Description
States and space billionaires are rushing to build and settle outer space. Whether it is to build a million-person city on Mars, build a Lunar base with an added theme park, a Lunar research station, or to seed the sky with O’Neel cylinders, there is an increasing push to expand human settlement into outer space. The next 50 years might see the first humans to live, work, and die in space. Humans that will have lost ties with their countries of origin and would have found new communities of belonging.
Unfortunately, international law and the outer space treaty has other ideas. The combination of Articles II (non-appropriation), Article VI (state responsibility), and Article VII (jurisdiction over launched or constructed spacecraft), as well as the general international law prohibition against the recognition of separatist territories, cements the destiny of all future space settlements. Rather than space settlements being the future 13 Colonies of North America, or Bombay, Chennai (Madras), and Kolkata (Calcutta), outpost through which trade and resource extraction flows like in the early days of the East India company, international law relegates them to the status of the Falklands, a far-flung settlement with a strong state presence. The paper will explore this scenario and pose the questions: will international and space law part ways? Is international law doomed to become terrestrial law only governing relations on Earth?
