If
astronauts onboard the International Space Station (ISS) run afoul of the law more
than 200 miles (321 kilometers) above Earth, their fate usually depends on where
in the orbital lab the incident occurred.
That legal framework will become a bit more complicated when
a new European Space Agency (ESA) module becomes part of ISS this month.
The space
station currently exists as a legal patchwork of about 16 sovereign territories
– modules and hardware belonging to the United States, Russia, Canada, Europe
and Japan – joined together to form one orbital research platform. Each nation
has legal authority over its part of the space station, as stated in the Outer
Space Treaty of 1967. But no single European nation's law will hold sway over
the ESA's
Columbus laboratory module, which is slated to launch into orbit aboard the
space
shuttle Atlantis Dec. 6, and there is no one overarching European law.
However, astronaut
lawbreakers won't languish in limbo. Earlier this year, European legal experts
agreed on a set of legal rules for Columbus during an conference entitled "Humans in Outer Space – Interdisciplinary Odysseys."
Should
tempers flare and astronauts end up in fisticuffs inside Columbus, the perpetrator's fate would be
decided by the criminal laws of his or her nation. But if the brawl occurred in
an American, Russian or Japanese section of ISS, the perpetrator's fate could
be decided by the criminal laws of his or her victim's nation.
"They
decided that if somebody performs an activity which may be considered criminal,
it is in the first instance his own country which is able to exercise
jurisdiction," said
Frans von der Dunk, of the International Institute of Air and Space Law at the University of Leiden, in a written statement.
Although
astronauts are an exceptionally well-behaved group, other legal concerns may
arise. An invention created by an enterprising astronaut on ISS will be
patented in the nation that has jurisdiction over the module where work took
place, not the nation of the inventor. Innovators onboard Columbus will have a choice of patenting
their work in either Germany or Italy – although European patent agreements make this distinction
less important.
Civil
liability on the space station is another issue. If someone on Earth gets hit
by a car, they can sue the offending driver. If astronauts accidentally damage equipment
in Columbus while doing their usual duties on
the space station, they typically don't have to fear a lawsuit.
"We
are all there together, we all have the same purpose to make the ISS into a big
success and we don't want that attitude, that mentality, to be disturbed by the
threat of one party suing the other," von der Dunk said.
The ESA
decision follows a previous cross-waiver agreement that the spirit of
international cooperation is more important than minor legal squabbling. When a
solar
array on the space station ripped during space shuttle Discovery's mission
in October, the involved astronauts and agencies simply planned and executed a
repair job instead of pointing fingers.
But
"there are a number of exceptions" to the cross-waiver for civil
liability, noted Andre Farand, a senior administrator in ESA's legal department,
in an e-mail interview. For instance, injury or death suffered by
individual astronauts could still lead to legal claims against the organization
which caused the harm.
What murky
areas remain in space law may come from the growing presence of private
interests, whether through space tourism or even astronauts participating in commercial
activities on ISS, said Farand. For the few space tourists who have visited
ISS, Russia proposed the legal rules that other
ISS partners then reviewed and agreed on, according to NASA's legal department.
The
European Columbus laboratory will launch toward the
ISS aboard NASA's shuttle at Atlantis on Dec. 6 at 4:31 p.m. EST (2131 GMT). Click here for SPACE.com's shuttle launch coverage and live
NASA TV feed.
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