Space: A Major Legal Void | Hacker News Reader

Space: A Major Legal Void

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59 pointslelf32 comments

Indeed, slightly different point of view: My government justified surveillance because it was done from space and therefore the local law wasn't applicable. If that sounds like something a smart-mouthed preschooler would throw at your head, I would agree.

But while the preschooler wouldn't be able not to put on a wide grin, these people were dead serious.

I think it is a bad mindset. Laws shall not be seen as hindrance, but as beneficial for all.

Depends on the law. Chinese style surveillance laws are probably a hindrance. Also, space doesn't really belong to any one country. It belongs to all of us, and will probably be dominated by whoever has most guns and is willing to use them.

Devil's advocate: And yet, even with strict surveillance and (internet) filtering / propaganda, China's economy is booming and if they manage to continue this growth, their GDP will overtake that of Europe and the US within the forseeable future. Their internet companies already handle a multiple of what their US counterparts do, for example.

But the humanitarian cost is high. The US is a bit better, maybe, but is also severely lacking on the humanitarian front (think poverty, homelessness, crime, substance abuse, suppression / lack of democracy, health care, education, debts, etc). The US could be doing so much better for their own people but because they choose to spend so much on the military and have tax laws that prevent the rich people and businesses from contributing, nothing is left for their own people. Mid- to long-term it means the country will be left behind.

(disclaimer: I'm no economist nor an American, I'm sure someone else knows all the nuances)

There are 1,3 billion people in China so the overtaking of the GDP would be expected if they reach a certain developmental level.

If often hear the economic growth must be due to surveillance and an autocratic regime, a laughable suggestion, although often shared by my unimaginitive government (Europe).

The third reich also had a booming economy. War creates massive economic opportunity. Slavery too. But somehow increased governmental control is the key for economic success? Doubtful at least.

The success of China is pretty straight forward. They had very cheap workers and hungry foreign consumers. I don't see how you wouldn't get any profit out of that situation. But no, it certainly must be due to complete systemic differences instead of economical ones.

The Chinese gov did play a big part in keeping the economic boom going. They continually propped up the housing bubble even though it was generating new construction well over demand and could have crashed multiple times. They did a bunch of currency manipulation to keep exports going. Whatever that was keeping shipping costs in and out of China so low worked very well.

I don't think you can rule out the government as a factor, there's plenty of cheap workers in the world that want money.

True, but I doubt that creating bubbles will create long time economic growth. And that there are indeed are cheaper workers elsewhere has already become a problem for China.

Still, you cannot say they didn't grab the opportunities and have indeed build up significant industrial infrastructure. Maybe a strong central government is currently required to keep the peace for so many different people, but the tendency to see Chinas governmental system as some form of panacea for all problems is a bit off in my opinion.

Given more time to develop, I believe the authority will decrease and that this process actually gives more room for even more opportunities.

A reasonable monetary policy will avoid recessions, yes.

Currency manipulation is not really a useful concept.

It's a bit rich to criticise China's approach to currency after 2008.

Their government should be given credit for basic competence, which our leaders don't seem to have.

Their government has consistently put major support behind key industrial sectors and built out infrastructure that enabled industrial growth.

Just as an example, China now has more high-speed rail than the rest of the world combined. They are the world's leading manufacturer of solar panels, electric vehicles, etc. There are several countries with equal or better starting positions, yet no achieving equivalent economic growth.

Meanwhile holders of the highest office in US/UK are busy with Brexit, building a wall, and denying climate change exists.

I fail to see the lack of basic competence once you look outside of hot button issues, or even inside those issues. It is trivial to make both China and the west look good or bad with a selective view.

I was not seeking to criticize China (though I will if it makes sense to) but to make the observation for parent's sake that the Chinese gov does in fact play it's hand in the economy.

Indeed. Private consumption per capita wasn't so great in the Third Reich.

The Great Depression in the US was only great because of some really stupid policy decisions. So some other countries avoiding the worst of that Depression doesn't mean they had Great policy, just that they were slightly less stupid in that regard.

The thought that economic success is solely due to simple factors that you understand and not the complex interaction of systems that are large and practically unknowable seems to me to be very close to hubris.

I think you can get away with saying that for most of recorded history, China has been the centre of human civilisation, technically, politically and culturally, and we may return to that state.

I don't think you can get away with claiming that the extraordinary transformation of China since 1982 demonstrates Chinese government policies better promote economic development than the policies of western governments - I think it can only be used to argue that they are better than the Chinese government policies prior to 1982.

I don't think it's sensible to make claims about what is making China rich, without examining what made it poor.

It's not guaranteed that they catch up to the US, even with such a massive population. Although they're growing at a faster pace the US economy is much larger, so that in absolute terms they're not currently gaining ground. Then you look at the US population which is still growing and closing that population gap slowly, while China will shrink 30 million in the next 30 years. At which point their demographic nightmare will be fully settled in with a very large retired population and a much smaller working class, worse than Japan currently is dealing with.

But the elephant in the room is does real innovation require freedom? So far China had been unable to come any where close to the US in innovation, and that's the major driver of growth for a developed nation. At some point they may just hit the wall.

The demographic argument has been played out for decades in regards to china.

Does china need to innovate? They have very well oiled structures for 'borrowing' other countries' ip. That was all fun and games when their military was not so great, but we're back to competing with them. They can also research in areas that seem ethically and morally dubious to the west, they will always have the edge there.

> ... we're back to competing with them.

I don't remember the US competing with China at any point in its history. China's been a wreck since 1800 or so. China not being a wreck is a fairly new thing, and China being a player on the world stage is unique. In my lifetime, people used the expression "starving kids in China" to denote incredibly poor people.

Demographics... pretty much all civilized peoples have experienced demographic collapse. The US is no different.

You can't just dismiss the demographic argument. The beautiful thing about demographic arguments, unlike just about everything in macroeconomics is it's predictable decades in advance in its magnitude. China really fucked themselves with their one-child policy, there's no way to fix that aside from mass immigration and I don't see that happening, do you? So demographics will eat them in the end.

The US have had enough immigration, legal and illegal, that the aging baby-boomers (much milder than what China has to face to begin with) won't be as bad.

Funny, just saw a documentary about food safety where 'whistleblowers/dissidents' stated that about 70% of their soil is contaminated, control and enforcement of environmental, food protection laws is lacking, and they even made a law which forbids everyone to discuss this in public. Do you think they manage to build enough vertical farms with LED lighting in time?

Assuming the law is good and the government will do what is right is a road that too often leads to suffering maybe accompanied with a pretty significant body count.

You can probably think of several countries in the world that are having issues with state violence being too often to control people in petty matters.

Getting laws right and changing them are both very hard. Throwing around state violence as a means to get people to do/not do something should be a last resort.

A Country's laws have to stop applying at some point - they can't apply to everything 'above' that country at that time. To do so would lead to absurdities like settlements on the moon/mars shifting legal zones many times per day as that country rotates into view.

I'd think that a reasonable limit would be the point above a planet where you can maintain a stable orbit for some length of time.

The targets of the surveillance and the people running the surveillance are both in country. It's ridiculous to say it's fine just because the cameras are outside the border. If Elon Musk launched a laser satellite and started vaporizing Tesla short-sellers, would we say he's not guilty of murder?

According to the UN convention on the law of the sea article 92.[0] Ships in international waters are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state under whose flag they are sailing. It is basically the same situation in regards with the legal subjectivity of an object since usually in international waters local laws do not apply.

There is also the case of the ISS and the intergovermental agreement behind it where in article 5. it is clearly stated that: "each partner shall retain jurisdiction and control over the elements it registers and over personnel in or on the Space Station who are its nationals"

And finally the most iportant is the outer space treaty, signed by most of the states in the world, article 8.:

"State Party to the Treaty on whose registry an object launched into outer space is carried shall retain jurisdiction and control over such object, and over any personnel thereof, while in outer space or on a celestial body"[2]

What is your government if I may ask?

[0] https://maxius.nl/verdrag-van-de-verenigde-naties-inzake-het... [1] https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Ex... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty

The government of Germany. The BND had surveillance operations that ran counter to the constitution (again). One of their excuse was the mentioned position. It became known as their space theory (freely translated from "Weltraumtheorie") in that context.

A plain example why you need to grab these institutions by the balls with tight restrictions or they run amok. They had the idea for their "space theory" from the NSA, allegedly, but I never heard of anything like this. Perhaps their American colleagues thought it to be too embarrassing to bring forward.

I would have difficulties to find examples from recent years when the constitutions was undermined that effectively. How should I convince anyone that it isn't a complete joke?

Dead serious indeed. They shuffled data between countries to get around the domestic espionage act in the US. They aren't waiting for our permission to reach the surveillance nirvana somebody somewhere is dreaming of.

Let's see you try to enforce your laws Terran!

Hah.

In reality though, enforcement on individuals will, for the foreseeable future, be done through waiting for them to come back down. Enforcement on countries and companies will continue to be done with threat of nuclear strike.

There's a massive, evolving body of work on space law and a lot more than meets the eye. This article doesn't really canvas the extent to which the community to working towards tackling the long-term issue of space sustainability.

Every IAC, there's a space moot court run by the International Institute of Space Law (IISL) [0]. This is an excellent opportunity for space law young professionals to engage in pressing issues like Space Traffic Management (STM).

The issue with space debris is much like the climate change challenge: it's serious and nuanced. A few years ago, I co-authored a paper on the applicability of the IADC's 25-year guideline ,mentioned in the article, for Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites [1] (happy to send anyone a copy of the full manuscript if interested).

I've also done some work on the technical side of Active Debris Removal (ADR), and published a paper on figuring out how to target solutions to the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) for multi-target missions using low-thrust transfer trajectories [2] (likewise, happy to share the full paper if interested).

I'm sharing this is to highlight that the problem of space debris is not trivial. I find that it's often trivialized in articles intended for a general audience, when the devil really is in the details.

For instance, the article misses the important topic of addressing object ownership. There are no salvage laws in place for space assets. What's more, the fundamental definition of what is considered "junk" is in the eye of the beholder. Russian rocket bodies are often cited, however what's missed is the fact that Russia continues indefinitely to retain full ownership of these objects: hence, you can't touch them even if you could safely and economically remove them, without Russia giving explicit consent. This speaks to how intractable space law actually is: it's a massively complex geo-political maze.

The article also fails to mention that despite space being big, we witnessed the effects of a collision back in 2009 [3]. I had the pleasure of grabbing a drink with TS Kelso, the genius behind CelesTrak, last week during the conference. Fact is that we're hampered on all side (technical, economic, legal, political) to deal with the space debris problem.

There's an idea being floated to develop a Space Sustainability Rating (SSR), recently announced at the World Economic Forum [4]. I'm currently working on an idea with one of the participants in the consortium (Prof. Moriba Jah at UT Austin). He's got this quote that he loves to use to describe the right approach to Space Situational Awareness (SSA): "to know it, you must measure it; to understand it, you must predict it!" To that end, we're looking at connecting our global space supply chain database [5] to the knowledge of the space debris population, to better assess risk and enable lawmakers to understand what needs to be regulated (disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders at satsearch).

In short, this article only skims over a highly complex topic with many dimensions.

[0] https://iislweb.org/iac-2019-technical-programme-iisl-colloq...

[1] https://iafastro.directory/iac/archive/browse/IAC-15/A6/IP/2...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027311771...

[3] https://www.celestrak.com/publications/AAS/09-368/AAS-09-368...

[4] https://phys.org/news/2019-05-space-sustainability-aims-amou...

[5] https://satsearch.co

How do you actually enforce law in space?

Lensmen.

I would think they would be enforced similarly to maritime law.

I think that can't work in space after someone builds a habitat.

You can't -- and it'll never happen once we get far enough out. This is a good thing.

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