Komercializace vesmíru ve zprávách Výboru OSN pro mírové využívání kosmického prostoru

This master’s thesis examines the transformation of the language of space commercialization in the annual reports of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) and its Legal Subcommittee (LSC). The main objective is to determine how the language of commercial space utilization evolved within these documents between 1990 and 2025. The theoretical framework is based on a social constructivist approach, which perceives normative language as a dynamic social construct. Given the long-term absence of new binding treaties, this language functions as a soft law instrument through which international actors shape a shared understanding of legitimate behaviour in space. To achieve this objective, an approach combining quantitative and qualitative methods of corpus linguistics is applied. The research was conducted using LancsBox software on a specialized language corpus consisting of 68 English-written COPUOS and LSC reports, comprising 1,348,326 tokens. The corpus is further structured according to the institutional origin of the reports and the defined time periods. The results of the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the annual reports identified 18 key terms related to space commercialization and demonstrated that the language of commercialization has progressed through three distinct developmental phases: 1. period of fears of commercialization and weakening of state dominance (1990–1998), 2. period of financing and expanding commercial activities (1999–2016), and 3. period of national regulation and diversification of space activities (2017–2025). These shifts in the contexts of the key terms correlate with the real development of space technologies and commercial space activities. The research also confirmed lexical differences in the examined language of both bodies. While COPUOS frames commercialization more within the context of a general developmental agenda, the LSC utilizes more specific technical-legal terminology. The thesis empirically demonstrates a direct link between the penetration of market forces into space and the normative activity of international institutions.