MILAN — For many of the more than 11,000 participants at the International Astronautical Congress this year, the biggest news of the week-long conference was not anything that took place within the sprawling convention center here but instead more than 9,000 kilometers away.

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Jeff Foust writes about space policy, commercial space, and related topics for SpaceNews. He earned a Ph.D. in planetary sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor’s degree with honors in geophysics and planetary science...