CORNER OFFICE
Better Regulations to Benefit Space Industry In the 1960s, exploration was about ‘look at what we can do that no other country can’. The current direction is much more about ‘what can we do with a larger number of partners’, says Dr. Scott Pace, Deputy Assistant to the President and Executive Secretary of the US National Space Council. Space is often called the final frontier and mankind’s common province. This calls for increased multilateralism, commercialization and democratization, and broad cooperation to address some of the pressing global challenges. What is the National Space Council doing in this regard? We see space as the final frontier, but in legal terms and international law, we would like to emphasize that as far as outer space is concerned, we don’t see it as a global commons. Global commons refers to a regime whose limits are defined by agreement, and people have not agreed on where limits exist in space. So, the areas of the high seas, for example, are global commons, but space is not really defined that way. We currently talk about it as a shared domain in which we work. Like many other sectors, the space industry is driven by, and is vulnerable to, geopolitical developments. In the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act 2015, we made it clear that US citizens have the right to engage in commercial exploration and use of space resources. We are currently working with the international community and drawing on legal precedents from other domains like the high seas to find ways to promote commercial development of space resources. Some people like to believe that the issue of space being a common province means that all legal issues are settled. We don’t believe that is really true — space is an area which is still quite undefined, and we are looking at having discussions with other like-minded countries that are interested in promoting the commercial development of space for creating a more predictable and stable environment for investors. 6
www.geospatialworld.net | Mar-Apr 2020
