Dispute, when agreement is needed. The impact of discrepancies between national and international space law on current and future industrial endeavours

Abstract

The corpus iuris spatialis, a set of five treaties that govern states’ access, rights, obligations, and responsibilities in outer space, was developed under the auspices of UN in the late 1950s and 1960s. Most importantly, it provided framework governing access to outer space, the issue of appropriation of outer space, registration of objects launched into outer space and responsibility for activities performed in outer space. However, the legal regime was created basing solely on the experience of a handful of states, which at that time, had the technical and economic capacity to enter into the space race. This lead to a situation in which the regulations introduced could not foresee nor encompass each and every future utilization of outer space, potentially leading to a discrepancy between the contents of the treaties and national regulations translating them into domestic legal regime. This analysis will be performed by scrutinizing the practice of the most active space fairing states, their domestic legislations regarding outer space endeavours vis a vis provisions of corpus iuris spatialis.