Before there was space policy, before there was space exploration at all, there were, as with many things, Nazis, or more precisely, space Nazis. At the origin of adventuring into space, the darkest pages of humankind’s history unfolded. This paper addresses that atrocious origin, critically dissecting how space exploration “for all humankind” stems from a moment when criminological and aerospace sciences profited from, and assisted, the Nazi regime and its crimes against humanity. During the Second World War, Aryan biological criminology informed the Nazis’ Nuremberg laws and related policies, justifying the dehumanisation of Jewish Europeans and others deemed “Lebensunwertes Leben” (“Life unworthy of life”), and thus functioning as an initiator, accelerator, and amplifier of the Holocaust. Led by the prominent Nazi aerospace scientist Wernher von Braun, later NASA’s first Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, the V-2 rocket was developed, providing the regime with destructive power; the United States sought to exploit Nazi scientists and knowledge, while the Soviet Union prioritised aerospace equipment and assets. It has even been argued that the Cold War, and thus the East–West divide, began during this looting of Nazi space science by both powers.

This paper delivers a hauntology of space exploration’s ghostly past, following Derrida’s hauntology as developed in Specters of Marx (1993), to understand its lingering racial conquest thinking in today’s Billionaire Space Race/-ism and its implications for contemporary governance and policy-making. Such thinking informs the present as “out of joint,” still haunted by unresolved pasts of Nazism and unrealized futures where political and cultural forces continue to enable “one space for one race”-(govern)mentality (Eski, 2024), whether covertly or, as problematic, bluntly (e.g., Elon Musk’s Nazi salute and overt white supremacy thinking on his X). This paper therefore treats the origin and history of space exploration not as linear or concluded but, as hauntology reveals, as absent or disavowed legacies, including Nazi ideological, technological, and governmental formations. These formations persisted through the Cold War and remain semi-openly present as spectral structures shaping contemporary space state-corporate realities and policy frameworks, including contemporary transatlantic and European space governance, particularly EU space policy agendas and debates over strategic autonomy (Eski & Luteijn, 2025), technological leadership, and shifting core-periphery (not infrequently conflicting) hierarchies between dominant space-enabled powers within Europe and beyond.

As space becomes more congested, contested, and commercialised, Space Traffic Management (STM) has emerged as a pivotal governance issue and strategic capability for spacefaring actors. Within the European Union (EU), STM is increasingly regarded as a pillar of strategic autonomy, and is associated with safeguarding critical space infrastructure, achieving technological independence, and enabling the Union to exert influence over global space governance. However, despite the recent policy initiatives introduced, the Union's approach to STM remains politically contested.

This paper examines how competing policy logics shape the EU’s evolving approach to STM, its pursuit of strategic autonomy in outer space, and its broader geopolitical implications. To analyse the interaction of security, technocratic, commercial, sustainability, and institutional rationales within EU space governance, it combines interpretive policy analysis with rational choice institutionalism, drawing on Suzuki's framework of policy logics. Empirically, this study reviews EU, ESA, and industry policy documents and incorporates expert interviews from institutions, agencies, industry, and academia.

Although the Union is increasingly framing STM as a strategic capability, the study finds that its governance remains constrained by institutional mandates, divergent Member States’ interests, and persistent tensions between supranational integration and national sovereignty. These dynamics hinder the development of a coherent STM framework and complicate the EU’s ability to translate its rhetoric of strategic autonomy into operational capacity. Furthermore, the paper contextualises the EU’s STM approach within a broader East-West comparative framework, emphasising the differences from the more centralised governance models adopted by the U.S. and China. This trend, particularly evident in the areas of space situational awareness and building a normative in space, influences EU policy narratives, reinforcing ambitions for strategic autonomy while highlighting persistent dependencies.

Importantly, the paper also considers internal European asymmetries. While Central and Eastern European Member States are becoming more integrated into EU space initiatives, they remain on the periphery of decision-making and industrial leadership. Such development raises questions about the complexities of intra-European hierarchies within the strategic autonomy agenda. By conceptualising STM as a contested policy arena rather than a purely technical domain, the paper makes a valuable contribution to debates on EU strategic autonomy, space governance, and global regulatory power. In this regard, the text demonstrates how competing policy logics shape Europe's internal coherence and its external role in an evolving space order.

Globally, the governance of global commons was institutionalised through multilateral agreements such as the Antarctic Treaty (1959), Outer Space Treaty (1967), Law of the Sea (1982) and the Kyoto Protocol (1997), among the most important. The underlying logic of these agreements is that collective strategies generate more sustainable outcomes for all players. Article II of the Outer Space Treaty, in particular, protects outer space, the Moon and other celestial bodies from national appropriation by claims of sovereignty, through occupation and any other means. Nevertheless, increasing congestion and environmental degradation in orbit indicate that spacefaring states are departing from the cooperative logic of the global commons and instead increasingly view outer space as an extension of terrestrial military capabilities, thereby projecting existing geopolitical rivalries into the space domain.

This paper will focus on a particular aspect of space, the low Earth orbit (LEO), where commercial, technological and military competition has been rapidly growing, to address the question of how securitisation of space commerce is affecting LEO as a global common. Specifically, it investigates how the European Union frames and regulates the commercial satellite infrastructure on which it relies through a security lens.

Analytically, the study employs discourse and policy analysis of formal EU political communication – EU parliamentary discussions, speeches by EU officials, ESA policy documents – to uncover the institutional and policy dynamics of EU space governance. Particular attention is given to persistent East–West divisions within the Union and how these shape the evolving patterns and logics of space securitisation. These findings are interpreted through the lens of critical approaches to security theory and political economy literature on state-private relations. The study also incorporates a normative assessment of the ongoing security dilemma in LEO, evaluating how the internal EU dynamics affect the sustainability of LEO as a shared global resource. For this aim, the study draws on securitisation theory and global commons governance approaches to assess whether securitised approaches undermine cooperative management.

By looking at the developments in the LEO from the perspective of actors within the EU and reassessing the changing norms in space, the broader contribution of this paper is to inform debates about global common governance and strategic autonomy as well as offer recommendations for building cooperative and sustainable strategies in LEO within the EU and internationally.