The New Space Race: Protecting Trade Secrets On The Final Frontier

Space: The final frontier.  For millennia, people have wanted to explore the great unknown of outer space, and series like Star Trek and Star Wars continue to our fuel our fantasies about what lies beyond our stratosphere.  This fascination, as well as countries' desires to maintain their military prowess, led to the First Space Race after World War II.  Today, while NASA's dominance may have fizzled out, private companies have embarked on a commercialized space race to gain market dominance from their designs. Indeed, the House of Representatives recently passed the SPACE Act to enable commercial space mining activities.

However, for as long as people have been thinking of ways to travel the cosmos, there have been miscreants looking to steal their ideas.  Before a company begins gazing towards the future (and future profits), it must consider several trade secret issues orbiting the aerospace sector.  Here are just a few of them: