Most space regulation that matters to operators is hard law: a license you must hold, a power limit you must respect, a band you may or may not use. But a growing share of what governs behavior in orbit is soft law, the norms, guidelines, and codes of responsible conduct negotiated in international forums and then voluntarily adopted. A Department of State notice published on February 6, 2026 (Public Notice 12941) offers a rare public window into how that soft law gets made, and who gets to shape it. The Department 'seeks private sector participation in a series of domestic and international events promoting the safe and responsible exploration and use of outer space,' and it explicitly invites participants to 'serve as private sector advisors to U.S. delegations.'
That phrase is the whole story. When the United States goes to an international workshop, symposium, or multilateral meeting to negotiate norms for spaceflight safety and responsible behavior, it does not send only diplomats. It sends, or wants to send, delegations informed by the companies that actually operate satellites, launch vehicles, and on-orbit systems, and by the academics who study the orbital environment. The notice frames this as helping the Department fulfill its responsibilities under the 2020 National Space Policy and align with two executive orders it names directly: Executive Order 14335, 'Enabling Competition in the Commercial Space Industry,' and Executive Order 14369, 'Ensuring American Space Superiority.'
Why norms, and not just treaties
The foundational treaties of space law, the Outer Space Treaty and its companions, were written in an era of two superpowers and a handful of government missions. They establish broad principles, non-appropriation of celestial bodies, state responsibility for national activities, liability for damage, but they say little about the granular questions that now dominate orbit: how close one operator's satellite may maneuver to another's, what notification you owe before a conjunction, how to behave during rendezvous and proximity operations, what constitutes responsible disposal at end of life. Renegotiating treaties to answer those questions is slow to the point of impossibility, because treaties require ratification and bind sovereigns.
So the practical action has moved to norms of responsible behavior: shared expectations that states and operators agree to follow without the formality of a binding treaty. These are hammered out in exactly the 'workshops, meetings, symposia, and other international events' the State notice references. Because they are voluntary and consensus-driven, the substance is shaped enormously by who is in the room and how technically informed the arguments are. A delegation that can speak fluently about real maneuver capabilities, real conjunction-assessment data, and real operational constraints carries more weight than one trading abstractions. That is why the Department wants commercial operators advising it: the people who fly the hardware know where a proposed norm would help, where it would be unworkable, and where it would quietly advantage one architecture over another.
What is in it for the companies, and the risk
For a commercial space company, a seat advising a US delegation is influence at the source. The norms negotiated today, on safety, debris mitigation behavior, transparency, and responsible operations, will eventually harden into the expectations that license conditions, insurance requirements, and customer contracts reference. An operator that helped shape a norm to fit its operational reality is better positioned than one that inherits a rule written without its input. The notice's alignment with the competition executive order is telling: the policy posture is that a thriving US commercial space industry is itself a national-security and economic asset, and bringing industry into norms diplomacy serves that posture by ensuring American commercial practice helps define the international baseline.
There is a tension worth naming. Norms shaped by the largest, most established operators can entrench their advantages, setting expectations that newer or smaller entrants find costly to meet. A responsible-behavior standard calibrated to the capabilities of a sophisticated operator can become a barrier for a startup, even when adopted in good faith. The breadth of the State Department's invitation, extending to 'academia and other non-governmental organizations' alongside industry, is partly a hedge against that capture, ensuring the advisory pool is not only the incumbents whose interests align with stricter, costlier baselines.
The notice is procedurally a request, not a rule. It is the State Department building a bench of private-sector advisors it can draw on as it prepares for a series of events. But its significance for anyone tracking space governance is that it makes visible a process that usually happens out of sight. The hard-law dockets at the FCC and FAA get attention because they produce enforceable obligations. The soft-law diplomacy the State Department conducts produces something subtler but arguably more durable: the shared understanding of what responsible operation in orbit means, which then propagates into national rules, license conditions, and commercial practice across many jurisdictions at once.
For operators, the actionable point is that influence over space rules is not confined to filing comments in agency dockets. It also runs through who advises the US delegations that negotiate international norms, and the State Department has just opened that channel. The companies that take the invitation seriously will help write the behavioral baseline for an increasingly crowded orbit; the ones that ignore it will live with whatever baseline emerges. As traffic in low Earth orbit climbs and proximity operations become routine, the difference between shaping the norm and inheriting it is not academic, it is operational.