Introduction

The publication of the European Commission's proposal for a Regulation on the safety, resilience and sustainability of space activities in the Union — COM(2025) 335 final, of June 25, 2025, immediately designated by commentators as the EU Space Act — marks a turning point in the governance of outer space that extends well beyond the internal market rationale invoked in its explanatory memorandum. The EU Space Act is a regulatory instrument conceived in the tradition of the GDPR and the AI Act, designed to impose European standards on a global scale through the leverage of market access. Europe has watched the space economy undergo a structural transformation that renders the regulatory vocabulary of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty — drafted when satellites were few, government-owned and measured in units — increasingly inadequate for a sector in which a single private operator deploys thousands of orbital assets and mega-constellations are reshaping the physical and electromagnetic environment of Low Earth Orbit. While the institutional debate on the proposal at European level is ongoing, the contributions collected in this instant book examine the text and its potential impact and implications considering several complementary disciplinary vantage points and, taken together, offer a critical anatomy of an instrument that is simultaneously ambitious and structurally constrained. Introduction of the editors and postface of Vincenzo Zeno-Zencovich. With contributions from Victoria Anfuso and Giovanni Maria Riccio; Beatrice Ermini; Frans von der Dunk; Rafael Moro Aguilar; Alfonso Giordano; Dario Elia Tosi; Stefania Paladini.