains from crewed launch to missile defense. While these companies lead the world in many respects, their dominance also creates dangerous single points of failure. Washington’s heavy reliance on a few firms has repeatedly led to cost overruns, production delays, and vendor leverage in high-stakes programs. Nowhere is this more evident than NASA’s growing dependence on SpaceX for crewed missions and launching national security payloads, raising long-term concerns about privatizing sovereign capacity.

Beyond industrial concentration, bureaucratic inertia hampers the acquisition system. Although the Pentagon has made repeated reform efforts, including establishing the Space Force, its procurement processes are hindered by risk aversion, complex oversight mechanisms, and interservice rivalries that undermine joint capability development. Programs often stall not from a lack of innovation but because of structural dysfunction. The COVID-19 pandemic further exposed vulnerabilities in America’s supply chains — especially in microelectronics, rare earths, and specialized manufacturing — drawing attention to the vulnerabilities emerging within overextended global supply and partnership networks, particularly in critical technologies.

Part of America’s current struggle stems from being the early technological leader, a dynamic reflecting the classic innovator’s dilemma. Many of its core systems were developed in earlier technological eras, locking in legacy architectures that now require constant adaptation and upgrades. Each modernization cycle collides with bureaucratic layers, entrenched vendors, and budgetary inertia, making innovation increasingly expensive and politically complex. By contrast, emerging space powers have the advantage of building their programs atop existing mature technologies, unburdened by decades of institutional baggage. They can directly adopt proven capabilities, avoiding legacy constraints that complicate U.S. defense and space acquisitions.

Perhaps even more problematic is how Washington tends to engage its partners. For decades, American alliance management has often followed a model in which allies are treated more as end-users or purchasers of U.S.-made systems than as equal co-developers of strategic capabilities.  This patron-client approach may generate short-term defense sales but discourages indigenous innovation, undermines technological sovereignty among partners, and limits Washington’s ability to foster real capability redundancy across alliances. While the the United States seeks to build coalitions to counter Chinese advances, it risks surrounding itself with technologically dependent allies instead of empowered contributors.

New Space Ecosystems for a Modern World

Unlike the United States, several emerging powers have built more adaptive, diversified ecosystems suited to their unique strategic constraints. Turkey stands out as one of the most sophisticated and geopolitically nuanced models. Anchored within NATO yet fiercely protective of its autonomy, Ankara has developed a multi-vector space and defense ecosystem that resists simple categorization. It combines public and private innovation, regional diplomacy, and sovereign capability-building into a highly flexible structure.

Establishing the Turkish Space Agency in 2018 reflected more than symbolic ambition. Within a few years, Turkey advanced national satellite programs such as Türksat 6A, the National Indigenous Earth Observation Satellite, and the Göktürk intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance series while developing early-stage human spaceflight capabilities in collaboration with Axiom Space. Turkey embedded technology transfer and training into its contracts through these arrangements, ensuring knowledge acquisition alongside operational milestones.

Even more significant is Ankara’s diplomatic strategy. Turkey works with American partners in its space endeavors while actively engaging in non-Western frameworks. It is a member of the China-influenced Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization, pursues regional leadership through the Islamic Space Cooperation Organization and Turkic state collaborations, and has avoided signing the U.S.-led Artemis Accords. This careful balance maximizes learning opportunities and diplomatic flexibility without complete dependence on any one bloc.

India has followed a different, equally instructive path. The Indian Space Research Organisation has delivered impressive capabilities on modest budgets, achieving lunar landings, conducting Mars missions, and advancing preparations for human spaceflight with remarkable efficiency. Its expanding private sector adds further energy, moving into launch services, satellite production, and small payload delivery. Although India’s strategic partnership with the United States has grown, reflected in expanded NASA collaboration and increasing Artemis dialogue, New Delhi maintains longstanding ties with Russia, France, and others, preserving the flexibility that major powers often require.

South Korea offers another version of this model. It has rapidly expanded space capabilities while remaining deeply integrated within the U.S. alliance system. Its KSLV-II launch vehicle, substantial defense conglomerates, and growing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and missile defense projects demonstrate how industrialized allies can contribute meaningfully. While several middle powers have the potential to become co-producers of strategic capability, U.S. policy has not always supported this path. In some cases, such as South Korea’s space launch ambitions, citing security concerns, Washington actively slowed indigenous development — particularly regarding missile proliferation risks on the Korean Peninsula. As a result, South Korea relied on Russian technology for the KSLV-I space launcher’s main stages after U.S. restrictions on technology transfer. Long-standing missile range limitations under U.S.-South Korea bilateral missile guidelines and the Missile Technology Control Regime further constrained its program. Seoul’s participation in joint development and research partnerships with the United States shows how cooperation can evolve beyond the conventional buyer-seller relationship.

The United Arab Emirates demonstrates a different form of strategic agility. Using financial strength and diplomatic finesse, the Emiratis have built partnerships across the United States, Japan, Russia, and China. Its Hope Mars mission, the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre astronaut program, and involvement in the Artemis Accords illustrate how smaller states can become influential players in what was once a superpower domain.

What distinguishes these emerging actors is not the scale of their capabilities but the structure of their national ecosystems. Their approaches combine multi-vector diplomacy, agile partnerships across public and private sectors, and a strong emphasis on developing sovereign technological expertise and institutional know-how. They do not aim to replace the United States, but to ensure that no single dependency defines their space ambitions. While Washington continues to approach alliance management primarily through arms sales and access agreements, these smaller powers show a different, arguably more resilient, way to build capability.

Rethinking Space Engagement

The future of American spacepower does not depend solely on scaling existing capabilities or outpacing rivals like China. It also requires rethinking how the United States engages with its allies and partners. The examples of Turkey, India, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates illustrate that mid-tier space powers can contribute through regional influence, strategic experimentation, ecosystem innovation, and operational resilience.

Rather than viewing these partners as passive recipients of American technology or strategy, the United States should recognize their evolving ecosystems as complementary assets in a broader alliance architecture. Doing so would not diminish American leadership. It would strengthen it. If the United States is to lead in a multipolar space era, it should lead through networks, not dominance, and that begins by embracing middle powers as full partners in shaping the future of space and defense.

This shift in perspective should be accompanied by concrete policy action. U.S. policymakers should go beyond rhetorical support and implement structured co-development programs, offer equitable access to critical technologies, and streamline export controls to trusted partners. Additionally, empowering regional actors through joint research and development initiatives, multi-party mission planning, and shared industrial frameworks can build long-term resilience. A useful example is the NASA–JAXA Lunar Gateway partnership, which combines co-development, equitable technology access, and joint mission planning. Treating capable allies as equals in design, not just deployment, is the next step in creating a truly multipolar spacepower architecture.

Nazmelis Zengin is a political communication specialist and contributor to international publications on spacepower, defense innovation, and Turkey’s geopolitical positioning. She currently works in the national space sector.

Image: NASA Kennedy Space Center/NASA/Chris Swanson via Wikimedia Commons