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The Odysseus lunar landing this past February marked the first soft landing on the moon for a commercial space vehicle. That historic event coincided with reports that the U.S. was warning Russia against deploying nuclear-armed anti-satellite weapons into space.
Straight Arrow News contributor Adrienne Lawrence argues that the nations of the world must come together to design much more comprehensive governing and legal structures for the next great frontier before the chaos gets out of hand. In addition, Lawrence argues leaders must be careful not to forget the many unresolved crises here on Earth.
That being the case, we need a whole new set of rules, and by rules I mean laws.
In mid-February, when news broke that the U.S. privately warned Russia not to deploy new nuclear-armed anti-satellite weapons in outer space, I kept scrolling down my feed. There are simply too many problems on this planet, or on this continent to be honest, for me to really give a damn. But now that I’ve had time to process it, I am utterly terrified, because we don’t have current laws and enforcement abilities in place, really, that reflect our current technological advancements, and the need to escape our current environmental crises.
Yeah, the world has an Outer Space Treaty. And it’s cute, really, but it’s not all-encompassing, and it’s not really realistic. The Outer Space Treaty, or OST as I like to call it, is a multilateral treaty that governs international space law. But one of the things it also does is prohibit weaponizing space. The problem is that OST was written and signed around 1967, before Star Trek gave us our first televised interracial kiss and before haters took from us MLK and RFK. We didn’t have half the technology or nuclear weapons that we have today. It’s a whole different world, figuratively, and kind of literally.
Moreover, OST simply is a treaty. For a nation to fear its impact is real, we need meaningful consequences here. If Russia isn’t afraid to kill thousands in Ukraine, in violation of numerous international agreements, why would it fear violating the OST by putting nuclear weapons into orbit?
