A sincere thank you to Marieluna Frank for joining ASTRA Bonn on 30 April 2026 for her lecture “Private Actors in Orbit: Structural Power in the Commanding Heights of Space”.

The talk took on one of the most repeated assumptions of contemporary space discourse, namely that “NewSpace” marks a genuine break from the past, a shift from established primes to a new generation of commercial newcomers. Drawing on a network analysis of actors and their relations in form of shared membership and sponsorship across the space sector, Marieluna showed how structural and infrastructural power is actually distributed in orbit today. The picture that emerges is more continuous than the NewSpace label suggests. Established actors continue to occupy central positions in the network, even as new entrants attract the lion’s share of public attention.
The discussion that followed picked up these threads with questions on what this continuity means for state dependencies, regulatory leverage, and the geopolitics of orbital infrastructure.

Thank you, Marieluna, for your support and opening the kind of discourse ASTRA Bonn sets out to foster, as the first external speaker of our summer semester programme.