Space law is inadequate for the boom in human activity there | Hacker News Reader

Space law is inadequate for the boom in human activity there

economist.com

102 pointspseudolus64 comments

Law doesn't come from (or shouldn't come from) unqualified legislators guessing about what the future will be like and what problems will be there. Law comes from when somebody has a grievance against somebody else, and society steps in to resolve it.

Could you imagine how bad it would be if Congress got excited about the potential for internet crime in 1985, tried to guess the form of the problems that would arise, and then wrote laws banning and permitting things that they thought would lead to trouble? There is no way somebody back then could predict which situations would lead to trouble decades later.

The best way to deal with space would probably be to let judges stretch earth law (property rights, whatever) to produce as much justice as possible, and then modifying the laws once the lessons had been borne out.

> Could you imagine how bad it would be if Congress got excited about the potential for internet crime in 1985, tried to guess the form of the problems that would arise, and then wrote laws banning and permitting things that they thought would lead to trouble?

Didn't they try to do that with 1984's Computer Fraud and Abuse Act?

Breaking into computer systems was already something that was happening then. Maybe they went a little overboard with the wording but it's not like Congress invented hacking.

> Maybe they went a little overboard with the wording but it's not like Congress invented hacking.

Believe it or not but CFAA would likely have not come about if not for the classic film "WarGames" [1].

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=7rBLCZuEOswC&pg=PA38&lpg=P...

A little overbroad is somewhat of an understatement..

Instead, they outlawed visiting google.com (by a strict reading of "unauthorized access")

About as well as Korea's government picking the crypto businesses should use in 1996:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/elaineramirez/2016/11/30/south-...

You mean like everyone who's talking about AI policy right now?

There have been people who have predicted exactly the direction we are headed like Richard Stallman.

I think though that the number of people with that kind of vision and foresight are few.

> I think though that the number of people with that kind of vision and foresight are few.

It also often comes from domain experts, and almost never from politicians.

It might be interesting to see what RMS is predicting right now.

I have a friend who participates in superforecasting. I should pay more attention.

It's just as ridiculous to do so in AI.

So this sounds great in theory, but there are a number of ways that I can think of where it falls short.

Tragedy of the commons issues are ones that often largely too late to easily solve by the time enough public pressure has built up to force legislative oversight. Social injustice issues are the same.

That being said, I agree that overzealous legislators making pot shots at potential issues is not a good solution either. My thought would be meet halfway with predictive laws with sunset clauses? That way, if a mistake is made, it will be undone in a predictable timescale without the need to get an oft deadlocked congress to take action.

Laws aren't so easy to sunset even if they have sunset clauses. Whoever benefits from the legislative mistakes will grow to be more powerful than whoever is being pinched by them, and then they'll lobby like nothing else to keep the laws the same. One example would be H&R block, which was created by a complex tax code and works very hard to keep it that way.

As for the tragedy of the commons, if your mining operation negatively impacts mine by messing up a shared resource, I can sue you right away. The lack of a legal framework doesn't mean that everything is legal, at least under US tradition; it means that the civil courts decide.

> As for the tragedy of the commons, if your mining operation negatively impacts mine by messing up a shared resource, I can sue you right away. The lack of a legal framework doesn't mean that everything is legal, at least under US tradition; it means that the civil courts decide.

This is only true though for direct damages that ideally are measurable in a monetary value. Are there cases where it helped keeping goods in the commons. I for one would love to sue everyone who fishes in the ocean because I'd rather watch the fish and sleep well at night knowing the ocean isn't being ruined. Simpler and less controversial example would be pollution of the air we are all breathing.

The good news is that most of these commons issues are related to ecosystems on earth, which are blissfully absent in space.

I'm curious to see if or how long that will hold true. We already have been seeing outcry over light pollution caused by SpaceX massive satellite formation.

I'd say low earth orbit is qualitatively different from, say, an asteroid somewhere.

Who do i sue over global warming?

That’s one legal concept, and one that’s consistent with common law: law is made through court rulings and decisions.

But it’s not the only legal concept, nor the most dominant or best, and in civil law systems, it’s required that all law be available and readable for free for the public, which means law has to be written into laws, and can’t be defined through court rulings.

The U.S. has both statutory and common law. They're not mutually exclusive.

True, but in civil law systems, with minor exceptions, only statutory law counts. Why should the US system dominate in space?

Another question is: why should the US decide what happens in space? That’s quite an imperialistic view on the world.

From a practical point of view, it's likely that much space law will be decided by the countries that send stuff into space. That seems reasonable since they have a clear vested interest in protecting their citizens, the possessions of their citizens and regulating the activities of their citizens.

That's not really imperialism, just a matter of responsibility. Clearly the US and any other space going nation should be held responsible for the activities of it's citizens and enterprises in space as elsewhere, and has responsibilities towards them as well.

Where that line of reasoning reaches the end of it's tether is when we come to consider property rights over pre-existing assets and territory in space.

staticautomatic isn't saying the US system should necessarily be dominant, they're just pointing out that the two systems aren't mutually exclusive.

I’m not saying they are, but it is a question that presents itself given the context.

I'm not saying it should. I'm just saying that we don't face a choice between one or the other.

Is it much different than the laws of the sea? Sometimes laws spur innovation. If the law is: first one to establish a base owns it then there will be a lot of effort put into establishing a base.

According to one of the earliest space lawyers in the '80's, maritime law is largely the foundation.

Then the question becomes: what counts as a "base" and how much of the surrounding land or other relevant resources are deemed to belong to the base?

Personally, I think land ownership claims around unmanned probes, rovers, and stationary facilities should be kept small, and claims around manned homesteads should not be more than about a mile radius or so, probably less. In the beginning, I think it's good to have policies that encourage settlements with different owners to be located close together, without anyone becoming a real-estate baron. The best land should go to those who have the ability to actually use it, not real-estate speculators.

See also: https://xkcd.com/2125/ as an example of how land claims shouldn't work.

Yea, I would say continuous occupation by natural persons for a certain amount of time.

Jurisdiction might prove a challenge here (state/federal courts?) but we already deal with this kind of things on oceans so I'm sure we'll muddle through like we usually do.

> The best way to deal with space would probably be to let judges stretch earth law

Step 0: Which ones? US judges? Chinese judges? Maybe Saudi ones?

> let judges stretch earth law (property rights, whatever)

Time to churn out those cornucopia machines.

This seems like the classic case of common law against civil law.

Isn't that pretty much what the US Constitution was?

It would have been if the US was the first country.

The United States Constitution wasn't even the first constitutive document of the United States! It was very much informed by the experiences, not only of other countries, but also very much of the Articles of Confederation.

Pretty sure as soon as there is permanent human habitation in space, any "Space Law" as determined by Earth lawyers is going to become wishful thinking really quickly. Good luck trying to enforce mining rights or even copyright on Ceres, using Earth law.

Its pretty easy to enforce if the disputes are between two parties that are at all Earth based. There will be a significant period of permanent habitation before there is self sustaining habitation. And you really cant afford to tell earth to screw off until you're self sufficient.

I hope you won't be the lawyer who delays a food shipment to mars/moon because of some petty copyright dispute.

Self sufficient may not be enough either. A rebelling colony needs guns, not just food

>is space mining even legal?

Who's gonna stop you?

It is for all intents and purposes wild west...except constrained by which geopolitical relationships the launching country/company is keen to maintain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Space_Launch_Compet... USA recently allowed it for their citizens

If you are going to bring your kind stuff back to earth, earthlings might stop you.

Let's send a copy of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress to members of legislative bodies contemplating space legislation ;-)

At least, we still have to wait a few decades for the "boom in human activity" there

Boom, how many people are in space?

Only about five people. But there's also an economy almost unrelated to those people that brings in $330,000,000,000 a year via satellites of various sorts. And if more of the internet starts getting routed through LEO that number is likely to go up a lot.

Satellites and rockets have a lot of regulation. SpaceX for example needed FCC approval before launching test satellites for it’s internet project.

Satellites seem largely unregulated because they impact such a small number of things. It’s not not like the FDA is relevant when it’s all photons being sent back and forth.

>Satellites seem largely unregulated

Also, because when a company like Swarm launches even after their licenses are denied, all they get is a slap on the wrist.

There are a lot of regulations but if you read the article it's about ways in which current regulation of space are proving inadequate.

Is that an actual statistic on the space economy? Do you have a source?

I've actually seen larger numbers, but that's probably ballpark

Launch is the part of the space industry that gets the most consistent PR, but it's a relatively small piece of the pie. A rocket launch may cost $50-300 million, but the payload on that rocket may have cost billions to design and build.

One source for $385 billion in 2017: https://www.uschamber.com/series/above-the-fold/the-space-ec...

Source for $330-350 billion: https://spacenews.com/a-trillion-dollar-space-industry-will-...

https://www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com/

Exactly. See, marslegalcode.org.

I can’t read the article due to a paywall, but don’t laws need an ability for someone to enforce them (police, military, etc.)

There are means to enforce things in space. But they all constitute an act of war, under current agreements.

...paywall...

You can read it if you turn off javascript.

Start by banning plastic straws in space.

Yeah as if Earth doesn't have any other problems right now than putting million of super-rich people into space lol. What a stupid waste of time and resources. Maybe there should be some laws indeed for Earth orbit, for instance, banning densely populated, orbiting space craft, for starters. Or fixing or problems on Earth before spending hundreds of billions on useless space projects. We might not be around long enough to populate space otherwise. Now is not the time...

Ban stuff because.... well, because bah humbug. Humanity can apparently only do one thing at a time. Also you get to decide what people should or shouldn't be allowed to do, and when. Nice.

Interesting comment. So your style of commenting consists of creating arbitrary statements that were not present in other people's comments, ignoring the valid claims they had and sprinkling it with a touch of stupidity of your own?

Anyone who thinks populating space and space governance at this point in time should be a priority, obviously has no idea about where our planet is heading right now. And judging by the utter uselessness of space exploration at this point in time, it's not too hard to realize that these billions spent for landing even just a rover on Mars, would be better invested in any other project that improves the place where we actually live...

You're doing the same silly thinking. Want to 'save the earth's, why not divert the trillions and trillions we waste on military spending? The billions we spend in space have and will pay off a thousand fold.

Yesterday is the time. I keep seeing these 'we must do X here first' posts and they are all built on the same bad lines of thinking. We are never going to solve our problems here on earth sufficiently, that's just how the human condition works. That said as we find new challenges we are great at creating solutions. Trying to say space is a waste of resources is silly, when space is filled with them, and you dont have to worry about many kind of pollution in space. Millions of metric tons of heavy metals that require huge amounts of ecological damage to mine on earth could be refined in space and dropped on earth for example.

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