How Not to Deal with Murder in Space (2020) | Hacker News Reader

How Not to Deal with Murder in Space (2020)

slate.com

126 pointsHooke67 comments

What the article fails to explain is that there are three broad categories of jurisdiction: territorial, personal, and subject-matter. Courts require all three jurisdictions to have power to hear a case; certainly in Common Law jurisdictions, but analytically the basic breakdown and principles carry over to any legal system.

When it comes to international relations, the point of tension almost always regards territorial jurisdiction. Exercise of territorial jurisdiction usually reflects an absolute and exclusive claim over resources, people (i.e. personal jurisdiction), and activities (i.e. subject-matter jurisdiction). But not always, and not necessarily. One way to cabin the effect of territorial jurisdiction when there exist or could exist overlapping claims of authority is to carefully qualify personal and subject-matter jurisdiction. (Remember, you need all three.) If you grant a court territorial jurisdiction but qualify personal and subject-matter jurisdiction to eliminate or minimize conflicting effective jurisdiction, then nobody will mistake your claim of territorial jurisdiction for a power grab.

The Slate article conspicuously doesn't mention that both the perpetrator and victim of the murder on T-3 were American nationals, perhaps because it would have simplified the problem and made the solution obvious to people without a legal background, even if they couldn't articulate it in legalese. From a theoretical perspective the fact that one of the parties, especially the perpetrator, was American basically resolves the whole thing. Nobody will care about your claim of territorial jurisdiction if you qualify personal jurisdiction to your own nationals. That's why the United States requiring and enforcing nationals living abroad to pay Federal income tax, even for foreign-sourced income, doesn't result in international incidents even though in such cases there's significant jurisdictional overlap--multiple sovereigns are laying claim to the same people and assets, but not in a threatening sense that nation-states would care about.

So the answer to T-3 was obvious. The only real problem was that the statutes and organic law granting jurisdiction at the time were too narrow on their face, and the courts were reticent to read into them jurisdiction, as American courts usually are (reticent). Predictably, and per Wikipedia, the consequence of T-3 was the passage of 18 U.S. Code § 7(7):

> The term "special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States", as used in this title, includes: ... (7) Any place outside the jurisdiction of any nation with respect to an offense by or against a national of the United States.

-- https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/7#7

Now, that still requires in any particular case answering the question of whether another state had jurisdiction at the time of some event, but that question (or at least that type of question) is unavoidable. You don't need a complex, comprehensive international treaty and framework to resolve and fix these problems. In fact, it's usually premature to that do that without actual experience of real-world incidents as there is no universal solution to or metric for balancing competing jurisdictional interests. (Just as in programming: the best solution to a functional problem often only makes itself known after you see and analyze real-world cases. Often by trying to solve problems anticipatorily you end up with unnecessary and burdensome complexity, plus an incomplete solution because of unforeseen cases and exceptions.) Anyhow, international treaties can only ever offer incremental improvements, if at all, by applying the same basic principles and technique in ever finer detail. Thus we have clause 6,

> (6) Any vehicle used or designed for flight or navigation in space and on the registry of the United States pursuant to the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies and the Convention on Registration of Objects Launched into Outer Space, while that vehicle is in flight, which is from the moment when all external doors are closed on Earth following embarkation until the moment when one such door is opened on Earth for disembarkation or in the case of a forced landing, until the competent authorities take over the responsibility for the vehicle and for persons and property aboard.

Which basically applies to spaceships the rule that already existed regarding traditional ships in international maritime law. I can imagine the courts of some countries assuming such jurisdiction implicitly by analogy with or extension of [their interpretation of] maritime law, without requiring new statutes. Indeed, that's how international maritime law developed--organically from practical necessity, basic legal principles, and recognition of customary behavior, usually preceding formal codification, if any.

The basic problems here are not at all new, and the answers are not at all difficult from an abstract perspective, especially once you recognize that overlapping claims of authority are natural and unavoidable--it's only the consequences that ultimately matter. (Indeed, reconciling conflicting claims of right is fundamentally what any legal system is about.) The issues only get "thorny" on a very technical level. Journalists and academics often use slight of hand (e.g. not specifying nationality) to make issues appear as weighty dilemmas, otherwise nobody would pay them any attention. Plus, people like reading about "gotchas" in the law, as it reinforces their notion that the law is arbitrary and contrary to common sense.

First, I'd like to express appreciation for a thoughtful and nuanced comment about how this might apply to space, and the boundaries of (extraterritorial?) law. This feels like a remarkably poignant summary of the issues involved, at least to an amateur.

While you did carve out the exceptions earlier for (my summary) laws essentially being created in reaction to actual events occurring, I think this misses some novel aspects at hand here. Citizenship, and by proxy the (choice?) of personal jurisdiction for persons born on another celestial body are certainly not issues that maritime law can provide absolute analogies for, if these realities come to pass with long term inhabitation.

As I think your comment implies, OST is wholly insufficient for any of these new problems, and so it does seem clear that there is a need to resolve ambiguities that might result from these scenarios via new international space agreements. How might we expect those to play out?

There's also the fact that ratification of OST (wholly or partially) might perhaps bring some standing to the issues at play, but there's really not all that much preventing a dissenting government from exiting it as well, despite international (Earth) condemnation. Orphaned citizens in space? Might sound crazy, but the fall of the Soviet Union did result in exactly this scenario for an astronaut that had to go through a harrowing survival situation for a very long time until things were resolved down on Earth.

> Orphaned citizens in space? Might sound crazy, but the fall of the Soviet Union did result in exactly this scenario for an astronaut that had to go through a harrowing survival situation for a very long time until things were resolved down on Earth.

In the grand scheme of things a handful of murderers going free or a ship of people stranded in space isn't the end of the world, and for almost everybody else they would be nothing more than a curiosity. These are hypotheticals that are easy to personify and therefore may seem to require urgent attention, but that's mostly illusory. (As evidenced by the fact that even when we use supposedly "real life" stories, we leave out many of the most important details; details that almost always admit of other possible endings easily reached.) The "plight" of the Mir cosmonaut paled in comparison to the plight of people down below, and in any event it's difficult to imagine a treaty having accounted for this kind of event--dissolution of a state. It may have been just as likely that a treaty would have bound the hands of signatories; signatories who might otherwise have permitted him to land--lawfully, unlawfully, or otherwise--when he truly neared the end of his rope.

At their best treaties improve the consistency and application of normative international law, and on occasion accelerate their maturation. But at their worst treaties become dumping grounds for wants rather than needs, ideals rather than practicalities; and thus are likely to injure consistency and fair application of the law in the long-term. And unlike domestic statutory laws, treaties can be very difficult to change. From a real politick perspective states are free to ignore them, but in doing so they injure the effectiveness of other treaties and the rule of law generally. (See how pharmaceutical companies have effectively locked the United States into a strong patent regime based on a complex system of multilateral and bilateral treaties.)

My only point is that these matters are not as urgent as often described and rarely without alternative remedies. Legal systems aren't usually so brittle and technical that they fall apart in the face of such seemingly novel events. And in any event, in the realm of international law and international relations avoiding the possibility of technical gaps a priori is not and should not be a high priority, and can have significant unintended consequences which are far more difficult to rectify than most other areas of the law. Letting experience and exigency be our guide might seem lazy, but it also helps keep the system accountable and grounded when there are very few mechanisms for achieving that.

From a practical standpoint, if a private space company were to move its center of operations to outer space it may end up as its own "state". As long as it has people loyal to the company owners, it could create its own rules and fend off any nation that tries to take jurisdiction. This would be similar to a feudal lord enforcing his own rules with a small army of private retainers. Realistically though, this would only happen on an independent base on Mars or the Moon, or a fully self-sufficient space station. Otherwise, Earth-dependence would allow nations to influence space operations and push their jurisdiction into outer-space, similar to European colonial endeavors. Maybe the solution is to create a new, separate state that has jurisdiction and military control over the entirety of outer space not tied to any particular nation?

The thing about a space colony is an invasion is not too easy. On the other hand, a blockade is pretty easy.

Thirdly: A debilitating attack if you don't seek to preserve anything of the colony, is also relatively easy.

If the colony has one or more nukes it could establish mutually assured destruction or at least a significant deterrent.

And so shall history echo with rhymes, even in a vacuum.

Well, a habitat with propulsion in space is itself a deterrent.

For a colony further up the gravity well that produces resources locally, "rods from god" style weapons suddenly make much more sense than for earth-based nations. Nukes might simply not be worth the effort.

You don't need nukes at orbital speeds. A tungsten rod has equivalent power.

Not even close!

An easy way to make upper boundary estimate: let’s say you use Falcon Heavy to deliver your kinetic weapon. Falcon Heavy burns around 500 tons of fuel. This is upper boundary for energy of your payload (since most of the energy goes to lifting rocket itself and air resistance). So even ultra-heavy payload of 64 tons will have way less then 0.5 kilotons of energy (TNT equivalent used for nukes). Any nuke is way beyond that.

Of course, another way to estimate is to not to be lazy and actually multiply mv^2/2. Truly massive 64 ton kinetic weapon reaching target at 7 km/s will have energy of 1.6x10^12 J. Modest 20 kiloton nuke has energy of 8.4x10^13 J. I.e. 50 times more.

> let’s say you use Falcon Heavy to deliver your kinetic weapon.

Why? pick up an NEO and aim for Sydney, or wherever it needs to go. Easy, unless your settlement isn't orbital or you don't have electric propulsion.

What is a NEO?

Near-earth orbit

Thanks. :)

Near-Earth Object. Asteroids around Earth.

There is infinite supply of all sizes of boulders in space that you can just grab and turn into missiles given you have sufficient level of technology.

Thank you. Is there a sci-fi book where NEOs are used that you'd recommend? I'm not too versed in that genre.

(Roughly speaking) Kinetic weapon has as much energy as you spent getting it on orbit from surface, thus fuel in the rocket provides useful estimate and comparison point for energy available. To get from orbit to surface you actually need to slow down, ie reduce energy.

I'm saying you can pick up a large enough rock floating in solar orbit and nudge it to coincide with Earth using electric propulsion. Basically forcing a dinosaur wipeout event in a small scale. Sky's the limit for energy available.

But the problem is that for any rock large enough it will require a lot of energy and time, thus expensive and gives advanced warning.

You're assuming the kinetic weapon originates on Earth, which doesn't apply when talking about a weapon wielded by a space colony against Earth. Instead, you should be calculating how much rock or metal a Falcon Heavy could lift off the surface of the Moon and set onto an Earth-intercepting trajectory, then subtract the kinetic energy that will be lost during reentry (hence the suggestion to use tungsten).

No, I used this estimate as simple way to calculate TNT equivalent. Of course energy of collision is proportional to delta-v. In solar system it’s tricky (or rather very energy-demanding) to achieve delta-v with Earth exceeding 30km/s. Which would require truly massive projectile to compare in energy with nuke.

In this snapshot of a moment, yes. But consider these things:

1. Space colonies, especially remote ones (e.g. not Moon, but Mars or Titan), are strongly motivated to be maximally independent as soon as possible. Whoever leads them must think about the possibility that the supply ships stop coming, either for some temporary disruption (pandemics on Earth, cough, cough, or even a war back home), or permanently (something has gone seriously wrong on the blue planet). And imports from Earth are expensive, because they have to be lifted out of the Earth's gravitational well. This means that the colony will try to produce everything necessary in situ for good reasons; such a colony will not be easily brought to its knees by a blockade.

2. It is easy to block a colony physically, but they will still be able to communicate back to Earth and argue their cause in front of the rest of the humanity. This will undermine the will of Earthly powers to maintain the blockade.

3. We are now in a rare situation when only one nation (the U.S.) is approaching the capability to send ships to the rest of the Solar System. It is not unlike the situation when only the Portuguese mastered the carrack and were the only ones to sail regularly from Europe to India in the late 1400s. But this situation will not last and I would guess that by 2050, at least five or six sovereign entities will have the same capability. By 2100 for sure. And their political differences will be exploited. It is unlikely that all of them would decide to start a common punitive embargo against a rebel colony.

For the point number 3 you might be too much under influence of SpaceX marketing and launches.

China is on their way to mars as well with Tianwen-1, India is ramping up their space program, ESA is launching their stuff with Ariane vehicle as far as Jupiter, Russians with Angara have plan for crewed moon flyby in 2029. So it is not like other nations won't have that capability soon after US and not like US has it right now or next year.

Second part is that there is still not that much of commercial gain in going to Mars, Moon or other place. Most of the money is made in LEO with satellite communications, gps, utilities. Space mining is not going to be profitable for really long time into the future. Where going to India was profitable right away if you had a ship to carry spices you were really ahead of the others. Space ship capability is just the starting point and we still have to find something that is worth enough to send those ships there, even with SpaceX reusable rockets it is still not worth to mine rare earth elements somewhere else in the solar system.

No marketing needed - SpaceX is a decade ahead of all other Earth agencies.

Yes it's very hard to get a soft landing on Mars, and props to any agency that can do it. We expect great things from Tianwen-1. But it's many times harder to develop a complete process to soft land 100mt there, 100 times a year.

This is the same engineering process that spanked ULA, who with a century of experience and head start, has yet to complete its commercial crew rating, plus they are single shot, not reusable.

It is worth studying the East/West Indian Company model that the English used in India. The same is done know by US for space colonisation. Just look at the executive order signed by Trump to explore the moon. Seems like history may not repeat, just rhymes.

The US District Court for China is a better example. It operated in the American concession in Shanghai in the 1930's. Also see the Canal Zone; take a look at the Mars Colony Legal Code drawn from the latter: marslegalcode.org, an effort to answer the question: how much law do we bring with us?

>3. We are now in a rare situation when only one nation (the U.S.) is approaching the capability to send ships to the rest of the Solar System.

That is a very Americanized view of how things are. Unless something goes wrong CNSA will land Tianwen-1 on Mars a week before Percy gets there. Your comment is written in a tiny timeframe where the US is actually at or near the front but looking over time this isn't the case.

The ship analogy is funny too considering that Columbus discovered America with a Spanish carrack fleet 5 years before Da Gama was able to sail around the cape to India.

And speaking of sovereignty & Spanish-Portugal colonization, I wonder what the interstellar version of the Treaty of Tordesillas is gonna look like.

> Maybe the solution is to create a new, separate state that has jurisdiction and military control over the entirety of outer space

Sounds like the Sovereign Military Order of Malta would be a good fit for that. They already have (partial) recognition, but no territory, so taking control of space would fix that anomaly. Also, bizarrely, it wouldn't be the first time they were used as a loophole to solve a political/military problem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Military_Order_of_Ma...

marslegalcode.org

The Space Liability Convention basically says that all space objects are tied to a nation. While that law is designed to make international disputes easier to handle (India can sue the US instead of SpaceX for instance), i think it prevents a space object from claiming sovereignty.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Liability_Convention

Musk has been talking along those lines for his Mars project.

marslegalcode.org introduces a legal code for the Mars Colony and addresses some of these questions. Need a copy of the Code?

As I understand it, murder in space is easy to deal with. You simply call a meeting to decide who the murderer was. After a majority vote, the guilty party is evacuated from the airlock.

Nobody said it can't be dealt with at all. Where's the justice in your approach though?

It's a joke about Among Us.

Justice is certainly a sliding scale. The remote, dependent culture of a space station may have to make hard decision. For instance, out the airlock with the plaintiff because they are expendable and the accused is the only one who can maintain the air recyclers. And so on.

In theory yes, but in practice you'll most likely to face the following issue: in space, people often are specialists. So what if the mechanic goes bananas, kills someone and then it turns out he is the only one with some in-depth knowledge of the engines and letting him out may be even more risky than keeping on board.

Great story, but they forgot to mention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_Death_(Yellowstone), the other candidate, but at a different scale.

In the real world it seems rather likely the presiding judge(s) would follow the spirit rather than the letter of the law.

But how is that fair or logical? How can a subject be convicted of a law that was not violated? The subject has a responsibility to know the law, but how can they if it's not articulated in statute/code? The judiciary would be guessing as to why the legislature left out a specific condition, which would be essentially legislating from the bench.

The spirit of the law is only invoked on the side of leniency (to my knowledge).

See the article, where they 1/2 just happened with a plea bargain not to appeal so the issue would stay unaddressed.

I don't mind judges doing this, but I do mind legislatures not fixing the problem once it's discovered.

That's like regular devs not fixing the bugs "because the admins will just restart the program when it crashes in prod".

It's a mistake to think of states and law as these neat, clearly defined things.

Nowadays law is generally a tool used by a group of people to make coexistence and societal processes smoother.

On the grander scale might makes right and whoever has the ability and will to make and enforce law will do so.

If however there are no laws, there can be no crime, by definition, and thus there is no crime going unpunished.

Does it matter right now? No. Will it in 50 years? Probably not still. Looking at our planet what we understand as modern law has generally only emerged in large groups of people. It's debatable whether any small group truly needs it.

>Does it matter right now? No. Will it in 50 years? Probably not still. Looking at our planet what we understand as modern law has generally only emerged in large groups of people. It's debatable whether any small group truly needs it.

It takes a special lack of self awareness to type this out on an internet forum in 2021.

> Looking at our planet what we understand as modern law has generally only emerged in large groups of people. It's debatable whether any small group truly needs it.

Laws - and hierarchy, generally - evolve with the size of the group that tries to live together. Small tribes of a hundred people didn't need them, but past that number people organically develop structures.

But that's irrelevant to first people living in space. They are not an independent small group, merely a long arm of the large (and increasingly global) society that sent them there. They do not own the ship on which they came, or the station on which they reside. Every artifact they use has investments and expectations of other people embedded in it. Their very presence in space is something commanded by the people back on Earth.

Situation may change if there are space settlements large enough to require their own layer of internal governance (say, 100+ astronauts). These may start pushing towards increased self-governance over time, especially as they maintain and build their own infrastructure and eventually start having children. Of course, existing power structures will be reluctant to let them go, so any independence movement will be of the usual "might makes right" type. But we're very far from that point. Definitely more than 50 years.

T-3 could be analogous to e.g. an asteroid upon which numerous parties have landed. Any built object in which humans might live, however, was built on behalf of a particular party. Everyone onboard was hired by that same party. If you don't like how that party handles incidents of stolen wine, don't hire on.

The people from the next crater over, though, they'll have to approach slowly, in small groups, and only on invitation. If they steal anything they're getting spaced.

I remember reading a long section talking about the applicability of Canadian law, which included a section about it applying to any spaceship where the Queen was aboard in her capacity as the Queen of Canada, but I can't find it now.

I did find this in the Canadian Criminal Code:

https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-46/page-3.html#do...

Space Station — Canadian crew members

(2.3) Despite anything in this Act or any other Act, a Canadian crew member who, during a space flight, commits an act or omission outside Canada that if committed in Canada would constitute an indictable offence is deemed to have committed that act or omission in Canada, if that act or omission is committed

(a) on, or in relation to, a flight element of the Space Station; or

(b) on any means of transportation to or from the Space Station.

Space Station — crew members of Partner States

(2.31) Despite anything in this Act or any other Act, a crew member of a Partner State who commits an act or omission outside Canada during a space flight on, or in relation to, a flight element of the Space Station or on any means of transportation to and from the Space Station that if committed in Canada would constitute an indictable offence is deemed to have committed that act or omission in Canada, if that act or omission

(a) threatens the life or security of a Canadian crew member; or

(b) is committed on or in relation to, or damages, a flight element provided by Canada.

Space law has been written about extensively: https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/search?searchCode=CALL%2B&sear...

But there has only been one suggestion for a comprensive legal code to support the multi-national Mars Colony: marslegalcode.org.

According to Wikipedia, the loophole has since been closed:

> The ambiguity was later resolved (at least for the United States) by an amendment to the Federal Criminal Code, which added a provision establishing federal jurisdiction when "...the offense is committed by or against a national of the United States at a place outside the jurisdiction of any nation", intended in part to address these issues.[6] It became law as 18 U.S.C. § 7(7) in 1984.[7]

Of course, things will get interesting when the offense is committed against the national of another country with the same claim, meaning they would both have jurisdiction.

Minor nitpick: After all, T-3 was in some sense the literal high seas, being high-latitude frozen seawater.

T-3 was an iceberg calved from a glacier, and thus frozen freshwater.

Any earthly law can apply in space only to the extent that people in space can be convinced to comply.

If astronauts don't want to comply, what are we gonna do? Fire a space missile?

There's no need for violence or space rockets. Rather apply a more boring approach: cut supplies and wait patiently, which basically amounts to doing nothing. If the space ship/colony is self sufficient and can operate without supllies, then it can probably declare independence. Anyone not content with that can apply diplomatic pressure or start a space war over it.

There's marslegalcode.org, an effort to provide a comprehensive legal code for the colony. Get a free copy of the code by writing admin at andaluspublishing.com. Then there's the US District Court for China, which exercised criminal jurisdiction over Americans (and a few others) committing crimes in the concessions in China in the 1920's and 1930's.

Contrary to the title it is exactly how to deal with murder in space. Legislation is lacking, but they still did the right thing. Which is probably an easy thing to do in a relative handwavy legislation as in the US.

Somewhat related: what are your favourite murder mystery/detective stories primarily set in space or with interplanetary travel as a major backdrop?

I can hazzard a guess that there has been a murder on the sentinel island, and the sentinalese people handled it.

In the far future ships will be their own islands of justice, unless some overbearing space government tries to protect even those who do not want to be governed. But can that even work, and if so, for how long?

Imagine a libertarian owned spacecraft in which the inhabitants decided to just leave the sphere of influence of that government. Would they be chased? What about children born on that ship? What if those children were abused?

How far should we chase them? I feel like humanity should punish some crimes universally, but murder isn't necessarily the worst crime.

We do need some system of space justice, but I'm not sure what form it should take.

> "inevitable murder in outer space"

Well that's depressing.

I thought space is international water.

So was T-3. FTA:

"After all, T-3 was in some sense the literal high seas, being high-latitude frozen seawater. Except, the law of the sea applies only to navigable areas, and T-3 wasn’t navigable."

Your quote makes the opposite claim.

To me this is the flaw in the article. The T-3 situation was only hard because it wasn’t clear if it was land or sea. But I don’t see why this should be a problem in space, just consider it the high seas.

It isn't obvious that the two contexts are so similar that customs developed in one will be useful in the other.

No it is not obvious. There are entirely different governing laws (Outer Space Treaty vs whatever land or sea treaty applied to T-3, which wasn't clear).

Had this happened in space, with the details otherwise the same, it would be 100% clear which jurisdiction applied: that of the nation which was registered under the OST as responsible for the hab/trailer in which the murder occurred.

Had the murder happened outside of a hab, in EVA suits for example, it would be a bit more complicated. But it is our general understanding that in those circumstances the Law of the High Seas would apply. The specific caveat of the article that was discussed (is a long-lived arctic iceberg a island or international waters?) probably wouldn't apply. All of space is generally assumed to be international waters, for the moment.

We know, Captain Blondebeard, we know.

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