265 SESA Journal 5.4: Special Issue • 2025 SESA Conference Space law is evolving in space-faring nations as the central element of science, technology and governance, as commercial actors centralise space as the next frontier for resource exploration and exploitation. The rise of military and commercial use has also introduced unprecedented risks of governance ranging from just war, liability, responsibility, property rights and more. In this complexity also lies an incertitude of who shapes the normative structure of the new space laws and policies. At the global level, international space law through treaties spanned just a decade, with the first treaty coming into force in 1967 and the fifth (and the last) drafted in 1979. The post-1980s developments have largely been through non-enforceable soft laws and national regulations. While the firstworld states have taken the forefront in developing pro-commercial space laws, often dislodging the fundamental principles of international space law, the new space nations are struggling to shape their national space laws. The smaller nations are attempting to reimagine law and legal scholarship around space governance but are forced to draft national laws that support and further hegemonic commercial interests. In this context, Earth System Law offers a normative framework to make space equitable and entrench common heritage principles. This paper argues that the current institutional structures and global space law frameworks promote an anthropogenic approach to outer space governance. There is a need for the third world and the new fourth world to orient space laws based on the Earth system’s innovative legal imaginaries of functional, spatial and temporal complexities.