Rethinking Space Policy: From Outer Space to Inner Dynamics Using Discourse Network Analysis, Topic Modeling, And Policy Actor Affiliations

Abstract

This dissertation examines the transformation of the U.S. space policy subsystem from a centralized, government-dominated domain into a collaborative, multi-sector governance arena. Drawing on the Advocacy Coalition Framework and the Comparative Agendas Project, three empirical studies trace how the subsystem's structure, belief content, and policy agenda evolved from 1958 to 2025. The first study applies discourse network analysis to congressional hearings across four policy eras and demonstrates that the subsystem underwent a typological transition driven by deliberate policy design, including the Commercial Space Launch Act of 1984, the COTS program, and the Artemis commercial partnership model, rather than by exogenous shocks alone. Shannon entropy in actor diversity nearly tripled, and commercial actors now hold the highest mean betweenness centrality in the network. The second study combines multi-stakeholder actor coding with community detection to show that organizational affiliation systematically shapes which policy core beliefs actors prioritize. Commercial actors shifted from infrastructural concerns to affordability and then to regulatory modernization; civil society actors expanded from narrow educational roles into the subsystem's largest coalitions. Low modularity and negative assortativity confirm that coalitions form around shared beliefs rather than organizational identity. The third study applies structural topic modeling to presidential documents, COPUOS proceedings, and congressional hearings, using the Comparative Agendas Project framework to measure how institutional attention to competing space policy priorities has been allocated and redistributed over time. Presidential discourse shifted from human spaceflight narratives to governance and institutional design; multilateral attention moved from treaty negotiation to cooperative security and sustainability; and congressional hearings concentrated increasingly on space science and Earth observation. Together, these studies contribute to policy process theory and space policy by treating subsystem typology as a dynamic outcome, linking actor affiliation to belief formation, and tracing how attention to space policy priorities has shifted across venues and eras as the subsystem diversified.