If space is the new frontier, who's in charge?
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, battles in space seem to be an everyday occurrence; in sci-fi, space travel is as common as driving a car, and political spats are solved with spaceships and laser guns. Meanwhile, humans in the solar system can barely manage to get off their own planet. But with the dawn of a new space age – one of cheaper, reusable rockets and plans to land humans on Mars in a few decades – and the new technology it brings, it seems unavoidable that earthly disputes will eventually spill over into space. Therefore, while it may be laughed off as a figment of sci-fi imagination, war and contention in space could be a real possibility. What would that look like?
This subject raises the question of who actually ‘owns’, or controls space. To state the obvious, space is vast; too vast to be controlled by any earthly measures of war, at least for now. To determine how to go about this, countries may have to work together; a big ask, I know. When the USSR launched Sputnik in 1957 and the Space Race officially began, the UN realized that things could get ugly, and formed the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPOUS) soon thereafter. As of 2021, the committee’s members consist of 99 countries and a number of both governmental and non-governmental organizations. The Committee’s executive arm is the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA). Together, these bureaucratic entities essentially oversee international spacefaring, and make sure everyone follows the rules. These include five treaties with the aim of avoiding turning space into a conflict zone.
The main one is the Outer Space Treaty, established in 1967. It’s quite long-winded, but essentially highlights the ‘common interest’ space provides for mankind, and how we should go about preserving that. It states that space is free to explore and use for the ‘benefit and interest of all countries’ in a peaceful manner, and is not up for grabs for any nation; for example, nobody can own the moon. It calls for equality and equal access to space among spacefaring countries, no matter the economic status. It also prohibits weapons of mass destruction in space, and states that (terrestrial) international law applies in space too. Above all, it emphasizes the importance of cooperation and ‘mutual assistance’, and transparency of operations.
The other treaties highlight specific issues:
- The Rescue Agreement of 1968 demands that member states will help any astronauts if they are in danger, sort of like maritime law requires nearby ships to come to the aid of people or ships in case of emergency. This includes sending out search and rescue parties if possible, and ensuring their safety if they happen to make an emergency landing in a given nation’s territory.
- The Liability Convention of 1972 states who is responsible for what goes wrong is space; that is, nations are responsible for the damages to equipment or human lives caused by the things they send into space, and must pay for those damages.
- The Registration Convention of 1975 demands that nations, well, register everything they launch or attempt to launch into space with the UN. A nation needs to provide details on every part of the vehicle; this is vital to controlling and monitoring space debris.
- The Moon Agreement of 1979 pretty much expands on the Outer Space Treaty’s rules on the moon, stating that international law applies on its surface and orbit, and it is to be solely used for peaceful purposes, hence forbidding any sort of military bases. It once again emphasizes international cooperation and that resulting missions should be for the good of all mankind, not just the nation in question.
Clearly, the concern for war and nukes in space was there before Star Wars, and the subject even sparked some diplomatic hissy fits within the committee as a result of disagreements between the USSR and the USA. Seen that way, politics in space are not so different than politics on Earth, while we have more ability to act on them, as well as resources, down here. Still, they’ve all agreed that nukes are bad – though some countries keep them just in case. But we’ve seen how that played, and still plays, out; the distrust shatters cooperation even more. Considering that, it seems quite naïve of the UN to state it so simply. But is there really anything else they can do apart from have everyone pinky-promise to not nuke each other from space?
Since space law is pretty much terrestrial UN international law tweaked for the new environment, the same basic mechanisms for enforcing it should apply. But international law is quite fickle; obviously, being established and enforced by the UN, which itself consists of nothing but the countries themselves, its self-evaluating process can lead to some interesting developments; when a law is ignored by too many states too many times, it can change (like in World War II, when everyone largely ignored the unhindered submarine warfare that was actually illegal, but nobody got done for it and the law became futile).
But when nations do decide they care, some things can be done. The United Nations Security Council is the organization’s conflict resolution team; it has the power to slap sanctions on misbehaving countries, which can take the form of trade embargos, severing diplomatic relations, or even military action. The first two may be less direct, but can really hit the countries where it hurts; however, the burden may also fall on its civilians depending on how isolated the country’s leaders are. Squabbles between countries can be handled by the nations themselves in similar manners. The UN have their own peacekeeping force, supplied by its member states, but while their involvement may have immediate impact, it could escalate a given conflict immensely.
While the system makes sense in theory, in practice, it could pose some problems in terms of space law. One example is the makeup of the Council. It has fifteen members; five of them permanent, which means they have veto power. Of these five, three are individual major players in space: the US, Russia, and China (the other two, the UK and France, are part of the European Space Agency). Apart from perhaps India, none of the other members are big names in space. This means that contrary to the UN’s goal of having space be a source of exploration and discovery for the whole world, enforcement of its laws is controlled largely by those that are already a superpower in the field. The ramifications of this are manyfold, and while the permanent nations can partially keep each other in check through veto power, the situation still allows for the chance for space to become essentially an oligopoly controlled by the most powerful. And in the case of some sort of incident, it has the potential for escalation with little mediating diplomacy or action.
Already, there have been some dodgy instances involving these countries breaking some space rules. For example, in May 2021, China’s space agency lost control of one of its Long March 5B rockets, and the vehicle spun around Earth in a somewhat unpredictable orbit, nobody really knowing where it would hit. Though it partially burned up in the atmosphere, one of the largest debris chunks to ever survive reentry finally crashed into the Indian Ocean. That may have been an accident, but in November 2021, Russia blew up one of its own satellites in orbit during a missile test, resulting in a cloud of space debris (already an ever-growing problem that the UN wants to fix), and the ISS’s astronauts having to shelter in their capsules until the immediate danger was over. China has also been testing an orbital hypersonic missile; its manipulability and difficulty to track surprised the US. Perhaps it is that international law states that self-defense is allowed and what counts as self-defense is quite a grey area, or that the knowledge gained from these occurrences could be used in future scientific ventures, but despite the very real threat of uncontrolled or unapproved vehicles in space, these incidents brought about only the familiar statements of condemnations from some countries, and not much else.
So, is anyone going to do something about that? Maybe we’re too used to the threat of nuclear warfare, but if missiles in space aren’t enough to shock someone into action, the possibility of the loss of the ability to monitor each other, and also watch TV, might do the trick. The frontier of a space war in the near future would be through a proxy: satellites. It won’t look nearly as badass as Star Wars, but we can barely send people into space, let alone have them fight each other up there. However, there are over 4,500 active satellites in orbit; they help us monitor everything from weather patterns and natural disasters (such as wildfires, storms, and tsunamis), to global warming, to intelligence, such as that used in warzones (the Ukraine war relies heavily on satellites). That’s not even mentioning things everyone uses every day, such as TV, international phone calls, navigation systems, and even some forms of internet. Safe to say, the loss of satellites would wreak havoc on most aspects of our lives; for example, transportation and agriculture would suffer from not being able to observe weather. So satellites are a lucrative target to wreak havoc on a country’s way of living.
And while missiles provide a surefire way to destroy them, this use of physical force on other satellites would undoubtedly escalate things, and is a quick way for a country to find out if the COPOUS has a bite behind its bark. It would also create debris that might damage the country’s own satellites. So realistically, the space war would be a slow, hacker-driven cyber-war, with the consequences still felt by people on Earth instead of a population in space. This situation is something that the COPOUS rules, all drafted decades ago, could not possibly have foreseen. Hence, there is no real legislature on what is allowed, apart from following international law and remaining peaceful, all of which can be interpreted differently depending on the country and the chicanery of its diplomacy.
But the above is not the only worry of lagging space regulations. The recent decades have seen a surge in private companies, among them SpaceX, whose primary goal includes establishing a human presence on Mars. Though COPOUS did include a quick word on governments needing to authorize private companies going to space, the extent to which private companies are pursuing these goals could not have been anticipated. Additionally, it leaves a grey area regarding what exactly defines sovereignty regarding a celestial body, which is not allowed, and a peaceful presence, which is. The involvement of corporations and their commercial use of space brings its own variety of problems with it, including the possibility of corporate conflicts: right out of any dystopia. These could in turn impact governmental interests as well, and before we know it, we’ve got not only another world war on our hands, but a space one, too.
Space exploration could be the greatest thing humans ever do; with the current bloom in technologies and interest, we could go further than ever before. But this is truly new ground; if we want to see ourselves as a spacefaring species, we’d better think about what we want that to look like, and not succumb to our knack for fighting before we even leave orbit. However, it seems inevitable, at least for the moment, that we are taking our politics with us.