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May 12th, 2024
Who Owns Outer Space? – International Law, Astrophysics, and the Sustainable Development of Space by Michael Byers and Aaron Boley; Cambridge University Press/Cambridge Studies in International and Comparative Law (2023); 428 pages; Available by Open Access.
This highly acclaimed book melds space activities, international law, and global governance to underscore major, now-looming, environmental, safety, and security challenges now on full-boil.
Authors Byers and Boley are from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver and this incredibly rich, information-packed book should give the reader pause in how to grapple with perplexing issues of today. The volume offers proposed “actionable solutions” to those challenges.
“Social scientists and lawyers are needed to ensure that solutions are politically feasible, and to carry them forward into lasting rules and institutions. Engineers are needed to develop technologies that can be used in beneficial ways, with environmental scientists guiding us forward by identifying what is beneficial, and what might not be,” they write in the volume’s introduction.
The book is divided into 9 solid chapters: Space Tourism, Mega-constellations, Mega-constellations and International Law, Abandoned Rocket Bodies, as well as sections on Space Mining, Planetary Defense, Space Security, Anti-satellite Weapons and International Law, and ending with a conclusion chapter – Where to from Here?
Credit: DARPA/DSO
That’s a diverse suite of subject topics. But this very readable, fully-referenced book launches a warning flare that space activities of today and tomorrow can be endangered, and just how those undertakings — and space itself — should be sustainably governed.
Who Owns Outer Space? – International Law, Astrophysics, and the Sustainable Development of Space reviews existing international treaties and state practices, but also details limitations in those treaties and practices.
Ideally, by strengthening those elements the hope is to short-circuit calamitous incidents. “War in space has no good outcomes,” they write, while observing that “long-term solutions to grand challenges in space require approaches that integrate multiple disciplines.”
On May 8 of this year, this book won the prestigious 2023 Donner Prize.
Go to this video capturing the views of Byers and Boley at:
For more information about this book, and to gain free access to its contents, go to:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/who-owns-outer-space/960CCB0464744F845B09434D932699EC
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