Abstract
This article investigates the legal architecture of knowledge and technology transfer in the space sector under conditions shaped by national security requirements, dual-use export controls, public funding rules, and public procurement procedures. The study aims to explain how these interacting regimes influence the commercialization of space technologies and to identify institutional-legal solutions capable of increasing transfer predictability without weakening baseline security safeguards. The research employs an institutional-legal design that combines doctrinal analysis, comparative legal analysis, structural-functional analysis, and content analysis of international legal instruments, Kazakhstan’s legislation, and selected foreign regulatory practices. To move beyond descriptive legal review, the study operationalizes institutional barriers through two composite measures, the Compliance Burden Index (CBI) and the Regulatory Fragmentation Index (RFI), which capture procedural burden and inter-regime inconsistency across the transfer process. The findings show that the most severe barriers emerge not at the stage of technological creation, but at the stages where rights, access conditions, and transfer terms must be legally formalized, especially in procurement contracting and cross-regime coordination. The article demonstrates that weak commercialization performance is explained less by deficiencies in classical intellectual property instruments than by the fragmentation of authorization, export control, funding, and procurement regimes. The study’s novelty lies in proposing a measurable institutional-legal framework and a structured transfer model designed to reduce fragmentation, lower compliance costs, and improve the legal manageability of space technology commercialization.