Thammasat University students who are interested in law, space, political science, history,  business, economics, and related subjects may find a newly available book useful.

Who Owns Outer Space?: International Law, Astrophysics, and the Sustainable Development of Space is an Open Access book, available for free download at this link:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/who-owns-outer-space/960CCB0464744F845B09434D932699EC

The TU Library collection includes many other books about different aspects of outer space.

The book’s introduction notes:

Many current human activities in Space, and others planned or contemplated, raise the fundamental question: who owns Outer Space? This book provides a detailed examination of a number of these activities and the different challenges they give rise to. But before we dive into the details, here are five more vignettes that serve as an introductory sampling of major challenges arising from the human development of Space. […]

More and more of the world’s ultra-rich are travelling to Space as tourists on short sub-orbital flights or much longer orbital flights, with increasing numbers going to the International Space Station. Trips around the Moon might also become a reality soon. Hollywood, unsatisfied with the visual effects provided by CGI or parabolic flights on aeroplanes, is right behind them, with Tom Cruise expected to fly to the International Space Station for a film shoot soon. It is all great fun, of course, unless one considers the environmental impacts. […]

A recently released framework for proposed mining activities on the Moon and other celestial bodies, called the Artemis Accords, includes a proposal to place ‘safety zones’ around these activities. The concept is borrowed from the quite different context of offshore oil drilling on Earth and from the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. ‘How can anyone be against safety?’

The assurances from Space agencies and foreign ministries are almost paternalistic in tone. At a minimum, the idea of safety zones seems like a solution in search of a problem, establishing a mechanism for drawing boundaries around ill-defined future activities. What is missing from such assurances is regard for the core principles set out in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, that the exploration and use of Space is the ‘province of all [hu]mankind’, and that ‘national appropriation’ of the Moon and other celestial bodies is prohibited. […]

Many people believe that Space belongs to all of us. In January 2022, the Outer Space Institute partnered with the Angus Reid Group to survey a random sample of American adults about their opinions on Space. Of the 1,520 respondents, 81 per cent of them ‘agreed’ or ‘strongly agreed’ with the statement ‘Outer space should belong to everyone; no one country should be able to claim control over it.’ Others are of the opinion that, far from Space belonging to everyone, it belongs to no one, and, for this reason, that no parts of it can be owned.

Yet others agree that nobody owns Space, in general, but believe parts of it can indeed be owned. Whichever position is taken, one inevitably runs into questions concerning actions – for example, what restrictions should be in place if somebody wishes to mine an asteroid or the Moon? Is it acceptable to mine asteroids, just because there are so many of them? Or if parts of Space can be owned, which parts? An entire asteroid, a small lunar crater, or perhaps only extracted resources? Finally, there is the most important question of all: who decides on the existence and content of rules, and on their application to specific situations?

Whatever Space is, states, companies and even wealthy individuals are rushing to assert dominance over it – to exploit resources, to pursue science and exploration, and, in some cases, simply to show off. Many of these actors are enormously enthusiastic about the technological and economic achievements that might be possible in Space. Far fewer of them seem to have given much thought to the considerable risks for Space missions, for those who undertake them, and for the environment in Space and on Earth.

This book examines a selection of ‘grand challenges’ that have emerged very recently because of the rapid expansion of human activity in Space. By ‘grand challenges’ we mean problems that exist on a scale that implicates all of humanity and must be solved for our civilisation to prosper, and indeed, in some cases, to survive. The most recent of these challenges is the invasion of Ukraine, which has brought the risk of an all-out nuclear war back into sharp focus.

Russia’s actions matter for this book because they threaten the political cornerstone of Space governance, namely the six decades of close co-operation between Moscow and Washington that led, first to the creation of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space in 1958, and then the International Space Station. It is there, on the ISS, that, thankfully, that Russian cosmonauts and Western astronauts still work side by side.

It should be apparent that grand challenges cannot be understood from a single disciplinary perspective, or even multiple disciplines working independently. Legal and policy solutions must be grounded in a firm understanding of the constraints imposed by physics and the uncertainty in our knowledge of events and outcomes.

And although innovation and technological advances continually open new pathways for humanity to use and explore Space, it should also be apparent that no grand challenge has a purely ‘technical’ solution. As with climate change, pandemics and inter-state wars, grand challenges in Space require solutions that are grounded in a firm understanding of why and how countries co-operate, and how they seek to stabilise and channel that co-operation through international law.

For all these reasons, this book takes a transdisciplinary approach to investigating grand challenges and identifying possible solutions. From start to finish, we have fully integrated our expertise in astrophysics, international law and international relations. Space debris is an excellent example of a grand challenge that can only be solved through transdisciplinary research and analysis. Yet most people conceptualise the problem in ways that make the problem worse.

They see Earth orbit as a near-infinite and therefore inexhaustible void, when it is in fact a finite resource. It is the same kind of misunderstanding that led to the plastics crisis in the oceans, and the climate change crisis in the atmosphere. If you throw enough stuff away, even the largest environment will become overloaded and begin to break down.

When multiple actors are contributing to the overload, we have a ‘tragedy of the commons’ – the quintessential ‘collective-action problem’, whose dominant feature is that individual actors can believe that everyone else must take steps to solve the problem, while not taking those steps themselves. These non-co-operative actors are ‘free riders’ who make no changes to their own behaviour while enjoying the additional benefits of everyone else’s co-operation.

Thus one path towards ‘sustainable development’ is to foster co-operation and discourage free riding. All of the terms in quotation marks in the previous paragraph will be familiar to many readers. We use them to underline the point that Space is properly seen as an issue of global environmental politics, using many of the same conceptual and analytical tools.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)