ABSTRACT
From the Second World War onwards, US foreign and defence policy bureaucracies along with think-tanks and members of the national security community have conceptualized US state identity through the prism of national security and of a global strategy. Among US national security elites, Outer Space1 is now considered the next battlefield, if not the ultimate sphere of confrontation. Geopolitics and diplomacy of Outer Space are now commonplace, and astropolitics has emerged as a genuine geopolitical discourse on Outer Space. As a result, those who have delved into this discourse have done it out of fear (the partisans of a ban on Space weapons), acceptance or resignation to Space weaponization (the hard-line realists thinkers and analysts), or, more frightfully, in an aggressive advocacy of Space warfare strategy and technology (the apologists of space weaponization). Behind this last group looms the still heavily influential military-industrial complex and more specifically the aerospace industry. Among these astropolitical discourses, a trend known as “Astropolitik”,2 a Realpolitik tradition applied to the politics and policy of Space, has risen to celebrate the power politics of Space. It consists in those who accept Space weaponization as inevitable and those who embrace it as a strategic opportunity for the US to seize control of Space.
