Space Law Essentials
2.4 Other regional or specialised space-related IOs ....................................... 114 2.5 The European Union and space activities ................................................ 116 3. Space cooperation and developing countries .................................................... 120 4. The UNIDROIT Space Assets Protocol ............................................................ 124 5. Dispute settlement relating to space activities ................................................... 125 6. Military uses of outer space ............................................................................... 127 7. The Conference on Disarmament (CD) ............................................................. 130 8. Space law: challenges and future developments ............................................... 133 Glossary .................................................................................................................. 137 Preface
Insurance companies consider spaceflight as an ultra-hazardous
activity. They are right. Fatal accidents happened in the past and
will happen in the future. After 24 flawless Space Shuttle flights,
laypeople were misled into believing that travelling into space had
become routine like travelling on an airplane. The Challenger
disaster on 28 January 1986, when the Shuttle exploded during its
ascent into space, made clear that this is not the case by far. When I
became an astronaut in 1990, one of the most important facts I was
told by NASA was that one in every 200 Shuttle flights would be
lethal. Fortunately, my flight STS-55 on Columbia in April 1993
was not one of such. But ten years later, on 1 February 2003, my
Shuttle Columbia was overtaken by statistics – it disintegrated upon
re-entry from space. Ever since, NASA’s rule of thumb was 1 in a
100 for a lethal Space Shuttle accident.
Per aspera ad astra – space is hard.
Another lethal accident occurred on 31 October 2014, when Virgin
Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo was torn apart during a test flight as result
of an explosion of the vehicle’s rocket engine. While the pilot could
parachute down safely, his co-pilot could not bail out in time. This
incident is a case in point, because it concerns a commercial company adopting the business case of flying passengers regularly into
space. Virgin Galactic had already sold more than 700 tickets,
€ 250.000 each, to wealthy customers, including many celebrities. If
any of these customers were to fall victim to a lethal accident, the
founders of Virgin Galactic certainly would have a problem, a legal
one. A lawsuit could bring the business to an immediate end. This is
why the company chose Spaceport America in New Mexico as their
launch site and place of business, because in 2013 the Governor
signed into law a liability-waiving regulation for commercial space
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3
Alexander Soucek
flights. This example demonstrates how, even above technical
issues, it is legal issues that rule spaceflight.
This book by Alexander Soucek is about space law. I first met
Alexander about eight years ago when he gave a lecture to my
students at the Technical University of Munich. I cannot imagine a
more professional expert, but also emphatic speaker in the field of
space law. If you get the chance of visiting one of his presentations,
don’t miss it – otherwise, read this book!
Prof. Ulrich Walter, Astronaut of the Space Shuttle mission STS-55,
Chair of the Institute of Astronautics, Technical University Munich,
Germany
Part 1
Preparing for space law
1. Why going into outer space?
In one sentence: “Space isn’t remote at all. It’s only an hour’s drive
away if your car could go straight upwards.” (F. Hoyle)
1 Outer
space
From the perspective of humans, outer space can be defined as the
environment that surrounds Earth and the denser parts of its atmosphere (–> 325). Human space activities are concentrated in a
minuscule segment of outer space: the Solar System and most of
all the near-Earth environment up to app. 36.000 km altitude above
the Earth’s surface. It is there where we benefit most from properties unique to the outer space environment.
2 Advantageous
characteristics of the
near-Earth
environment
An important aspect of placing hardware in outer space is the gain
of distance and perspective, i.e. altitude. Another aspect is the gain
of time to cover a distance or relay information, i.e. velocity. The
absence of denser atmospheric regions filled with air molecules
means less drag acting on a space object. A satellite in a so-called
Low Earth Orbit (LEO, –> 325) achieves one full orbit around Earth
in 90 minutes on average. A third aspect is to benefit from the
microgravity environment (popularly referred to as ‘weightlessness’ –> 325).
4
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