In May 2026, ahead of the Governance of Emerging Technologies and Science (GETS) conference, the Space Governance Lab at Arizona State University convened Engineering Trust Under Scale: A Space Governance Lab Workshop for GETS 2026, supported by a $4,200 Rob Walton College of Global Futures Principled Innovation Research and Teaching Grant.
The grant's purpose was to prepare early-career researchers to contribute to GETS. Doctoral, master's, and undergraduate students presented research examining governance through different disciplinary lenses, including trust, environmental ethics, data infrastructure, accountability, and community voice. For several undergraduates, it was a first conference presentation, and a first on space.
Students then facilitated a governance design simulation for an audience including invited participants from ASU leadership, and policy, legal, communities. Participants identified value conflicts, took up differing stakeholder perspectives, and redesigned governance arrangements under real-world constraints — moving past compliance-based thinking toward questions of accountability, legitimacy, and institutional design. The simulation also served as a first trial of the scaffolding itself.
That scaffolding was used again in July 2026, in a separate Washington, DC governance design programme where students built and stress-tested a proposed governance instrument for a cislunar scenario.
Space governance is the immediate context, but the underlying questions connect to AI governance, infrastructure governance, and other complex sociotechnical systems. Across this work, the Lab examines how institutions determine who participates, what counts as harm, and what forms of knowledge are recognized.
Timiebi Aganaba, Assistant Professor, School for the Future of Innovation in Society in the Rob Walton College of Global Futures with Space Governance Lab, Arizona State University; Governance of Emerging Technologies and Science (GETS) conference, ASU Law, on May 21, 2026.
Says Aganaba: What interests me is that institutional design can be taught, and that it travels. The design work that decides who participates, what counts as harm, and whose knowledge is recognized usually happens quietly, by whoever is already in the room, and it is rarely taught explicitly as a skill. Undergraduate, master's, and doctoral students worked through those decisions together and took that thinking to a conference audience. Two months later, the same approach was used with executive students in Washington DC, who built and stress-tested an actual governance instrument for cislunar space. Space makes these problems visible early, but the same questions are already arriving in AI, infrastructure, and climate — and people who can do this design work will be needed in all of them.
Aganaba offers the following acknowledgments:
The Space Governance Lab thanks the Rob Walton College of Global Futures Principled Innovation Research and Teaching Grant, the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, and the Parsons School of Design at The New School, which sponsored the participation of one of its students, a member of the Space Governance Lab.