Obama said in a statement that the United States seeks peaceful collaboration with other countries that will ward off conflict and make it easier to expand exploration. The United States must do more to deal with debris and other hazards in space, he said, and he wants a "burgeoning commercial space industry."

Peter Marquez, the White House director of space policy, said the administration is returning to a policy that existed before George W. Bush was president, which would entertain the possibility of a treaty to limit space-based weapons. He did not say the Obama administration would pursue such a treaty, but he would not dismiss the idea as the previous space policy had.

The language is similar to that adopted by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Marquez said.

Russia and China in the past have made vague proposals about limiting weapons in space, and the United States always has opposed it. No country has deployed space weapons, but there is a possibility of attacking satellites from the ground, as China did against its own satellite and the United States did to a dying satellite in 2008, said Laura Grego, a senior scientist on global security at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The US space program began in the late 1950s as a competition with the Soviet Union, a longtime Cold War enemy. In his statement, Obama said America's imperatives and obligations in space have changed in recent decades.

"No longer are we racing against an adversary," he said. "In fact, one of our central goals is to promote peaceful cooperation and collaboration in space, which not only will ward off conflict, but will help to expand our capacity to operate in orbit and beyond."

Most of the civilian side of the space policy was already announced by Obama in February and April, including a dramatic turn for the human space exploration. Instead of aiming for a return to the moon, the Obama space policy is more geared to Mars with a stop first at an asteroid by 2025.

Even the exploration plan has more of a tinge of international cooperation. Officials said they are talking with the Chinese government about including them in US space efforts, such as the International Space Station, but there is nothing concrete yet.