Date: September 29, 2009
Title: Space Law
Podcaster: Harold Goldner
Links: http://www.goldnerlaw.com
Adelta Space Law (Australia)
http://www.spacelaw.com.au
European Center for Space Law
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/ECSL
International Institute of Space Law
http://www.iislweb.org (also on LinkedIn and Facebook)
United Nations Office on Outer Space Affairs
http://www.oosa.unvienna.org/oosa/en/OOSA/index.html
Description: Exploration of space eventually means mankind leaves the planet, and leaving the planet means taking society along. What is “Space Law” and how will it apply to space exploration? Learn about the efforts being made on Planet Earth to keep outer space from becoming a legal vacuum.
Bio: Harold Goldner is an employment lawyer in Pennsylvania. He has been looking at the sky since his father took him out to see the moons of Jupiter when he was six years old. He has a 114 mm go-to Newtonian telescope and tries to get out and battle the light pollution of Suburban Philadelphia whenever he can to see what everyone else has been talking about during the 365 Days of Astronomy. He blogs at http://www.humanracehorses.com and Tweets as HumanRacehorses.
Today’s sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by Professor Astronomy, a blog chronicling the day-to-day life and thoughts of a research astronomer, online at blog.professorastronomy.com. Professor Astronomy, wishing Toaster a happy 15th birthday.
Transcript:
Hello and welcome to today’s 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast. I’m Harold Goldner, I’m a lawyer in the state of Pennsylvania in the USA. Most of my work relates to employment law, helping businesses and employees deal with the daily issues which arise in the workplace. But I am also an amateur astronomer, and while spending countless nights looking up, I think about life in outer space, and how we will need to extend civilization and, more importantly, the “rule of law” in more than one way once we move beyond our home planet.
I’m not going to guess about what an intergalactic government or constitution might look like; I’ll leave that to the science fiction writers. I will spend today’s podcast talking where we stand in developing a body of law covering outer space.
The first important legal concept to consider is Jurisdiction. Jurisdiction means the territory or area which is subject to the power of a judicial system or legal entity. So where does space’s jurisdiction begin? For the most part, it is considered that “space” begins where objects can orbit the earth, about 100 kilometers above the surface of the planet.
In 1958, the United Nations created the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, to address this jurisdiction. That committee had as its initial member nations 18 countries including the USA, the then USSR, the United Kingdom, India, Canada, Iran, and a dozen other nations.
Four years later, about the same time both Russia and the United States started the Space Race, that Committee finally met and the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs started to operate. That entity has helped promulgate four important treaties or conventions for space exploration. These are:
- The Outer Space Treaty – That treaty prevents any one country from claiming anything in outer space as its own territory and governs the use of natural resources in outer space. It also provides for the control of weapons in outer space, and ensures the freedom of space exploration.
- The Rescue Agreement, which provides for the safety and rescue of spacecraft and astronauts,
- The Liability Convention, which covers liability for damages caused by space objects, and prevents harmful interference with space activities and the environment; and finally
- The Registration Convention, which establishes a process for notification and registration of space activities and scientific investigation.
These treaties are premised upon the notions that exploration of outer space can enhance the well-being of all nations and all people and that the exploration of outer space is the province of all mankind.
What are the legal consequences when satellites collide? First, we need to determine who owns each satellite. That is the purpose of the Registration Convention. If everything launched is registered, just like automobiles must be registered before going out on the highways, that’s a start.
Next, we have to consider the issue of fault. On the highways, we have rules of the road and concepts such as right of way. When a traffic light is red, you stop; when it’s green you go. But the law of roundabouts varies from state to state and nation to nation. Some places the entering vehicle has right of way, in others the vehicle in the circle does.
Space is like one giant roundabout without any clear rules of the road. So we have to borrow from the law that cover ships at sea, which is called the Law of Admiralty. A few centuries ago, around the time Galileo was first looking at the Jovian moons, mankind took to the seas and started travel between the continents on the high seas. That’s roughly when the Law of Admiralty developed to deal with society’s equivalent of Outer Space.
When a broken and de-activated Russian weather satellite struck a functioning Iridium satellite in February of this year, scattering thousands of additional pieces of space debris into orbit, some tried to analyze the legal consequences.
Applying concepts borrowed from the Law of Admiralty, like a ship, a satellite which has power must be operated to avoid any known hazards. On the other hand, a space device which is foundering or failing should be maneuvered before it fails completely so as to remain out of the way of functioning space equipment. The current state of space law, however, does not require a failing space device to do so, so it is hard to assess legal liability against any one or entity in connection with that crash.
What about when space machines come back to earth? The Liability Convention provides for absolute liability on the part of whomever launches something that eventually comes back to earth, but only if the damage is due to the launcher’s fault. The Liability Convention does not define “fault,” so if one nation’s space machine sends another nation’s space machine into a building, the convention calls for the nation suffering the damages to lodge a diplomatic dispute with the UN. The injured nation can instead bring a legal claim in the launching state’s jurisdiction, but then the provisions of the Liability Convention no longer apply.
Here’s an example. In 1978, a Russian satellite fell out of orbit and struck northern Canada scattering radioactive debris. After Canada made a claim, Russia paid $3,000,000 (Canadian) to Canada for the required clean-up. On the other hand, when the USA’s Skylab fell into the atmosphere and spread debris over central Australia, the Australian government did not present any claim against the US.
Space law experts are generally united on one thing: the law has not yet adequately developed to make sure that future incidents are discouraged through the consequences of legal liability.
Shifting our focus from robotic space exploration to human exploration, are there other laws which govern human activity in outer space? For instance, if an astronaut works for more than ten hours straight on a repair to the Hubble Telescope, does she get paid overtime? The Fair Labor Standards Act, which is the US’ federal law governing mandatory overtime and minimum wages, provides for certain exemptions from minimum wages. This is called the learned professionals exemption, and includes various engineering, medical, and computing positions from overtime provisions. So our friend on her spacewalk wouldn’t qualify for overtime anyway, at least not if she works for NASA. Other nations have labor and employment laws which they can extend to their own astronauts.
At some point the law will have to deal with lunar factory workers, and assembly-line workers on Mars who are busy terraforming the planet, and all the folks on the space ships that we eventually launch to explore the galaxy around us. Space Laws will have to be developed to handle the society that engages in lengthy interplanetary or even interstellar travel over long periods of time without breaks, without vacations, and without any time outs whatsoever, or equipment worth billions of dollars and precious lives may be lost.
And what happens if Earth’s natural resources have dwindled to life-threatening levels but replacement resources are located and accessible elsewhere, whether on the Moon, or on Mars, or on an asteroid, or otherwise? Imagine if we could tap the methane on Titan? Our current treaties don’t allow for this, but what if we absolutely had to have that resource or it would imperil our existence on Earth? If we could, how would the costs of transportation be handled and how could the resource be sold if nobody can own it?
Our laws right now are earthbound. While we try to develop a body of ‘space law,’ there’s lots of work to be done, and the challenge will be to stay ahead of the science, or at least stay even with it.
I hope you have enjoyed this little exploration into Space Law, and I thank you for downloading and listening to this podcast. I will put links to a few websites about Space Law on the show notes at the 365 Days of Astronomy website..
I’d love to hear or read your comments. You can reach me on my blog at http://www.humanracehorses.com or on Twitter as HumanRacehorses.
Enjoy the remaining ninety or so days of the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcasts, and clear skies to all.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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