State Department Legal Advisor: The Outer Space Treaty — 50 Years On

The foundational document that sets international law for conducting space activities — the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST) — is about to turn 50.  State Department Legal Advisor Brian Egan discussed the relevance of the Treaty today and its future at the 11th Eilene M. Galloway Symposium on Critical Issues in Space Law last week.  The annual symposium is held under the aegis of the International Institute of Space Law (IISL).

Officially named the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, the OST was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 19, 1966, opened for signature on January 27, 1967 and entered into force on October 10, 1967.

Article VI, which requires that governments authorize and continually supervise the activities of their non-governmental entities, like companies, puts it at the center of today’s debate over commercial space activities.  Specifically the question is how to ensure that proposed U.S. entrepreneurial ventures like private space stations, satellite servicing, habitats on the Moon, and asteroid mining comply with those obligations.   Experts at the December 7 Galloway space law symposium debated many of those issues.  Egan focused his comments on the relevance of the OST today and the outlook for the next 50 years.  

He noted that the Commercial Space Launch and Competitiveness Act (CSLCA, also called the Space Resource Exploitation and Utilization Act) enacted last year generated confusion internationally.  Some countries concluded that the United States was abrogating its obligations under the OST by granting property rights to space resources obtained by U.S. companies.  “In fact it is just the opposite,” he stressed, because CSLCA clearly states that such rights must be consistent with U.S. international obligations and are subject to authorization and continuing supervision by the U.S. government as required by Article VI.

Egan noted that Article IX is also important in the context of innovative commercial space activities.  It requires that signatories to the Treaty avoid “harmful contamination” of the Moon and other celestial bodies and adopt “appropriate measures for that purpose.”  The U.S. government recently approved an application by Moon Express to land a spacecraft on the surface of the Moon after it voluntarily agreed to comply with international planetary protection guidelines established by the international Committee on Space Research (COSPAR).  He stressed that the approval was specific to this one short-duration mission and the State Department’s ability to authorize more extensive missions in the future requires “a more robust authorization framework … to enable conditional approval where necessary.”

Importantly, as the next 50 years of the OST unfold, the approach to avoiding harmful contamination of celestial bodies may evolve, Egan said.  The “open-textured” nature of the OST “accommodates such developments” by avoiding precise definitions of terms like harmful contamination that may change over time.

“Eilene Galloway was prescient about this need for flexibility in anticipation of the unforeseen — and unforeseeable — developments.  In a paper she delivered in the Hague in 1958, she cautioned that unless we study legal problems ‘in conjunction with the developing facts of science and technology … our interplanetary thinking will be earthbound by tradition and precedent at a time when creative predictions should enable us to keep international law in pace with scientific achievement.'”

Egan concluded that the Treaty “does not attempt to answer every legal
question directly, or speak to any activity specifically” but is a
“framework” to address “new capabilities and activities … and the legal
questions such activities inevitably generate.  If the preparations for future space activities underway in the United States and other nations are any indication, the Treaty will serve this function well into its second half century and beyond.”

Dennis Burnett, IISL Treasurer and the lead organizer of the Galloway Symposium, pointed out that this was the first official statement on the OST by a State Department Legal Advisor in more than 30 years.