Executive Summary

This article examines the ongoing transformation in Arab countries space policy, tracing the region’s gradual shift from a consumer of commercial satellite services to an active participant in the broader governance architecture of orbital geopolitics. As the space domain grows more contested—shaped by competition over cislunar infrastructure, future resource extraction regimes, and the fragmentation of once-shared international norms—Arab states have turned to space diplomacy as a calculated instrument of strategic hedging, though the depth and practical consequences of this engagement vary considerably from one state to the next.

The analysis proceeds along four principal lines of inquiry. The first concerns the legal frontier: how regional actors are positioning themselves between the U.S.-led Artemis Accords and the Sino-Russian International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) in ways intended to preserve leverage over the norms emerging to govern extraterrestrial activity. The second addresses the dual-use dilemma, examining the structural tension between the economic value of space infrastructure and the military vulnerabilities that dependency on that same infrastructure creates. The third evaluates the institutionalization of regional space diplomacy, asking whether bodies such as the Arab Union for Astronomy and Space Sciences (AUASS) can function as meaningful platforms for policy coordination rather than as venues for scientific exchange alone. The fourth examines the pathway from strategic intent to operational capability, identifying the investments and institutional developments that would be required to convert the region’s hedging posture into durable strategic influence.

The article’s central contention is that Middle Eastern orbital diplomacy represents a rational, if uneven, effort to secure a recognized presence in a domain where foundational rules remain unsettled. The four lines of inquiry together build toward this argument while also testing its limits, attending to the region’s internal rivalries, the asymmetry between state-level and institutional-level ILRS engagement, and the persistent gap between diplomatic positioning and operational capacity.

Introduction

The space domain has moved well beyond the cooperative scientific enterprise that characterized the post-Cold War decades. What has emerged in its place is a contested operational environment in which national military and economic strategies are increasingly inseparable from the ability to project influence in orbit and, prospectively, across cislunar space [1]. The drivers of this shift are partly technological—declining launch costs, the proliferation of commercial actors, and advances in satellite miniaturization—but they are also deeply political. The prospect of sustained human presence on the Moon, and the resource extraction and norm-setting power that would accompany it, has made cislunar space a domain of acute strategic interest for states that were, until recently, peripheral to the space conversation [1].

The Middle East is among the regions undergoing the most visible recalibration of its relationship to space power. Nations such as the UAE have moved from satellite procurement clients into recognized participants in global space dynamics, deploying independent interplanetary missions and cultivating space as a vehicle for national branding and economic diversification [2]. The broader regional pattern is one of accelerating, if uneven, development: a vanguard of states with genuine programmatic capabilities leading a wider regional movement whose ambitions are increasingly backed by institutional investment and political will.

The scale and pace of this transformation warrants emphasis. The UAE has committed over $800 million through its National Space Fund and earmarked more than $12 billion for space sector development over the coming decade, while the Mars 2117 program signals a generational strategic horizon [10]. Saudi Arabia has allocated $2.1 billion to its space program under Vision 2030 and is targeting a further $2 billion commercial boost by 2030 through the Saudi Space Accelerator Program, overseen by a Supreme Space Council chaired by the Crown Prince [10]. Egypt is constructing a dedicated Space City comprising 23 purpose-built facilities. In December 2025, a UAE-led team successfully launched Arab 813—the first jointly designed Arab Earth-observation satellite—aboard a Chinese Lijian-1 rocket from China, with engineers contributing from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Sudan, Kuwait, Oman, and Lebanon [10]. The choice of a Chinese launch vehicle for a nominally pan-Arab cooperative project underscores the layered nature of Arab space partnerships: Artemis accession and Chinese launch services are not mutually exclusive. Euroconsult projects the value of the Middle East space economy will reach $75 billion by 2032, with government space expenditure growing from $1 billion in 2013 to a projected $2.7 billion by 2032 [15]. And the number of Arab states party to the Artemis Accords grew from three in 2022 to seven by end of April 2026 [3]. Taken together, these indicators describe a region whose space ambitions are transitioning from rhetorical commitment to operational reality.

The Artemis Accords, launched by NASA and the U.S. Department of State in 2020, offer the clearest institutional site for examining this engagement. Structured as a non-binding framework governing civilian space exploration, the Accords establish principles for transparency, interoperability, and the responsible use of space resources without carrying the force of treaty obligations or extending to national security activities [3]. Seven Middle Eastern states had signed by the end of April 2026: the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Israel, Jordan (April 23, 2026), and Morocco (April 29, 2026)—with Jordan becoming the 63rd global signatory and Morocco the 64th, in a ceremony held bilaterally in Rabat rather than at NASA headquarters, a distinction that underscores the diplomatic weight Morocco carries in its relationship with Washington [3]. The non-binding character of the Accords is analytically significant: it lowers the cost of participation while limiting the constraining power these commitments exercise over state behavior in more adversarial scenarios.

Running in parallel is a more tentative regional engagement with the Sino-Russian ILRS partnership. Martin (2024) documents that China has secured memorandums of understanding with universities and research institutes in the UAE and Egypt, but has faced persistent difficulty attracting formal government-level commitments from Arab states, the majority of which have opted for Artemis accession rather than ILRS affiliation [4]. The asymmetry between these two modes of engagement—state-level with the United States, institutional with China—runs through the argument of this article and substantially complicates any reading of the region as a cohesive strategic actor playing the two blocs against each other. The article proceeds as follows: Section 1 examines the legal and normative dimensions of the Artemis/ILRS polarization and the Middle East’s positioning within it. Section 2 analyzes the dual-use dilemma confronting Arab space programs. Section 3 assesses the institutionalization of regional space diplomacy through multilateral frameworks. Section 4 charts the pathway from strategic intent to operational capability and identifies the cooperative opportunities that lie ahead. A methodological note and conclusion follow.

1. The Legal Frontier: Norm Competition and the Fragmentation of Space Governance

The collapse of a unified multilateral framework for space governance did not happen overnight. Moltz (2019) traces the long erosion of the cooperative impulses that governed the space age through the Cold War period and into the 1990s, showing how the combination of commercial pressures, renewed great power rivalry, and the ambiguities baked into the 1967 Outer Space Treaty produced a governance vacuum that neither the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) nor any successor body has managed to fill [5]. What has emerged instead are two competing institutional architectures—the Artemis Accords and the ILRS—each reflecting the strategic preferences of its architects and each seeking to shape the norms governing access, resource extraction, and conduct in lunar and cislunar environments before those norms are locked in [5].

The economic stakes animating this competition are substantial. Osborne and Urwick (2026) document that the Moon’s sub-surface is understood to contain significant deposits of water ice, helium-3, platinum group metals, and other materials essential for both deep-space logistics and next-generation energy technologies, and that the international legal framework governing their extraction remains, in their assessment, inadequate and contested [6]. For Middle Eastern states, this resource dimension carries particular resonance: the long-term trajectory of regional economies toward post-hydrocarbon diversification creates a structural interest in securing access to future extraterrestrial resource regimes before participation conditions are set by others. Signing the Artemis Accords is, in part, an act of early positioning in a governance process whose economic consequences may not materialize for decades but whose normative architecture is being assembled now [6]. MacDonald (2026) places this within a broader argument that the construction of sustained lunar infrastructure—not the short-duration flags-and-footprints model of Apollo—is the defining strategic objective of the current phase of lunar exploration, one whose winners will be determined as much by governance engagement as by launch capacity [7].

The security dimension of cislunar space adds further urgency to regional calculations. Pennington (2026) argues that space beyond geostationary orbit has become a strategically significant domain in its own right, where the ability to operate persistently in cislunar space confers advantages in surveillance, access denial, and the positioning of assets that would be difficult to contest once established [1]. Lynch et al. (2025) situate this within the wider pattern of great power competition, in which space capabilities have migrated from support functions to integral components of military operations, making the orbits a domain where deterrence and coercion are actively practiced rather than merely theorized [8]. Against this backdrop, Arab states’ maintenance of open channels with the ILRS while deepening Artemis engagement is less a genuine equidistance than a hedge against the risk that exclusive alignment with one bloc might constrain future optionality—whether in technology access, operational partnerships, or normative influence [4].

2. The Dual-Use Dilemma: Economic Dependency and Military Exposure

Satellites and space infrastructure occupy an uncomfortable position in national security planning: they are simultaneously indispensable to civilian economic activity and among the most exposed assets in any serious military conflict. This structural condition, which the literature labels the dual-use dilemma, is not unique to the Middle East, but the region’s combination of hydrocarbon-dependent economies undergoing accelerated diversification and a security environment marked by active armed conflicts makes the tension particularly acute [8].

The economic case for space investment in the Gulf is well established in regional strategic planning documents and needs only brief elaboration here. Earth observation capabilities underpin agricultural planning, water resource management, and climate monitoring across environments where margins for error are slim. Telecommunications satellites anchor financial services, logistics networks, and the digital infrastructure that Vision-type diversification programs depend on. MacDonald’s (2026) observation that the gradual extension of human operational footprints into cislunar space will generate a new commercial economy—one in which early participants shape the terms of access and resource rights—adds a longer time horizon to this calculus, though one whose returns remain speculative [7]. What is less speculative is the dependency side of the equation: states that rely heavily on external satellite services for critical infrastructure have limited ability to guarantee continuity of those services when political relationships with provider nations deteriorate.

The military dimensions are, if anything, starker. The 2025 Space Threat Assessment documents the steady expansion of counterspace capabilities across China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, with particular attention to the widespread jamming and spoofing of GPS signals in and around active conflict zones—a phenomenon directly relevant to a region where several of these conflicts are concentrated [9]. The same report traces the growing use of satellite rendezvous and proximity operations as instruments of coercion, and the integration of cyberattacks into counterspace strategies in ways that blur the line between espionage and sabotage [9]. For states whose conventional military capabilities rely heavily on commercial and partner-nation satellite services, the vulnerability this creates is significant and not readily addressed through diplomatic engagement alone.

The honest implication of this analysis is one that regional boosters of Arab space diplomacy tend to elide: participating in governance frameworks is not the same as acquiring resilience. The majority of Arab Artemis signatories have no indigenous launch capability, limited satellite manufacturing capacity, and minimal space situational awareness infrastructure. Their ability to “diversify strategic dependencies” through dual-track engagement with Artemis and ILRS is constrained by the fact that their actual operational dependencies run almost entirely through Western infrastructure. Diplomatic positioning and operational autonomy are not the same thing, and conflating them produces an inflated account of what space diplomacy can deliver.

3. Institutionalizing Regional Space Diplomacy: Potential and Structural Limits

The Arab Space Coordination Group and the Arab Union for Astronomy and Space Sciences are regularly cited in regional policy discourse as evidence that Arab states are developing a collective approach to space governance that can amplify their individual influence in multilateral settings [10]. The logic is familiar from other domains: states that are too small or technologically limited to negotiate effectively on their own can gain leverage by coordinating positions through regional institutions. Applied to space, the argument holds that a unified Arab bloc could influence the terms of lunar resource governance, the design of interoperability standards, or the allocation of orbital slots in ways that no individual Arab state could achieve independently.

There is something to this, but rather less than the rhetoric surrounding these institutions typically suggests. AUASS is, at its core, a scientific and astronomical organization; its mandate centers on advancing research in astronomy and space science across Arab member states, not on coordinating defense policy or formulating common positions in treaty negotiations [11]. The proceedings of its fourteenth conference, held in Sharjah in 2023, confirm that the body’s primary output is scientific: papers on stellar spectroscopy, atmospheric monitoring, and space instrumentation, produced by a community of researchers who operate largely independently of the diplomatic considerations that would make AUASS an effective vehicle for strategic coordination [11]. Characterizing its functions as Track II diplomacy in the security sense of that term—as a channel for managing strategic competition and building confidence measures—overstates the institution’s design and its actual operations, even if the convening of scientists and officials from politically divided states produces some incidental diplomatic value [12].

The structural constraints on Arab collective action in space are, in any case, more fundamental than institutional design. The broader regional picture, however, reveals that Arab space engagement takes forms that extend well beyond the Gulf programs most commonly cited in policy commentary, and that these diverse expressions of space ambition carry their own institutional and diplomatic weight. Jordan offers a particularly instructive example. Against the backdrop of limited financial resources, the Jordan Space Research Initiative has developed an analog research program in Wadi Rum—a desert valley whose topographical and geological resemblance to the Martian surface has attracted international scientific attention for decades. PETRA-1, conducted in 2024, established Jordan’s first analog mission framework; PETRA-2, held in October 2025 as part of the World’s Biggest Analog—a coordinated global simulation spanning sixteen habitats across multiple continents—featured the first all-Arab female analog crew, representing Jordan and Palestine [13]. The significance of this program received formal international recognition when NASA, in its announcement welcoming Jordan as the 63rd Artemis signatory, explicitly cited JSRI’s PETRA missions as evidence of Jordan’s growing space capabilities and as a foundation for future cooperation under the Artemis framework [3]. This direct institutional acknowledgment of Jordan’s ground-based research program by NASA is precisely the kind of concrete link between bottom-up capacity-building and top-down norm engagement that the hedging thesis predicts but rarely documents. What is additionally notable about the JSRI model is its institutional design: community engagement with Wadi Rum’s Bedouin population is built directly into the mission architecture—each mission is hosted in collaboration with local Bedouin camp owners—creating a template for space research that generates sustainable local benefit rather than extracting scientific value from a landscape in isolation [13].

Egypt’s contribution to the regional space ecosystem is distinct in character and operates across multiple scales simultaneously. With thirteen satellites launched between 1998 and 2024—including NEXSAT-1 in February 2024 and a series of Earth observation platforms for agricultural monitoring and national security applications—Egypt has accumulated the most extensive Arab satellite operational record outside the Gulf [14]. Its decision to host the headquarters of the African Space Agency, inaugurated at Egypt Space City in Cairo in April 2025, positions it as a node connecting Arab and African space governance rather than operating within either system alone [14]. The Assembly, Integration and Testing Centre handed over by China in 2024 adds a manufacturing dimension that most Arab programs currently lack. Further west, Algeria’s six-satellite constellation under ASAL, Morocco’s high-resolution Mohammed VI reconnaissance platforms, and Qatar’s exoplanet survey program—whose wide-angle camera array is hosted in New Mexico but funded and directed by Qatari institutions, with ten confirmed exoplanet discoveries to date—represent further evidence that Arab space engagement is geographically and functionally distributed in ways that aggregate statistics about Gulf investment tend to obscure [10]. What these programs share is not a common capability tier but a common orientation: each has identified a domain in which national geography, scientific capacity, or strategic interest creates a comparative advantage, and has organized its space engagement around that niche rather than attempting to replicate the full-spectrum ambitions of the Gulf leaders. This niche-based model of space engagement is, in its own way, a form of the strategic hedging that this article has described at the state level—applied now at the level of program design.

4. Pathways Forward: From Strategic Intent to Operational Capability

The preceding analysis has proceeded on the assumption that the strategic hedging thesis—the proposition that Middle Eastern states are deliberately positioning themselves between competing great power frameworks to maximize leverage—captures something real about regional behavior. That assumption holds, and the investment trajectories described in this article’s introduction suggest it will become more consequential over time. The more important question, however, is not whether the intent is genuine but what conditions would need to be met for it to translate into durable strategic influence. Strategic hedging, as theorized in the international relations literature on middle powers, implies that the hedging state possesses sufficient bargaining power to make its alignment a credible variable in the calculations of the states being hedged against. Developing that bargaining power is the central challenge now facing Arab space programs.

For most Arab states, the current gap between diplomatic positioning and operational capacity is real and should be acknowledged clearly—not as a verdict on the region’s potential, but as an accurate diagnosis of where investment and institution-building are most urgently needed. Satellite constellations are predominantly procured externally, launch services contracted through foreign providers, and military space capabilities integrated into partner-nation architectures. The institutional-level ILRS agreements documented by Martin (2024) are a starting point, not an arrival [4]. Closing the gap will require sustained investment in indigenous manufacturing capacity, domestic launch infrastructure, and the kind of deep STEM pipeline that the UAE’s educational programs—still at an early stage—are beginning to build. The Arab 813 program and the Saudi Space Accelerator are precisely the kind of capability-building investments that, over a decade, could shift the balance between intent and capacity. The hedging posture is most productive when understood not as a substitute for capability development but as the diplomatic framework within which that development can proceed without premature strategic lock-in.

A further dimension of the forward-looking agenda concerns the scope of regional cooperation itself. Iran and Turkey, both of which maintain active and relatively advanced space programs with genuinely independent characteristics, fall outside this article’s analytical frame by design: the study focuses on Arab League member states, and both require separate treatment. Their exclusion does not reflect a judgment about their irrelevance—Iran’s indigenous launch capability and Turkey’s growing satellite industry are plainly significant—but it does point toward a longer-term question: whether a broader Middle Eastern framework for space cooperation, extending beyond the Arab League, could eventually emerge as a more effective vehicle for collective norm-setting than any sub-regional grouping operating alone.

Conclusion

The Middle East’s growing engagement with orbital governance is a genuine development whose strategic significance should neither be overstated nor dismissed. Several Arab states have moved beyond rhetorical commitment to space ambitions and into active participation in the institutional frameworks through which the rules governing cislunar space and lunar resource access are being written. The Artemis Accords, for all their non-binding character, represent a meaningful normative commitment; the UAE’s interplanetary missions are operationally real; and the interest of Arab institutions in maintaining contact with both Western and Chinese space communities reflects a coherent, if asymmetric, form of hedging in an environment of deepening great power rivalry.

What this article has resisted is the temptation to present that engagement as more cohesive, more autonomous, or more strategically consequential than the evidence currently supports. On the legal frontier, Arab normative influence within either governance architecture remains constrained by limited operational footprints—though growing investment is beginning to change this calculus. On the dual-use dilemma, diplomatic participation in Artemis or ILRS frameworks does not by itself reduce military exposure, but it does create the partnership networks through which resilience can be incrementally built. On the institutional dimension, AUASS and the Arab Space Coordination Group are venues for scientific exchange and episodic coordination rather than integrated strategic action—but the Arab 813 satellite demonstrates that such coordination can, under the right conditions, produce operational results. And on the capability dimension, the gap between hedging intent and hedging capacity is real but actively narrowing, driven by the investment trajectories that several Arab states have now committed to sustaining.

The cooperative dimension of this trajectory deserves particular attention as a site of genuine opportunity. The Arab 813 program offers a template for joint technical development that bypasses the political complications of defence cooperation while delivering tangible capability. The Arab Space Coordination Group’s mandate to harmonise regulations and adopt unified positions at international forums could, if adequately resourced, evolve into a more substantive collective bargaining mechanism over time. And the convergence of Arab states around the Artemis framework—despite their different bilateral relationships with Washington—suggests a degree of normative consensus that could anchor a more coherent regional voice in the governance negotiations ahead. The foundational rules of the extraterrestrial domain are still being written. The Arab world has both the interest and, increasingly, the means to help write them.

Zaid Aldahamsheh – Graduated in International Relations and Strategic Studies

Methodological Note

This article employs a qualitative comparative framework, drawing on open-source primary materials—treaty texts, official agency documents, institutional reports, and government policy statements—alongside peer-reviewed academic and policy-institute literature. The principal theoretical frame is the strategic hedging literature in international relations, understood as the behavior of states that seek to reduce exposure to great power pressure by diversifying alignments across competing frameworks, supplemented by institutionalist theory applied to the norm-diffusion functions of multilateral organizations. Units of analysis are individual Arab League member states and their participation in the Artemis Accords and ILRS frameworks. Iran and Turkey are excluded by design: both are non-Arab actors whose space policies operate on different logics and require separate analytical treatment. The analysis is descriptive and interpretive rather than predictive, and the rapid pace of change in the space domain means empirical conditions may have shifted between the time of writing and the time of reading.

References

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