During my summer space internship, us interns had the opportunity to sit in on expert lectures from many of Western’s leaders at the Institute for Earth and Space Exploration. One such expert lecture discussed international law and policy as it applies to space. The moral of the story is: space policy is very ambiguous; there’s a lot of grey area. It will be interesting to see how these ambiguities are resolved as more countries become involved in space exploration and with the upcoming plans to revisit the moon through NASA’s Artemis program. For these reasons, I was very intrigued by this lecture and wanted to use my blog to review my notes from the lecture and symmarize them (as well as add my own two-cents).
The Outer Space Treaty
This is a document that has been ratified by 111 countries through the United Nations; this includes all the major space faring nations (Russia, USA, and UK, namely). The treaty serves as a framework law for all human activities in space. The treaty is dated, as it was first introduced in 1967, however no major violations to its terms have been observed so far.
Some of the important articles of the treaty outlined in lecture:
Article 1: all states have free access to explore space without any kind of discrimination or blocked access.
Article 2: countries cannot “claim” an aspect of space as their own; no territorial claims are permitted.
Article 3: states that are conducting activities in outer space must do so in accordance with international law- this includes the charter of the UN. The purpose of this article is to make sure that international laws that touch on maintaining peace and other important clauses that are not directly listed in the outer space treaty are applied here.
Article 9: countries that are party to the treaty need to conduct activities with regard to the interest of all other parties in the treaty. Also, states have to avoid contaminating celestial bodies when conducting experiments.
Ambiguities
As with all international law, there are many ambiguities with these articles and with creating a framework for space law in general. One big grey area that can be identified is how article 2 applies to the Artemis mission plan to create “safety zones” on the moon that can’t be touched. Article 2 clearly outlines that a country cannot claim celestial body territory, hence this plan violates the outer space treaty. A few ways around this would be to: 1. Evaluate the length of time of the safety zone being in effect and the size of the safety zone and 2. to use the safety zones to benefit all states party to the treaty.
Another ambiguity identified in the lecture was regarding future large scale removal of resources on the moon. Currently, the treaty does not outline the procedure for removing resources on the moon and the quantity of resource removal that is permitted for science. In addition, commercialization of resources on the moon and resource use for individual states is very undefined. Can one state in the treaty take resources from the moon for its own individual use, or does that state need to share resources?
The upcoming commercialization and privatization of the space sector also further complicates things. How will commercial entities fit into international space laws? Will they be considered the responsibility of the country in which they originate? What happens if a private company wants to set up a mining base, for example, on the moon? How will that company go through the process of acquiring a plot of land on the moon without violating the treaty? It remains to be seen how the ambiguities in current space laws will be solved.
COPUOS and the future of international space laws
COPUOUS is a committee within the UN focused on outer space laws. It is focused on looking at current space exploration efforts and developing future legal framework for the peaceful exploration of space.
Fun fact: When on the International Space Station, the criminal law of the state that controls that part of the space station (ie: manufactured and registered) applies.