“Space is not a technical issue anymore, it is a peace and security issue, and an economic issue…”
Amal Mudallali remembers being fascinated by space for as long as she can remember. When she was a child in the early 1970s, she first heard the seed of skepticism that would later grow into a lifelong fascination. “They didn’t really land on the moon,” she recalls her grandmother saying, “It was just a mountain somewhere.” At the time, she wasn’t sure what to believe, but the mystery stayed with her. “That always haunted me,” she said. “Did they land on the moon or not?”
Decades later, that same curiosity would ignite a career dedicated to one of the most overlooked frontiers in global governance: space. That passion had its seed in a place not necessarily directly associated with space, at the United Nations. That personal interest eventually found professional grounding when she arrived at the United Nations, wherwe she became Lebanon’s U.N. ambassador in New York in 2017. Mudallali quickly saw the potential the U.N. had to bring countries together to talk about cooperation on the next important frontier humanity will develop.
Diplomats in New York, whose work tend to focus on the world’s biggest crises and is the home of the Security Council and the General Assembly, may not think and talk about space regularly, as the U.N.’s committee for the Peaceful Use of Outer Space’s (COPUOS) headquarter is in Vienna, Austria. Still, Muddallali saw a responsibility for the General Assembly and even to some extent the Security Council to start thinking about the issue in those terms.
“I saw the problem right away,” she said. “Nobody talks about space. It’s like, if you bring up the topic, people look at you like you’re from outer space yourself.” Muddalali notes that Geneva has long dealt with space-related issues, but New York tends to neglect it. “I thought it is time to start the conversation in NY because space is not a technical issue anymore,” she said. “It is a peace and security issue, and an economic issue, and space has become a warfighting domain with great power competition in space and militarization of space.”
In 2022, frustrated by the absence of space affairs from multilateral dialogue in the Big Apple, she organized her first space-focused event at the U.N.. It was an ambitious undertaking, featuring speakers from organizations like NASA, the European Space Agency, and Blue Origin, a private company. The reaction was eye-opening for her.
“Ambassadors would say to me, ‘Are you serious? We’re in the middle of the Ukraine war, and you want to talk about space?” she said. “But when they came and listened, their reaction was unanimous: ‘We had no idea.’”
While space has come up more often in recent years in New York and was mentioned in the Pact of the Future adopted in 2024, it is still relatively marginal compared to the rest of the workload in New York City. Mudallali left the U.N. in late 2022 to work as a consultant in Washington, D.C., but her passion for everything space followed her. She now writes a newsletter about space, SpaceFlash, teaches a class on space policy at Princeton University, and is actively involved in related discussions in the American capital.
With Donald Trump back in the White House and businessman Elon Musk playing a key role in the administration — the CEO of the world’s largest space company– the field is likely to undergo a seismic shift in the years to come. In geopolitics, space can be a contentious place where big powers fight for influence, and this dynamic is reflected in some U.N. platforms. However, there is more to it. While the U.N.’s priority on space is its peaceful use, there are several issues that the organization works on, mostly in the shadow that helps making space more accessible for all through the U.N. Office of Space Affairs (UNOOSA) – a relatively unknown and small office whose reach go beyond the skies, the stars and the surface of the earth.
Bringing space back to earth, for everyone
Located in Vienna’s diplomatic district, far from the fanfare of Geneva’s political showdowns, UNOOSA is something of a hidden gem—“it’s probably the U.N.’s best-kept secret,” Aarti Holla-Maini, UNOOSA’s director since 2023, told Envoy. Established in 1957 as an expert unit, UNOOSA has become the beating heart of the U.N.’s efforts to ensure that space remains peaceful, safe, and accessible to all.
As the operational body of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), UNOOSA’s mandate ranges from satellite counts to asteroid monitoring and managing moon travel. In a world where geopolitical divides are widening, COPUOS continues to adopt decisions by consensus, offering a stark contrast to gridlocked arms control. “Space cooperation is bridging geopolitical divides,” Holla-Maini said. “It’s one of the last places where everyone—big spacefaring nations and small developing countries—are still talking and listening to one another.”
That inclusivity is central to UNOOSA’s mandate. “We are a gateway between the millions of dollars of investment that have gone into space technologies by developed nations and countries that don’t have a role. We facilitate their access to space.” This means, for example, connecting governments to resources they didn’t even know existed.
“We told [developing countries] that the Norwegian space agency had spent a lot of money on very high-resolution imagery and made it available for free. They had no idea it was there,” Holla-Maini said.
The same holds true for planetary safety. “There was an asteroid with a 3% chance of impacting Earth. How many countries are looking at this? How many have the capabilities,” Holla-Maini added. UNOOSA, through the International Asteroid Warning Network, helped ensure that all countries, not just the well-equipped ones, can prepare. While many rich countries have dedicated space agencies monitoring space activities, it’s not a luxury afforded to all. UNOOSA tries to bridge that gap.
An emerging concern is space traffic coordination and management. “It’s a burning need to ensure space safety,” Hola-Maini said, citing the rapidly growing number of satellites in orbit. Space isn’t just a geopolitical theater anymore; it’s also a growing environmental and ethical concern, and one that Holla-Maini and her team focus on regularly. “Space sustainability is an obvious one,” she said. With the number of satellites in space expanding exponentially, so is the debris coming from them and their launch, increasing the risk of collision and atmospheric hazard. “There’s the impact of debris burning up, the number of metallic particles in the air. [Astronomers] never had to be concerned with satellites before, but now they do.”
As space becomes more commercialized, with over 200 lunar startups in Japan alone, for example, UNOOSA is working to ensure its guidelines are relevant to both governments and industry. “We believe that we need to convene [industry] smartly in order to advise, but also to inform the work of the committee,” Holla-Maini, who herself comes from the private sector, said. “That’s what we did last year when we organized the first-ever UN Conference on sustainable lunar activities.”
While a lot can change this year in the field of space, the moment UNOOSA believes will be truly transformational is 2027, when member states will meet for UNISPACE IV, a meeting aimed at revisiting the Outer Space Treaty, which will then turn 60. At the conference, countries will have the opportunity to discuss the long-term sustainability of outer space activities, space resources, and sustainable lunar activities. The office hopes 2027 will be remembered the way 1967 is—with the Outer Space Treaty—as a catalytic year. “We hope that member states will look back on 2027 like today we look back on 1967.”
For now, the office is focused on holding that delicate balance, on building trust between governments while meaningfully engaging private companies and innovators. That means answering hard new questions—like whether it’s appropriate to carry human remains to the Moon, a question UNOOSA had to address recently, as well as technical ones, like how to calculate a launch hazard zone.
“Space is rising up the international agenda,” Holla-Maini said. “It’s a critical national infrastructure. It’s an enabler.” And for UNOOSA, this is its moment to rise too—quietly, consensually, and ambitiously.
“In the end, space is not about stars and rockets. It’s about people. And we need to protect it for all of us,” she said.
About The Author
