50 TheEconomistJuly 20th 2019
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n may jeff bezosgave an hour-long pre-
sentation on his vision for humanity’s
future in space: a series of artificial settle-
ments in orbit that would be home to as
many as 1m people each. Mr Bezos was talk-
ing in his role as founder of Blue Origin, a
privately held rocket-launch firm. But he
also referred to the company for which he
is better known, Amazon.
Amazon would never have existed, he
said, without pre-existing infrastructure:
postal services to deliver packages; home
computers to order goods; credit cards to
make payments. The job of the current gen-
eration would be to build an equivalent
“infrastructure” for space. Mr Bezos identi-
fied two elements of this: much lower
launch costs and the exploitation of re-
sources in space. But he might have men-
tioned another, more basic requirement
for enterprise: a proper legal environment.
What rules there are largely date from
the cold-war era. The Outer Space Treaty of
1967 is the foundational space-law text. It
sets out some basic principles, among
them that space is free for exploration anduse by all states, and that no claims of
sovereignty can be made. Later agreements
assign liability for damage caused by space
objects and require states to help rescue as-
tronauts in distress.
A common thread runs through these
texts. They all assume that space is a realm
dominated by states, not by companies, let
alone individual billionaires. As space in-
dustrialises, the gaps in the law are becom-
ing clearer. Two areas of concern stand out:
debris and resource extraction.
Debris is much the more pressing issue.
nasa, America’s space agency, already
tracks more than 500,000 pieces of space
junk in orbit around Earth. Items that are
smaller than a marble are not yet tracked
butnasareckons there are millions; and at
velocities of more than 27,000km per hour,
even a fleck of paint can cause damage. Sys-
tems are in place to reduce the risk of colli-
sions (“conjunction risk” in the under-
stated argot of the satellite industry). Firms
that launch objects into space need li-
cences from the relevant national authori-
ties. These regulators are meant to vet pro-posed orbits and set end-of-life rules for
old satellites either to re-enter Earth’s at-
mosphere, where they burn up, or to be
propelled into “graveyard slots” where
there is no risk of collision.
International guidelines, based on
American standards, specify best practices
for mitigating the risk of debris. America’s
Space Surveillance Network shares some
data on the trajectory of larger bits of space
junk. The International Telecommunica-
tion Union (itu), a unagency, responsible
among other things for allocating radio fre-
quencies in space, acts as a clearing-house
for information on satellites in orbit.Put your helmet on
But the current system is, in the words of
Alexandre Vallet of the itu,less a binding
framework than “a gentlemen’s agree-
ment”. End-of-life rules vary between regu-
lators. The guidelines on debris mitigation
are not enforceable internationally. When
satellites are on a crash course, demanding
large changes in orbit, as happens perhaps
once or twice a year, common sense is what
stops a collision. States themselves are free
to ignore norms of good behaviour. India
caused both outrage and a fresh debris field
in March by conducting an anti-satellite
missile test; China increased the amount of
trackable debris then in space by 25% with
a single such test in 2007 (see chart on the
next page, which covers bigger objects,
with a diameter of more than about 10cms).
This system has worked well enough so far.Outer spaceStar laws
Space is commercialising. The legal system needs to catch upInternational