The Galactic Commons, 1982–89

In 1982, a Houston-based space services firm launched the world's first privately-funded, commercial space travel rocket. The private ownership of this spacecraft marked a departure in the trajectory of space travel, which had long been the exclusive purview of nation states. Over twenty years earlier, an international treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union had declared outer space the "commons of humanity," but the 1982 rocket launch represented a significant shift in the U.S. legislation that arbitrated ownership-- or lack thereof-- of the galactic. This paper will examine how, over the course of the 1980s, Ronald Reagan's presidential administration and United States Congress increasingly, unilaterally enclosed the commons of outer space, and will explore the struggle over the domestic and international political meanings of outer space in the years immediately proceeding the disintegration of the Soviet Union.