The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.
By Theresa Quitto Dickerson
June 12, 2026
I spent 19 years inside IT governance. I watched organizations build standards bodies that arrived after the chaos. I watched interoperability frameworks get negotiated after every major vendor had already locked in incompatible architecture. I watched coordination mechanisms get bolted on top of systems that were never designed to coordinate. And I watched the same expensive, avoidable mistakes repeat themselves from agency to agency, sector to sector because nobody looked at what IT had already learned.
In late 2025, I transitioned into commercial space policy and advocacy. Within weeks, I recognized the terrain. Different technology. Different actors. Different stakes. Same structural patterns. And the same window that IT once had to get governance right before the architecture locked in.
That window is closing faster than most people in the space sector realize.
The Pattern IT Left Behind
IT governance did not fail because people were unintelligent or unwilling. It failed because governance investment consistently lagged technology deployment. The infrastructure got built first. The standards came second. The coordination mechanisms came third. By the time governance frameworks arrived, the architecture had already created facts on the ground that were expensive, and sometimes impossible, to reverse.
In my experience across federal IT environments, three patterns repeated reliably.
First, standards bodies formed after dominant designs were already entrenched. Frameworks now considered foundational to IT governance were codified years after the failure conditions they were designed to address had already calcified in agency architecture. The result was not a standard so much as a negotiated truce between incumbents, one that often locked out new entrants and preserved incompatibilities beneath a veneer of compliance.
Second, data-sharing agreements were designed around what organizations were willing to share, not around what decisions required. The gap between available data and decision-relevant data became a permanent feature of the governance landscape, documented extensively in federal interoperability assessments and still actively unresolved across multiple agency domains.
Third, coordination mechanisms were built for the actors already in the room, not for the actors the system would eventually need to include. When new entrants arrived, whether cloud vendors, managed service providers or emerging technology platforms, the mechanisms could not absorb them without structural redesign that nobody had budgeted for.
What I Am Watching in Commercial Space
The commercial space sector is not making identical mistakes. In my assessment, it is making structurally equivalent ones, at a pace IT could not have imagined in its formative years.
Spectrum management frameworks are actively under development, while constellation deployment is already at scale. The FCC’s October 2025 Space Modernization rulemaking and the December 2025 Executive Order on American Space Superiority both reflect a governance apparatus that is still catching up to an operational reality already in motion. Space Policy Directive-3 acknowledged as far back as 2018 that space traffic and radio frequency spectrum use had traditionally been independently managed processes, a structural gap that existed before the current wave of commercial activity and has grown more consequential with every additional constellation launched since.
Orbital traffic coordination tells the same story. In February 2024, a NASA satellite came within 10 meters of colliding with a defunct Russian spacecraft. The warning data that came through was conflicting, pulled from NASA, the Department of Defense and commercial sources that were not synchronized. This is not a relationship failure. It is an infrastructure failure. The actors were willing. The interfaces were not ready.
None of this is the result of bad intent. It is the result of governance investment that is perpetually chasing technology deployment rather than running alongside it. Public administrators should recognize this pattern immediately. It is the same one IT spent two decades trying to correct.
What Public Administration Brings to This Problem
The commercial space governance challenge is not primarily a technical problem. It is a multi-actor coordination problem operating under conditions of distributed authority, incomplete information and accelerating deployment. That is a public administration problem. And the field has tools for it that the space sector is not yet drawing on.
IT governance, at its best, eventually learned to treat interoperability as a design requirement rather than an afterthought. It learned to build feedback mechanisms into standards bodies so frameworks could adapt as the technology landscape shifted. It learned, slowly and at considerable cost, that coordination is not a behavior you can mandate. It is a structural property you must design for.
The governance frameworks now under development across spectrum allocation, orbital traffic management and debris mitigation will shape commercial space for the next 30 years. The question worth asking before those frameworks calcify is whether they are being designed to produce coordination as an outcome, or to facilitate coordination as a hope.
The Case for Cross-Domain Governance Memory
Public administration has something the space sector needs right now: institutional memory of what happens when governance infrastructure arrives late. The field has documented, studied and theorized the failure patterns of complex multi-actor systems across health IT, financial regulation, telecommunications and federal procurement. That knowledge does not automatically transfer. Someone must carry it across the boundary.
This is not a call for public administrators to become space policy experts overnight. It is a call for the space governance community to stop treating its coordination challenges as novel problems requiring novel solutions, when decades of governance infrastructure research already have useful things to say.
IT learned its lessons the expensive way. The infrastructure broke, the coordination failed and the cleanup cost more than proactive governance design ever would have.
Commercial space does not have to repeat that sequence. But only if someone who was in the room for IT’s version of this story is willing to say clearly: we already did this, and here is what it cost.
Author: Theresa Quitto-Dickerson is a doctoral candidate and federal program manager specializing in governance architecture and signal-based leadership. She writes at QuittoDickerson.space.
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading…