If someone’s murdered on the International Space Station, what happens? Dr. Saadia Pekkanen is the founding director of the Space Law, Data, and Policy Program at the University of Washington, and is one of the global experts on the rules and diplomacy of outer space policy. She joins host Sean Mobley answer a deceptively simple question: as humans extend our reach into outer space, how do we know what rules to follow?
Link to learn more about Dr. Pekkanen’s work: https://saadiapekkanen.com/
Link to more information about the University of Washington School of Law Space Law, Data and Policy Program: https://www.law.uw.edu/academics/programs/global-business-law-institute/space-ldp
Link to donate to The Museum of Flight: https://pages.museumofflight.org/flight-deck-donate
Transcript after the player.
SEAN MOBLEY: The Flight Deck is made possible by listeners like you. Thank you to the donors who sustain the Museum of Flight. To support this podcast and the Museum's other educational initiatives, visit museumofflight.org/podcast.
[Intro music]
SM: Hello and welcome to The Flight Deck, the podcast of the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington. I'm your host, Sean Mobley. If someone's murdered on the International Space Station, what happens? What about something more mundane like one country's satellite running into another country's satellite? Dr. Saadia Pekkanen is the founding director of the Space Law, Data and Policy program at the University of Washington and is one of the global experts on the rules and diplomacy of outer space policy. She joined me for a conversation about space law, a growing field that deals with highly complex rules that all try to get at the heart of a deceptively simple question: as humans extend our reach into outer space, how do we know who's rules to follow?
[Intro music]
SM: Saadia, thank you so much for joining me today for this discussion on space law. I'm so excited.
SAADIA PEKKANEN: Sean, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here and to talk to an audience from the Museum of Flight.
00:01:29
SM: As this little series that we're doing right now on this podcast about space stations and living in space comes around, this topic is one that I am personally probably the most interested in of all the things we talked about. Because we think about imagining a future where, right now, there's a dozen—not even—people in space at a time, but a future, many years probably in the future, where there is a lot of people living and working in space and building a society, we think about the easy things of just—well, easy—putting people in orbit. But we don't tend to talk about the hard things like what does a society look like? And space law is so much a part of that.
SP: Thank you so much, Sean, for that train of thinking. I, too, agree with your assessment that we shouldn't just focus on the shiny objects in the room but really what it means for human being to live and work in space. And there, as you so correctly say, things like the principles or the norms or the rules by which we all decide to live together and work together in peaceful ways is extremely important. And I think that's where things like the Outer Space Treaty can be important in helping us to set some of those foundational principles as we move forward.
SM: Well, I'm going to bet that a lot of folks might not even know there are treaties about outer space. Why don't we start at just baseline? So what is space law? What is it?
00:02:53
SP: Space law, formally, we have five treaties. We have resolutions. And these have come down to us from the 1960s. Of these, I would say the most foundational is the Outer Space Treaty from 1967, and it is exactly what it says it is. It is a treaty of principles by which we all agree to peacefully interact in space. And so when we talk about, as you were saying earlier, about societies, one of the things that people in the international space community do go back to those principles and seeing, in space, how can we all move along in peaceful ways?
I think it's wrong also to say—you may often hear this—that space is just, in terms of law, it's the Wild, Wild West. Nothing is more wrong. So the entire body of international law is actually written into our understanding of space by virtue of this Outer Space Treaty. So it's a highly legalized law and policy-centric kind of place, and I think that's a good starting point for thinking about some of the principles more cohesively as we begin to shift into space.
SM: So how do we even—going to the Outer Space Treaty, how do they even start thinking about making laws about space? What examples did they try to build off of?
SP: Because this is a treaty of principles—so we have principles like peaceful exploration or peaceful uses of outer space, about what your duties are to make sure that other countries and other actors can also continue to do what they want to do in space without any kind of harmful interference from others. And so the whole thrust of the Outer Space Treaty is to lay down the foundations for how countries can peaceably interact in space. So who's responsible when something goes wrong? What happens when astronauts have to come back? What do we do with space objects that may either be on the Moon such as Apollo artifacts or when they're coming back down to Earth? So I think those were some of the general things that people had begun to think about, but we're at a very different stage today where it's not just states that are involved in outer space or setting the principles. We also have a lot of commercial actors that are heavily involved.
00:05:16
As with any principles, we have to interpret those principles for the times that we are in and our objectives with respect to where we want to be, say, on the Moon. So a good example of that is something like the Artemus Accords led by the United States, which is again about an interpretation of the Outer Space Treaty in the context of setting up and working on settlements on the Moon as well. So I think that that's the arc of the narrative when we look from the Outer Space Treaty to where we are today. We have a lot of principles. How do we interpret those principles, like peaceful uses of outer space, in a way that comports with everybody's national interest, but that also allows countries to carry out activities that they think are important for their commercial actors? So it's a very exciting time to bring those strands together at this stage of history.
SM: When we talk about space law, it can seem so distant, right? We're talking about living in space. Often, it's very—it's like a future thing. And then you also talked, too, about commercial enterprises, and most people aren't funding space businesses. They do exist. But what importance do you see that space law has to just an average person who's walking around Earth living their daily life? Why should they care? Why does it matter to them?
00:06:37
SP: And that's also a very important question I think. So I think if I step back and say that we tend to think that space is all about rockets or settlements or Moon bases or space stations, a significant part of the outer space axis actually involves satellites. And those satellites actually affect our daily living commercially, economically, in terms of position navigation and timing, and so all those things down here become extremely important. And when we think about space, I think people have this idea that it's just rockets. It's this or Earth economy that is a big part of outer space—appears today.
And so it affects at a pretty fundamental level, Sean, the way that we communicate, the way that we transact across borders, and morphing over into the military side of things. The protection of those assets is also extremely important because a lot of people depend on them. Our modern way of living depends on these assets. As with any kind of critical infrastructure, that's where we are in terms of—you will miss it if it's gone. I think that most people don't realize how much their life run in and through space today.
SM: The thing that's interesting about that, too, is that even people who may not directly utilize some of that technology are still impacted by it. I think about conversations I've had with—we think of space, at least in the US, we think of the space stations and the Moon landings. We don't think about the technology part because it is so engrained in us. But I've had some interesting conversations with leaders in the space industry in developing countries who—they rely on satellites for things like weather data so that they can understand what's going to happen with the agriculture in their country. So even people in a developing country who may or may not have internet, they're still benefitting from the information that they're getting.
00:08:39
SP: It's all about space data, how—who gets it, how do we access it. How does it actually help our economic and political operations on the ground? I think that those are the important things that we have to think about. I think it's very exciting to think about Moon bases. It's very exciting to think about space stations. But where we are at this stage in history is that we have these satellites that are really forming a critical infrastructure for humanity on a planetary basis, so everything from environment to weather, as you mentioned.
SM: Along those lines, though, the negative side of some of these things, people are becoming more aware of stuff like space junk, right? There's a lot of satellites that are just out there. What rules exist today? And where do you see shifts and changes in making sure that things like space junk—all these satellites that remain in orbit and may be dead and not doing anything, but they're just there and getting in the way and collision hazards and light hazards—where do you see that going? Where do you see that changing?
SP: Yeah. No, I think that that's a very important problem to deal with because you can get space junk both through accidents, but you can also get it through deliberate actions that increase the size of space debris. And the question for many policy analysts and legal analysts, stepping back, is what are the rules or the principles that are going to govern this kind of interaction? And it's an important question to ask because we have significant amount of activities in terms of mega-constellations that are also, as we discussed earlier, fueling our modern way of living. So I would say that the most important thing is that there is now a public conscious that there is such a problem. I think that that's a very important step forward.
00:10:21
And then, second, governments have taken steps to have debris mitigation guidelines, and there's also now, of course, a movement to have things like space traffic coordination. Because in addition to space junk, we have such expanding mega-constellation satellites, we need to make sure that everything—we're being safe and secure at all times. And to do that, we need to build a picture of—a map of what is out there, how is it moving, where is it going. And that's the work for traffic coordination going forward. This is a hard job. I think the US is doing work on this, of course, but I think other countries are eventually also going to come on board.
So just as we built civil safety for airplanes, it's also important to build that safety for our satellites and other spacecraft. Having said that, I think the problem is also one of clearing up the space debris that is there, and there are companies that are out there that are looking at what is possible in terms of being able to clean up that junk. You have this plastic in the oceans, and you have this junk in space. It's hard to do. And it's hard to do for legal reasons but also practical reasons. The legal reason is that anything that is out there that you, Sean, maybe lost belongs to you, so you have to have permission for other players to come and actually do this.
00:11:45
And we're beginning to see governments and companies coming together and having agreements on what can be deorbited and when. The other way that I think we're making progress is that we're also trying to figure out what is a safe distance that objects should be kept apart, and at what point should we notify the spacecraft or objects that are there? Again, I think that this is something that, as I said, the US is, of course, taking a lead on but that will involve commercial enterprises, that will involve our partners around the globe, and it's a very, very important task going forward.
SM: How has the negotiation of these treaties over the last half-century or more actually, at this point, how has that been a foreign policy exercise? I guess that's the question. We're talking about height of the Cold War, right, for the early treaties. How has it made countries have to sit down with each other over this topic, and has it been good? Has it been bad? How has it influenced larger foreign policy?
SP: I think that's another great question. So when I look back at the history, at the height of the Cold War, the US and the USSR actually sat down to negotiate these treaties and, particularly, the Outer Space Treaty, which was the foundational treaty that then affected all the other treaties that came after it. So I remain hopeful not that there will be other treaties but that countries that may see themselves as antagonists might also be able to sit down on the basis of those treaties and think about how to interpret them in order to have peaceful uses of outer space.
00:13:22
Now, having given you the optimistic version, let me also just step back and say that we are at a stage where we are not negotiating any new treaties, and I don't see in any foreseeable future that any such treaty is going to come about and replace what we had before. So in a lot of ways, the work that is being done now concretely is the interpretation of something like the Outer Space Treaty to inform the principles and the norms that will affect our ability to be able to do next generation kind of things, so space stations, Moon bases. How do we interact as human beings with other human beings from different countries in peaceful ways?
So I would say that when I look back since the late 1960s, I'm really filled with hope and optimism that, yeah, international law did its job. The question now is can we interpret that to fit the new realities today? That I think is where we are, and I think the Artemus Accords is a good way to think about what those principles might be, but I would not expect any formal, big, multilateral treaties to take place. I think the interpretation in accords and in agreements is really the way forward.
SM: You've mentioned the Artemus Accords a few times. What is new and different about them that older treaties maybe didn't address or older agreements didn't address?
00:14:47
SP: The Artemus Accords are very much tethered to the Outer Space Treaty principles, so they talk about the global benefits of space exploration and commerce. And I think one of the big differences that I think we are grappling with at this very moment is that at the time that these treaties were designed, there were very few players. The US and the USSR were in the lead. Certainly companies were involved since the beginning of the Space Age, but not to the extent and degree to which they're involved today. And so that makes a difference in terms of how do we fashion a world where we, of course, reward innovation but then also step back and remain tethered to these principles of peaceful explorations of outer space?
So a couple of things. If you look at the Artemus Accords, one of the controversies that emerged in light of those accords was that people thought, oh, this is all about having space mining and allowing countries to disregard—a very important principle in the Outer Space Treaty is that there is no exertion of national sovereignty is outer space. Nobody can own the territory of the Moon. But if you look at the accords very carefully, what they're saying in terms of safety zones is that, look, everybody can have safety zones but just so long as we have notification, so long as there's no harmful interference, so long as you give due regard to the concerns of other countries. We should be all able to go get along as we set up the societies that you were talking about, the setting up of the infrastructure.
00:16:25
So I would say that realistically we're at the stage where maybe this is beginning to come to fruition and it is, of course, a test of international law as well as the Outer Space Treaty in terms of how it's being interpreted in the context of the Artemus Accords. Now, having said that, on the US side, I think the Artemus Accords now have over 40-plus countries that have signed on to the principles as well. And they're open; they're out there. You can see what they're all about. We can have discussions and debates about them, but it is one interpretation of the Outer Space Treaty. And on the other side, we have also another exciting venture led by China, Russia, and other countries who are interested in putting an international lunar research stations on the Moon as well.
And so it's vitally important as they go for the same areas on the Moon, for landings and so on, that there be some deconfliction in place so that countries can carry out these missions in peaceful ways so that they are not conflicting on these bodies as well. So to answer your question really in this very longwinded way, we have the Outer Space—especially the Outer Space Treaty principles continuing, but we're also having to interpret them in light of the different commercial circumstances and the different geopolitical situation in which we find ourselves today. And that is really the test for the legal system, the space law regime going forward, how will that continue and what that actually means.
Now, another very prohibitive thing in terms of the space treaty is that you are not supposed to put weapons of mass destruction in orbit, right, so you can't have nuclear weapons in space. So when we hear about countries that are today potentially stationing such weapons in space, it really makes us question about whether or not the Outer Space Treaty itself will be something that survives going forward. Because it shreds one of the bedrock principles within the treaty itself.
00:18:28
SM: Yeah. There's a certain element when you're talking about space of like, okay, who's going to make me?
SP: So it's for international law in general. It's not a question of punishment or enforcement. It's really a question of principles that guide behavior. It's about the norms that you internalize and think, oh, okay. If I want to be treated a certain way, I should make sure that others are treated a certain way. And so I think that is where we are. That's why I keep saying principles because, in the end, it is about principles and norms that guide human behavior and human interaction. And you are absolutely correct that nobody can force any state to do anything that the state doesn't want to do.
In the final analysis, countries can also withdraw from the Outer Space Treaty if it's not serving their interest, but I think that as things shape up, there will be more of an emphasis on the commercial aspects in which the US is such a leader but also about the principles that will guide some of that activity. And that I think has remained very consistent since Trump, under Biden, and then back to Trump. Probably likely to continue in terms of the principles that are in place, at least for the US side.
00:19:43
SM: Yeah. And speaking of military, I remember a couple years ago under the Trump Administration when the Space Force was announced, a lot of discussion just as to whether that was legal, right? Because we hear about militarization, and I think people may be vaguely aware that space is to be used for peaceful purposes as principle, but, yeah. There was a lot of discussion, I remember, when that announcement came out of like, "Can we do this? Is this a violation of the treaty? How does this change what we've gone by in the decades prior?"
SP: Yeah. So I would say that the Outer Space—again, the treaty is very clear, and I think if you look at the realities across the principle spacefaring countries, space forces are now part and parcel of almost every military in the world. So it's not just the US. It's Russia; it's China; it's Japan; it's India. And so it's a fact that we have to deal with. In terms of when you think about the fact that it's military personnel that have actually been in space and, especially during the Apollo program, what you realize is that it's not military personnel that are per se—it's the fact that you are carrying out shooting wars in space that I think is a problem. So militarization is something that has been consistently with us in many different ways, both because of the military personnel that have been involved and also because the technology is dual use, right?
So the same technology that is used for commercial and civilian purposes can also be used for military purposes. So the problem I think is not so much militarization as weaponization, and I think that that is the most active concern that we have today. How do we prevent the stationing of nuclear weapons? How do we ensure that things are not blown up? How do we ensure that space weapons, which are also very difficult to define, do not completely transform the domain into one that is primed for war? So I think that that's the stage at which we are today, not militarization but really weaponization, and that I think is something that it'll be interesting to see what the Trump Administration takes that issue on
00:22:11
But for your listeners, I would say that that is where the state of the art debates are at the moment. And it's not so much missiles anymore. It's more things like cyber warfare that is running in and through space. So those are the things that we are worried about when we think about space. But as I say, you have to balance. So if you—if we only talk about that—what you think is, "Oh my God. The world is—space is coming to an end," I don't think that that is true. You have to balance what is going on there with the exciting innovations and commercial enterprises that many countries around the world are also interested in doing. So a balance between those two is I think extremely important when we think about safety and security and sustainability in space.
SM: Yeah. So on that note, as space history has changed over the decades, how have other countries like EU nations—or Japan has become a major player. How has their entry into space law and work in space law shaped them on the global stage?
SP: Oh, that is such a wonderful question. Let me speak about Japan in particular. Because the EU also does it, but Japan has done a very good job of actually helping to educate up-and-coming spacefaring countries about what space law is all about and how it can be transformative for their own civil, commercial, and realities within their own countries. The EU also I think does a lot of training in that respect. China also does a lot of that training and helps raise awareness about that. So when we look at how these countries have tethered their foreign diplomatic space diplomacy in the context of the wider space regime, what you realize is that they are actively helping up-and-coming spacefaring countries to act on the basis of the existing principles that we have.
00:24:08
And I think that that's a very good thing, no matter who is doing it. And there are now I think more than 80-or-so countries, a lot of them new countries, that are interested in space. They are setting up their own agencies. They are setting up their own national space laws, and those are, again, consistent with the international space law regime, and a lot of that work is the work of space diplomacy. The European Union, Japan, China and also, of course, the United States, through something like the Artemus Accords, is helping to spread and anchor international space law in these up-and-coming countries.
SM: So you have founded a center that studies these topics here in Seattle, and I know there's other activity around this is Seattle. Why Seattle? Why is Seattle a hotbed for this stuff?
SP: Well, listen, we have the Space Needle. That's the most important [unintelligible 00:25:02].
SM: [Laughter]
SP: I mean, of course the Apollo—one of the buggies that was on the Moon, was, as the Museum of Flight knows well, that was actually produced right here thanks to Boeing. So we have a long history that I think we need to leverage when we think about space. It's part of our DNA in some ways, and I think people don't quite realize how much it is a part of our DNA culturally, technologically, historically. I think that Seattle has played—Washington state has played an extraordinarily important part. One of the things that we are trying to do at the university is to not just focus, as I was saying earlier, on the shiny objects—we tend to focus on the shiny objects—but also think meaningfully about what it mean for human beings. What does it mean for the middle masses of humanity when we are thinking about space?
00:25:53
So that's the job of the Space Law, Data and Policy program that I helped set up at the law school and that I run now, and we are attempting to raise some of the issues and the questions that need to be asked and that I think we can play an important role as a convening place to our Space Diplomacy Symposium going forward. And I think that that's educational not just for our students but also useful as countries begin to grapple really in a new world order about how we should be thinking about space and who should lead things forward. And I'm hoping, over the years, you will also join us. I hope your audiences will join us. But we do have the Space Diplomacy Symposium running every year, and the next one will be on 7th of November, 2025, in case you're interested in coming.
SM: Get your calendars out.
SP: [Laughter] Thank you.
00:26:47
SM: I think it's really easy to illustrate just how complex these topics are with just some simple examples. One that's very everyday is the question of, as you said, sovereignty or claiming. Earth needs a resource. There's asteroids that have the resource. So the question of if a private company from the US launches a satellite to retrieve—or from space object and bring it back, who does that belong to? Can they claim ownership? It very quickly becomes, at least to us uninitiated, a philosophical minefield.
SP: That's absolutely a great question. So imagine that you have a little fishing boat, and you want to go out and fish. What you do is that you get your government to give you a license. You go out and you fish, and you come back with that haul. It doesn't mean that you're actually owning the oceans or anything like that, right? And so in the same way, when you extend that analogy to our space, this is the way that people have begun to conceive of it is that just because you go out and mine doesn't mean that you're actually going to own the territory underneath. So based on the principles that we have in place today, there is no national appropriation of any territory in space.
So if you read something like the Artemus Accords, it's very clear that just because we're engaged in mining in safe and sustainable ways, it's just because we set up safety zones for operational reasons. It doesn't mean that we are claiming that celestial piece belongs to whoever sets that up. And the other thing I do want to say is that, under our existing international space law of frameworks, states, governments continue to have supervising authority including over commercial enterprises that may be acting in space. So there are licenses. The governments are responsible. I think that this is completely consistent with the international space law regime that we have in place today.
00:28:50
SM: There's less relatable questions that are interesting to investigate nonetheless. Just very recently reading about Sergei Krikalev, who launched as a Soviet cosmonaut and he was in space when the Soviet Union collapsed.
SP: Oh!
SM: And the Soviet Union didn't exist anymore, but the plan when he was launched was to land him I believe in what was no longer Soviet territory. It was one of—I believe Kazakhstan. And so it's like, well, now what? He was kind of stuck up there because they had nowhere for him to go because new agreements had to be made. The Soviets landed their people on land, and so this was the plan. They weren't going to drop him in the ocean like we think of with Apollo and Mercury and stuff like that. It's just like, whoa. [Laughter]
00:29:43
SP: Also, I would say, in that case, we must remember that based on the principles that we have in place, your duty is always of course to help human beings, so you always want to be involved in the rescue of astronaut. But you also raise a very important point, I think, more foundationally which is that, as conditions change, can the law actually keep up, and how fast can it keep up? So that's one issue that's raised. And then the other issue that you're raising, very importantly, is about the safety of the human beings that are actually there. So I would say that safety of human beings becomes paramount, and it is, in a sense, extremely important to keep in mind. If we think about, as many of our billionaires like to dream about, that we will have millions of people working in space, so how do we ensure that the health, the safety—and what are the protocols and the things?
That I think is an extremely important frontier in terms of space law and how we design the governing systems to make sure that—I don't know—our friends or our grandchildren can actually do that in peaceful ways? I think what I love about the law is that every time something changes, you have to figure out can it stretch, or can it not stretch? What needs to be fixed? But in the end, as I say, it is about the safety of human beings. It's about our desire to explore and set down roots beyond Earth, starting with the Moon and maybe, under the Trump Administration, on Mars. Who knows? And how do we do that in a way that's consistent with our space law regime that also pushes forward the frontier?
SM: What do you think is the most pressing question that really needs to be resolved for whatever is the most immediate, next step for humanity in space?
00:31:30
SP: So I think space junk, which you mentioned, I think that is a threat I think to the safety and security of spacecraft, so I think that that's something that we need to keep an eye out for. But back here down on Earth, I think geopolitically there's lots of tensions between countries. And, again, I would say, historically, if the US could sit down with the USSR to devise peaceful ways for civil exploration of space, there's no reason to think that the US couldn't again help lead the formation of new types of agreements that could ensure safety and security in space going forward.
SM: Well, that seems like a nice point to stop on right there, that point of optimism for the future, one that we hope we can pass on to our kids and our grandkids and many generations to come. Well, thank you so much for joining me for this. This just feels like such a tip of the iceberg conversation, Saadia. [Laughter]
SP: It is a tip of the iceberg, and that's why I say please come and join us at what we're doing at the University of Washington. Come to our Space Diplomacy Symposium. Join us for our seminars. Because we're at the moment where we're all learning and trying to figure out what is the best way to live together and work together in space peacefully.
SM: And where can people learn more about the symposium and the center and your work and this work in general?
00:32:54
SP: If you google Space Law, Data and Policy program at the UW school—you can also google my name and hopefully all that stuff at the University of Washington that we're doing will pop up.
SM: Awesome. Well, thanks again. Have a great day.
SP: Thank you so much, Sean. It was great to be here.
[Outro music]
SM: Thank you for tuning into this episode of The Flight Deck, the podcast of The Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington. A transcript of this episode is available in this episode's show notes, which you can find at museumofflight.org/podcast. The Flight Deck is made possible by the Museum of Flight's donors, everyday people who are excited about sharing these sorts of stories. Special thanks to all of you for your support. If you like what you heard, please subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you downloaded us from. And please rate and review the show. It really does help spread the word. Until next time, this is your host, Sean Mobley, saying to everyone out there on that good Earth, we'll see you out there, folks.
00:34:04
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