I'm on this parking garage roof to ask you a simple question: Where's the dividing line
between the air and space? Where does space start? There's the moon up there. So is the
line here? Is it here? Or is it here? There is no line in space.
This is a problem that has plagued space lawyers for more than half a century. And it remains,
even today, one of the biggest problems in space law.
So let's start with the problem and where it came from. I first learned about this issue
in the Journal of Space Law from this article. Space Law seems like a joke.
But as companies like SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin fly more, and more as hypersonic
planes blur the line between space and air, and as countries like China become major space
players, space law will be less of a novelty and more of a big deal. But right now, no
one agrees on where airspace ends and space space begins.
Let's make clear what the problem is. Imagine you want to sue somebody here, or I don't
know you murdered somebody here. Don't do that, though.
You knew you were being trained under American law, not Canadian law, because you're on this
side of the law. Now imagine that line is blurry. Things get pretty confusing. Or imagine
there is no line at all. Things get really, really tricky, really quick. That is the current
situation for space lawyers.
So why can't you just solve this with science? Well, the science doesn't exactly clear up
where that lunch should be. This is Theodore von Karman. And it is hard to overestimate
his impact on NASA and aerospace engineering. One concept drawn from his work is the Karman
line, it's where the atmosphere gets too thin to support airplane flight. It's like a definition
of where space starts. If you follow the Karman line, this is air space.
This is space.
It's around 80 kilometers up, which is backed up by more recent work like this paper by
Jonathan McDowell. But air thins there is not a hard cut off, that Karman line is really
a big blur.
And that means the law has to decide where space is not science. But nobody did that.
before it became a problem.
“Today a new moon is in the sky, a 23 inch metal sphere placed in orbit by a Russian
rocket.”
This is the day that space law became more urgent. On October 4, 1957, the USSR launched
the Sputnik satellite.
“You are hearing the actual signals transmitted by the earth circling satellite, one of the
great scientific feats of the age, in order to date up to hundreds of miles away from
Earth's surface.”
It was basically a beeping ball. But it was the impetus for everything from the intensification
of the Cold War to the creation of DARPA and NASA. We however, are concerned with space
law. Did we do a cool effect on my voice there? Otherwise, I'm gonna sound really dumb. Try
again. We however are focused on SPACE LAW.
That's better. Think about the dilemma here that suddenly becomes a very real problem.
If Soviets flew an airplane bomber over Chicago, it would be World War Three. And Sputnik was
flying over America, just 500 miles over America. So the question was, was it really going over
America if it was so so far away, and should airspace laws carry over into space?
At first, this is what the newspapers freaked out about. They tallied the crossings over
the US and mapped Sputnik's path. But we eventually decided not to launch an international war,
because Sputnik wasn't in airspace. It was in space space. This necessitated new rules
for space. And as a corollary, an idea of where space began, where stuff like Sputnik
became. Okay, I'm not a lawyer. But the relevant treaties, like this one in
Aviation Law, the 1944 Convention on Civil Aviation, which says that signatories own
their airspace, the big space law treaty, the 1967 Treaty on principles governing the
activities of states in the exploration and use of outer space, including the moon and
other celestial bodies, which says, outer space, including the moon and other celestial
bodies is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty.
Nobody owns the stuff in space. So Sputnik helped to settle one space problem, it created
this golden neutral zone that we call space. But the countries of the world never got together
to decide exactly where space started.
Timothy Nelson, space lawyer, describes the mess of approaches to align defining space
in this op-ed.
There's a distance rule, just 100 kilometers or whatever, flat. Most aeronautical regulators
use this, but they aren't all powerful. There's the von Karman line around 80 kilometers with
that scientific patina around it. And there's the lowest spot satellites can orbit in a
bit higher at 125 kilometers. And though the leader of Space Command and Space Force said
that their military turf began at 100 kilometers and above, which makes it seem like that's
where the United States to define space, the United States actually refuses to officially
state where space starts, and they give astronaut wings to anybody who crosses 80 kilometers,
or about 50 miles.
You can imagine the problems. We have a blurry or non-existent line for government and corporate
use of space in the area without a clear rule.
Because the space line— it's blurry. Space law is not a joke anymore. I will admit
that by page 500 or so of “How high the sky: The definition and delimitation of outer
space and territorial airspace in international law,” I started to think things would eventually
coalesce around that 100 kilometer mark, that's where the space line would be drawn. But at
this point, that line would likely be drawn by the decisions of an international court,
not by the world's governments or by the people of Earth.
This weird debate shows just how hard international law can be to create and sustain, because
we can't even agree on the terms. It also shows the unanticipated problems of imposing
Earth law under the weirdness of space, we can't decide where space starts.
And we also don't know where that golden neutral zone ends and it becomes a free for all for
every country again, is Saturn still in the neutral space land created by that UN treaty?
Or is there some planet beyond Jupiter where like the United States or China can go and
claim it for their own country?
Space lawyers need that line. It is not there yet, but it will be. Even if we can't see
it.
Okay, that's it for this one. This is literally as close to space as I wanted to get — a
grocery parking lot. But hey, you know, you can see the moon.
Thank you for watching this video. I do history and personal stuff on here. If this interests
you please subscribe and like because it's really helpful at this stage. I've got links
to some of the research below. And otherwise, I hope you have a pleasant night and that
you stay entirely on the earth side of the space line. Alright.