Three agenda items, one underlying problem. COPUOS 2026 reveals how far space governance’s information-sharing duty has come, and how much further it needs to go
The United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) held its 69th session in Vienna from 10 to 18 June 2026. The principal body for discussing the development of international space law met against a backdrop of fracturing geopolitical consensus and a UN liquidity crisis impinging on the Committee’s capacity to function. This has left the Committee needing to be both proactive and responsive in respect of continuing to develop space governance at the international level.
Three areas dominated the Committee’s deliberations over the two weeks: the international mechanism for lunar activities, the use of nuclear power sources in space and the ongoing work of the Working Group on the Five UN Treaties. At first blush, these look like three separate agenda items. In fact, they represent a single problem: a hydra with three heads. Space governance runs on the acquisition and sharing of information, and COPUOS 2026 showed how far that principle has advanced in some areas and how far it still needs to travel in others. The discussions this session held are best understood as a progress report on that divide, one with direct consequences for how Member States and non-State actors (including private operators) alike need to conduct themselves in the governance of human activity in outer space.
Information sharing
As with all discussions on international space governance, the necessary starting point is an examination of what the UN space treaties require. The term ‘information sharing’ gets used loosely at COPUOS, and it is worth being precise about which obligation is in play. Article XI of the Outer Space Treaty requires States Parties to inform the UN Secretary-General, the public and the international scientific community, “to the greatest extent feasible and practicable”, of the nature, conduct, location and results of their space activities. That is a duty to disclose what States are doing. It is not a duty to share the data those activities generate, and examples such as satellite telemetry and mission data sit outside it entirely.
The Registration Convention narrows the obligation further, requiring registration of space objects at the national and international levels (Articles II to IV). The ITU Radio Regulations add a parallel duty (Articles 9 and 11) covering the use of radio frequencies. Between them, these three instruments form the legal skeleton behind everything else COPUOS discussed this session. Under Article VI of the Outer Space Treaty, States remain responsible for meeting these obligations on behalf of their non-state actors too, which is why national licensing regimes matter as much as the instruments themselves.
The Working Group on the Status and Application of the Five UN Treaties on Outer Space has been working through what Article XI demands in practice, and its deliberations this session deserve particular attention. The sheer number and diversity of actors now operating in space have outpaced the informal understandings that used to make the obligation workable. Space traffic coordination and space situational awareness depend on that same information flowing reliably, so a narrow treaty-interpretation exercise extends well beyond the Working Group’s own remit.
Lunar activities
Whilst there are pockets of good practice where the information-sharing obligation is settled, lunar activities show where it is still being built from scratch. The Action Team on Lunar Activities Consultation (ATLAC) met during COPUOS to continue work on a potential international mechanism for coordinating lunar activities. These discussions illustrate just how much groundwork remains before anything resembling the Article XI obligation exists for the Moon. The first challenge is definitional: there is not yet a shared understanding among States of what a ‘mechanism’ would actually be, or what governance gaps it is meant to close, before the question of Outer Space Treaty compliance can even be addressed.
The ATLAC Co-Chairs’ Conference Room Paper on Considerations Regarding a Potential International Mechanism for Lunar Activities (CRP.39) is the clearest evidence of that groundwork being undertaken. Drawing on Member States’ expert input, it sketches four parameters for a future mechanism: a non-binding nature, consultative at government and agency level; a coordinating function, working through contact points and technical baselines rather than new obligations; a plural modality, linking existing bodies such as COPUOS and the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC) rather than creating a single new one; and a debt to precedent, drawing on how the IADC, ITU, Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting and International Civil Aviation Organisation each built their own coordination arrangements.
That last parameter produced the most interesting exchange of the session. One delegation pointed to the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Agreement (the High Seas Treaty) as a possible model, and ATLAC discussions also raised the possibility of inviting the IADC and the Working Group on Space Resources to future meetings so that lunar coordination does not develop in isolation from adjacent regimes. Progress remains slow, constrained by the time available to the Committee as much as by substance. Nonetheless, the direction is instructive as to the importance now placed on data sharing. Lunar governance is being built to address information and coordination problems first, with binding obligations, if they come at all, a good way further down the road.
Space-based nuclear power sources and nuclear reactors
Nuclear power sources sit at the earliest point on the same spectrum as lunar activities, and the contrast between the two is instructive. Ahead of COPUOS, on 9 June, UNOOSA co-ran a Joint Workshop between the Science and Technical Subcommittee’s Working Group on the Use of Nuclear Power Sources (NPS) in Outer Space and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Space and nuclear experts set out national and regional perspectives, and, tellingly, the discussion stayed technical and scientific rather than moving into governance territory. Where lunar activities already have Member States wrestling with what a coordination mechanism should look like, NPS discussions are still at the stage of establishing what States are doing and considering, before governance questions can be meaningfully put.
The governance groundwork is not entirely absent. Panellists referred to the 1992 UN General Assembly Principles Relevant to the Use of Nuclear Power Sources in Outer Space and the IAEA Safety Framework for Nuclear Power Source Applications in Outer Space, jointly developed with COPUOS’s own Scientific and Technical Subcommittee in 2009. Both instruments are non-binding, which puts them in the same category as the lunar mechanism under discussion in ATLAC. This, though, represents a starting point for law and policy, not a settled one. Whether they remain fit for purpose as NPS use expands is a question the Committee has yet to fully engage with.
In the meantime, this governance gap is being filled from outside the Committee. The Lunar Policy Platform (LPP) is currently collating stakeholder views on NPS policy challenges, with a report due in autumn 2026. That a non-governmental platform is doing this work in parallel with, rather than after, the intergovernmental process is worth noting. It is precisely the kind of informal information gathering that, on the lunar side, feeds into mechanisms like ATLAC once the technical picture matures. NPS is simply earlier in that same process.
Industry’s place in the chain
Everything above describes information flowing between States and the Committee. Industry sits outside that formal channel, since COPUOS is a forum of Member States and Permanent Observers. Any space industry presence is typically as delegation experts or side-event panellists rather than as parties in their own right. That structural position looks like exclusion. In practice, it makes industry one of the more important sources feeding the same pipeline described above. Technical input from delegations strengthens both national implementation and the international discussions that eventually shape instruments like the lunar mechanism or the NPS Principles.
The clearest opportunity sits with the voluntary instruments already in force. The Long-Term Sustainability Guidelines and the Space Debris Mitigation Guidelines are non-binding, which means industry itself can choose how far to build them into risk management and mission planning, whether or not a national regulator asks it to. What matters from a governance perspective is what happens next. Implementing a voluntary guideline and then reporting how it went, back through a delegation or a Permanent Observer, is exactly the kind of information sharing that the treaties formally require of States, and ATLAC is trying to build from scratch for the Moon. Industry doing this now, particularly on lunar activities while ATLAC’s mechanism is still being shaped, is a way of feeding practice into a process before it hardens rather than after.
Conclusion
Taken individually, the four COPUOS sessions on lunar coordination, nuclear power, treaty interpretation and industry input might look like little progress has been made. Viewed collectively and read through the lens of information sharing, they show something more useful. The obligation is settled, and it is functioning (if not fully) for registration and radio frequencies. It is being actively constructed, parameter by parameter, for the Moon. It is barely at the technical starting line for nuclear power sources. And it depends, more than the formal architecture likes to admit, on industry choosing to feed practice back up a chain it does not formally sit within.
That unevenness is not a failure of COPUOS, but it is an honest picture of where international space law currently stands on this issue. It is further along than sceptics assume in some places, and considerably earlier than optimists assume in others. The liquidity crisis and the wider fracturing of geopolitical consensus make this harder, not easier, since they weaken the very Secretariat capacity that turns technical exchange into binding text. That is precisely why the informal channels, ATLAC’s groundwork, the Lunar Policy Platform’s stakeholder work, industry’s own reporting back through delegations, matter more now than they would in calmer times. They are not a substitute for the treaty framework, but, at present, they may be the only thing keeping pace with it.
The Committee’s next scheduled activity, the 64th session of the Scientific and Technical Subcommittee in February 2027, will be the first real test of whether this session’s groundwork on lunar activities and nuclear power sources converts into anything more concrete. Whether it does will depend less on Vienna than on how many of the stakeholders are willing to do their part of the information-sharing work before they are asked to.
Please Note: This is a Commercial Profile
