Delegates,
For the first time since Sputnik crossed the sky in 1957, the question of who governs outer space is no longer a question for two governments to settle between themselves. The Cold War dynamics where two superpowers, a handful of rockets and a shared fear of mutual escalation led to the formulation of the Outer Space Treaty, has quietly dissolved. Instead, there now stands a crowded, commercial, and increasingly unregulated frontier including numbering of  constellations in the thousands, companies racing to land on the Moon before nations do, and the first serious legal arguments over who owns what is mined from an asteroid no state has ever set foot on.

The treaties that were meant to keep space "the province of all mankind" were written for a world that no longer exists. They did not anticipate a billionaire launching his own rockets. They did not anticipate a nation with no space history becoming a launch power within a decade. They did not anticipate a legal gray zone so wide that a company could, in principle, extract a resource no state is permitted to claim.

And so the old questions have returned, dressed in new clothes. Is this commercialization, or is it merely colonization with better branding? Is a flag still a flag when it's stitched onto a corporate logo instead of a national one? When a satellite falls, who is answerable for it, the company that built it, or the country that let it land to be used for flying?

This committee does not have the privilege of deciding whether commercial space activity will happen. It already has. Your task is harder than that: to determine whether the frameworks built sixty years ago are strong enough to bend without breaking, or whether the silence of the treaties has already become its own kind of policy, one written not by diplomats, but by whoever moves fastest and asks forgiveness later.

As you begin your deliberations, remember that silence is no longer an option. To defend the status quo is to side with the chaotic rush of the market. Your national interests cannot simply stop at your borders, nor even at your atmospheres. For you must decide today, will you draft a code of conduct for a shared peaceful future, or will you allow the law of the jungle to become the law of the galaxy?

Welcome to the Committee on the Peaceful Use of Outer Space.