The European Union is preparing to release the EU Space Act later in 2025, which will establish new regulations and requirements for space companies providing services within its dominion.

It's part of a tentative global shift away from voluntary regulations (that is, guidelines with no legal penalties for breaking them) toward more formal, binding obligations intended to protect the space industry and space itself from irresponsible actors.

The rules themselves are closely guarded while they work on them, but if they're anything like previous EU-wide regulations, for instance the GDPR, they will be wide-ranging and complex. Fortunately, Dr Michael Gleason at Aerospace's Center for Space Policy and Strategy has a preemptive analysis that will help anyone get a grip on the incoming policies.

As he writes in The Space Review:

The EU Space Act’s imposition of more binding regulations across a broad spectrum of space activity, with potentially significant penalties for non-compliance, will rebalance the scale and make hard law options previously considered untenable more available to governments. While voluntary constraints will continue to be important, the EU Space Act will increase the range of plausible solutions for addressing space safety and operational sustainability challenges.

Even if the EU Space Act does not include every measure identified in the analysis of the source documents and senior leader statements above, just the fact that the EU Space Act establishes some binding measures regarding collision avoidance, information sharing, cybersecurity, and other space activities will break with past reluctance to go down that path and establish a new model.

Expect a fuller and more detailed analysis by CSPS and the rest of the global space enterprise whenever the regulations are published for more general discussion.