Space economy: Luiss launches the Aspera project to boost business competitiveness

‘How should the law adapt to the new space economy?’ According to Paola Severino, president of the Luiss School of Law, it is precisely to answer this question that the Aspera project was launched, on which the Luiss Lotus Observatory is working in collaboration with Avio, a leading company in the national aerospace sector. The challenge on which our country’s competitiveness hinges, Severino emphasises, is to make the Italian legal system ‘attractive to the space industry whilst at the same time ensuring that Italia’s public interests and international responsibilities are safeguarded’. At the event ‘The Italian space industry: between national law and foreign regulations’, organised by the Rome-based university, institutions, academia and businesses sought to jointly identify the path the country should follow, exploring competitiveness and commercial strategies in depth.

The discussion began with an analysis of the impact on the sector of Law 89, passed by Parliament in June 2025, the first comprehensive piece of legislation in the Italian legal system concerning the space economy. According to Severino, this is a ‘balanced’ measure, although the real challenge lies ‘in the application of the law and the drafting of its implementing decrees’. Given that Italian companies ‘are exceptionally strong in the space sector’, it is essential that our legislation ‘does not create too many obstacles to the internationalisation of our companies or to the arrival of major foreign firms in Italia’.

Giulio Ranzo, CEO of Avio and a partner in the Aspera project, shares this view. The rapid expansion currently taking place in the space sector – as Ranzo points out, up until ten years ago there were only 1,500 space objects orbiting our planet, whereas now there are more than 17,000 – makes it necessary to ‘reconsider the regulatory framework’, to prevent ‘space from becoming the Wild West’. The proliferation of sector-specific laws, however, in Ranzo’s view, must not act as a constraint on competitiveness: the law we have in Italia ‘was inspired by the idea of establishing a licensing regime, and that is right, but we must also recognise that the economy of this sector moves so quickly that bureaucracy must not be a brake on growth. We need to strike a balance between regulating what needs to be regulated and not stifling a sector that is expanding at a tremendous rate’.

Alberto Carboni, aerospace adviser at Confindustria’s Research Centre, takes a similar view; he believes it is right to ‘have a law and implement it’, whilst ensuring that it constitutes ‘an advantage for businesses and is not merely an obstacle’.

The Aspera project (an acronym for ‘Foreign Space Authorisations and Administrative Recognitions’) has therefore set itself the specific aim of ensuring that Italian legislation does not act as a brake on the sector’s development, but rather facilitates Italian companies in competing on foreign markets. Aldo Sandulli, coordinator of the Lotus Observatory, explains that ‘there is no shortage of hurdles and difficulties in the implementation of the recent sector-specific legislation’.