Space is decided before it is conquered. Political thinking about space was born almost at the same time as spaceflight itself: pleas for astronautics as an international undertaking, the birth of space law, strategic analyses of orbit, often written in the heat of the moment, when everything remained open.
Then come the critical readings: the moral responsibility of the engineers, the economics and industry of the programmes, the geopolitics of rivalry and cooperation, the reflections of the actors themselves turned thinkers of their own enterprise.
A theme for those who want to understand not how one flies, but why one decides to fly, and who pays.