Orbital Sovereignty in Latin America: Regulatory Translation, Sustainability, and Normative Dependence in Regional Space Governance

Abstract

This article examines Latin American space governance through the problem of regulatory translation. It does not ask whether the region participates in outer-space activities, a question that already presupposes the wrong object, but whether participation in international regimes, operational infrastructures, satellite-enabled services, cooperative frameworks and policy instruments is converted into domestic legal, institutional and supervisory capacity. Based on a documentary-comparative matrix built from public sources, including United Nations space-law repositories, Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space documents, national legislation, agency records, Artemis Accords materials, space-economy reports and official policy instruments, the article maps five dimensions of regional governance: institutional density, normative density, operational exposure, international alignment and regulatory translation capacity. The argument resists a linear developmental reading. Latin America is neither outside the space order nor simply delayed in relation to central space powers; it is asymmetrically incorporated into a fragmented regime in which diplomatic alignment, operational dependence and space-enabled economic exposure often advance faster than domestic regulatory consolidation. The article introduces orbital regulatory translation as a middle-range analytical device to identify how global space norms become, or fail to become, national public capacity. It also develops the notion of orbital semi-peripherality as a relational condition in which states increasingly depend on space-based infrastructures while retaining uneven authority to shape the standards, rules and institutional routines that organize them. The conclusion argues that the decisive regional challenge is the transformation of participation into autonomous, sustainable and publicly oriented governance, rather than the mere accumulation of agencies, signatures, satellite programs or cooperation agreements.