From America’s COSMIC alliance to China’s Five-Year Plan: how the US, UK, India, Japan, the EU and China are racing to service, assemble and manufacture in orbit
In the first part of this story we traced ISAM back to a 1974 essay by Gerard O’Neill and a 1967 question about a candle burning in space, and mapped the three pillars — servicing, assembly, manufacturing — behind a market now estimated at $8–13 billion by 2030. Here, we turn to the countries actually racing to build it.
USA Space Superhighway: COSMIC
No country has invested more deliberately than the United States. The White House has published a National ISAM Strategy and Implementation Plan, directing federal agencies towards six shared goals, backed by the Pentagon’s Commercial Space Integration Strategy, designed to guarantee access to ISAM resources even in conflict.
The US established COSMIC, the Consortium for Space Mobility and ISAM Capabilities: over 1,200 experts from more than 250 organisations spanning federal agencies, universities and companies. The initiative’s documentary, COSMIC Crossroads, states the goal without ambiguity: the US is building its “Space Superhighway”, with a mandate covering low Earth orbit, cislunar space, deep space and planetary surfaces.
United Kingdom: ISAM as sovereign capability
Like other governments, the UK links ISAM to national security — but with an explicit market-share target. The Strategic Defence Review 2025 names it a sovereign capability, and London is aiming for a quarter of the global market by 2030.
In February 2026 the UK Space Agency awarded contracts worth around £845,000 to BioOrbit (pharmaceuticals), Space Forge (semiconductors) and OrbiSky (ZBLAN fibres) for in-orbit manufacturing feasibility studies, plus £600,000 for two demonstration missions. In June 2026, at the 69th UNCOPUOS session, London announced an in-orbit demonstrator programme: the now-formal shift from policy to hardware.
India: economy and defence
India is approaching ISAM along two parallel tracks. On the industrial side, the Indian Space Association (ISpA), together with IIFCL Projects Ltd, has published a report — Enabling the New Space Economy: ISAM as a Pillar of Orbital Sustainability — that identifies ISAM as a strategic foundation for the country’s space economy: an analysis of the most mature international practices — from Hubble’s servicing missions to Northrop Grumman’s MEV life-extension programme — accompanied by proposals on public-private partnerships and financing mechanisms for extending satellite lifetimes and reducing orbital debris.
The topic was also central at India Space Congress 2026, held in New Delhi in mid-June, where industry discussed the steps needed for India to reach its declared goal of a 44-billion-dollar space economy by 2033. On the defence side, General Anil Chauhan, India’s Chief of Defence Staff, told the DefSpace Symposium 2026 that ISAM was a frontier needed to stop India «fighting blind» in space.
Japan, the European Union and China: three routes to orbit
Japan is betting on servicing as the fastest route to operational relevance: Astroscale, the sector’s global symbol, extends satellite life and removes debris; its ELSA-M mission, due in 2027, will demonstrate commercial debris removal at scale.
In Europe, ISAM sits among the strategic capabilities of the Commission’s “Act in Space”, set out in A vision for the European Space Economy (June 2025). The flagship project is the ISOS4I pilot mission, due to launch by 2030, joined by ten countries: Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Luxembourg, Italy, Sweden, Greece, Norway and the Netherlands (Commission communication). Preparing the technological ground are three ESA missions — ClearSpace-1 (debris removal), CAT (capture interfaces) and RISE (commercial GEO servicing) (ESA statement) — and roughly €100 million in Horizon funding across more than twenty projects, including EU-RISE (Airbus) and EROSS SC (Thales Alenia Space, 19 partners). Airbus has also built Metal3D for ESA, a metal printer operating at 1,200°C that can produce radiation shields and structural components in orbit.
China too has placed ISAM within a national policy framework: a CNSA document setting out recommendations for the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030) places servicing, manufacturing and debris removal among strategic sectors, with a national fund for commercial space (State Council text). On concrete projects, China has demonstrated metal 3D printing aboard the Qingzhou cargo craft, and in 2022 the Shijian-21 satellite towed a defunct satellite to a graveyard orbit — a servicing operation in its own right.
A double frontier: technology and geopolitics
ISAM’s dual-use nature makes it impossible to establish, with current tracking capabilities, what a given vehicle can really do: a satellite that removes debris can disable a functioning one; an arm that refuels can neutralise. There are no binding international rules, and near-term consensus looks unlikely.
The entanglement of commercial and military interests deepens the ambiguity. The close relationship between governments and ISAM companies – built through regulation, public contracts and defence-integration strategies – makes these firms appear, in the eyes of geopolitical rivals, as extensions of their respective national governments. China has described US satellite life-extension programmes as part of a broader quest for space superiority; the United States has pointed to Chinese proximity operations as evidence of aggressive intent. Both narratives are built as much for domestic consumption as for outward strategic communication, while companies in the sector remain focused on their own economic sustainability, often ill-equipped to manage the geopolitical sensitivities their own activities generate.
Technology is moving faster than governance
Technology roadmaps are advancing faster than governance frameworks. What is already clear is that the industrial transformation Hans Wuenscher glimpsed in Huntsville in October 1967, and that Gerard O’Neill tried to imagine on an even grander scale in 1974, is now under way, irreversibly. The point is who will write the rules and who will benefit.
There was, in those 1970s years, an optimism that sounds almost naive today. In the same interview in which he was asked about war, Isaac Asimov replied that giving humanity a project big enough to dream in terms of worlds and space would make the very idea of fighting over – in his words – «real estate on earth» simply ridiculous.
It would be good to recover, at least in part, that confidence: in a truly peaceful world, ISAM’s structural ambiguity might resolve in favour of its better half, and space could once again become, as O’Neill and Asimov imagined it, a source of life rather than one more front of war.
For the record: here is what a candle burning in space actually looks like
Want to explore this topic further? Read also: What is ISAM? Inside the race to build factories in orbit
