Annie Kuo: Welcome to Discovery, a 红桃视频 podcast where we discuss the biggest legal topics with the law school鈥檚 distinguished guests and experts from around the world. I'm your new host Annie Kuo. I'm new to the law school and as a Houston native who grew up surrounded by NASA stuff, I was excited to see that 红桃视频 newly launched the Space Law Data and Policy Program under the Global Business Law Institute. And the SLDP program would be hosting a two part series Space Course: The Problem of Orbital Debris earlier this month with part two coming in April. Ever wonder what orbital debris, space traffic management, and law and policy mean for the international community and the United States? Our guest today Dr. P.J. Blount spoke at Space Course on today's topic space traffic management as part of the course oriented toward the future. Dr. Blount鈥檚 email signature contains an interesting quote: 鈥淵ou could tell by the way he talked though, that he had gone to school a long time. That was probably what was wrong with him,鈥 said John Kennedy Toole from the Confederacy of Dunces. I think that Dr. Blount may have been poking fun at himself, but he has indeed gone to school a long time. Dr. P.J. Blount is a lecturer in law in the School of Law and Politics at Cardiff University in the UK. Formerly the editor in chief of the Journal of Space Law, P.J. is currently executive secretary of the International Institute of Space Law. He is a member of the State Bar of Georgia.
Welcome, P.J. Thanks for joining us today.
P.J. Blount: Thanks for having me.
AK: I'm really curious if you've ever aspired to go into space and how you got into space law.
PB: I kind of got into space law, as I described, as I impulse bought it. I was working on an LL.M. in public international law and I was doing law of armed conflict, human rights law and all these these various topics. And I thought鈥擨 saw this course on space and satellite law. And I decided, hey, I'll take that. And then the opportunity to write a thesis on it came up. And I wrote a thesis on it because I kind of thought it would be funny. And after that a job opportunity opened up. And I thought, I've got a writing sample for that. And so I found my way into space law that way. As far as aspiring to go into space, I don't know that I really do. My wife has actually explicitly forbid me to go into space. And so I doubt that I'll be going based on that. But I really do think that I want to see a bit more of the vehicles go up before I really trust them. But that said, I love space. One of the things that you see in a lot of discourse on space is it's the Wild West. And I hate that, right? There are no saloons in space, as far as I know. And, in fact, space is regulated, right? We do have law in space. And it's really important law. And so the idea of space being regulated, I think, is very important as it allows us to use space in a way that brings us a lot of benefits.
AK: Absolutely. By the way, it's totally offensive to me as a Texan that there are no saloons in space.
PB: It's offensive to me as well. I mean, I really like a good saloon.
AK: Can you tell us about how air traffic control is different from what we have in the space realm?
PB: Let's start with actually with this concept of space traffic coordination, right, which is, I would say what we have now. We have a system now that is ad hoc coordination. If you're a space operator, and you want to put something up in space, the first thing you need to know is somebody else there, right? Because I can't put my object where another object is. So, one of the things that you're going to do is begin to enter into a coordination process where you begin to 1) look at the data that's available, see whether what other operators are there, begin to coordinate with those other operators to see whether or not the orbits, as well as the frequencies that you want to use are viable. And see if you can carve out an orbit or a place in space that you fit, right? And so that's coordination.
What we keep talking about in the space world is the idea of space traffic management, which kind of connects this idea of air traffic management. If you think about air traffic management, that's really important to all of us, right? I'm going to get on a plane in a handful of hours. The thing that I want to know when I'm on that plane, is that my plane鈥檚 not going to run into another plane, right? That's really important to me. That's what air traffic management does. They manage where things are in the sky and help to avoid collisions. We don't have that in space. And so this idea of space traffic management is a very future-oriented idea. It's the idea that there might be some sort of entity or body that might have the ability to manage, to begin to say, 鈥淵es, you can go there. Yes, you can go there,鈥 and work those things out. But that's in the future. What we have now is coordination. And it's coordination that involves both operators, as well as the states that those operators operate with under the jurisdiction of, in order to ensure that there aren't collisions and that there isn't this idea of interference between operators.
AK: In your talk, you mentioned that there is a focus on interference, which leads to debris creation events that affect the space environment negatively, it could potentially lead to more pieces blasting through space.
PB: So, what you're describing is what we call the Kessler syndrome, right? And it's this NASA scientist, I believe it was in the late 70s, published this paper. And this paper said, you know, if we hit this critical point of debris, debris will begin to collide with debris and create more debris. What he posits in that paper is that this will lead to an exponential increase in debris, and we could lose access to large parts of space, right? It's not that immediately encircles the earth, and we can't get anywhere, but there are going to be parts of the earth that are so covered in debris that they can't actually be used. And so the Kessler syndrome argues that, you know, this is a possibility.
Now, there's more recent scholarship that actually argues that we've passed the tipping point, that we are past the place where, you know, Kessler theorize that we hit this tipping point that we lose access. There's more recent research that says we've passed that. But this is the challenge, right? It is, you know, early space actors didn't have to concern themselves debris, right? When the United States and Soviet Union were launching things up, it wasn't an issue. In fact, one of the early projects in the United States was something called Project Westford. And they wanted to find out whether or not they could bounce radio signals off of a bunch of needles. And so a cloud of needles was launched into space. You would never do that today, because that seems really, really bad for satellite operations.
AK: It sounds painful too.
PB: Yeah, you don't want to get, you don't want to find yourself in the middle of that. So, this idea that we need to begin to control debris really is relatively recent, right? NASA has been concerned with it since the 80s. But really, in the past two decades has it become something that the international community has taken up and said, 鈥淵ou know, we have to control the creation of debris,鈥 which is where we get the idea of debris mitigation.
AK: Debris mitigation. I'm just thinking about space pollution. It sounds like there's no traffic tickets in space, or you know, hand slapping, or maybe there are. You'd mentioned something about punishment, there not being punished for things. And therefore, there's an encouragement to creating a proactive framework for communication and dialogue. Everything is really just about global cooperation, and trying to mitigate the risks as opposed to being concerned about punishment.
PB: I mean, one of the problems with international law, in general, right, not just space law, international law in general, is that it's not a legal system that encompasses sort of a police force, right? So, when you think about domestic law, we think about, you know, if I break the law, the police are going to come. That's not something that we see in the world of international law because there is no international police force. And so we end up with is a system wherein states are both the subjects of the law, but they're also the ones that tend to enforce the law, but they don't enforce it in the sense of a police force. They enforce it in the sense of diplomatic pressure, right? But we see that one of the most successful ways of doing international law is often through technical regulation, right? And so one of the things that I would talk about is, is we have this organization called the ITU, the International Telecommunications Union, and they manage the coordination of the use of international frequency. And they do that very successfully because their focus is on technical regulation in which states understand that they have to engage with in order to use this resource efficiently. And we're facing a similar problem in space. There is no enforcement mechanism that's going to come in and say, 鈥淗ey, states, don't make debris.鈥 But there is this idea of what some might call an enlightened self-interest in that states might need to cooperate in order to continue to use this resource and the resource being orbital space around the earth. And so no, we don't see enforcement in the traditional sense in which there's somebody that slaps your hand. But we do see this idea of cooperation, of coordination being very powerful, particularly in technical regimes like space.
AK: Can you talk about how information sharing is encouraged in the Outer Space Treaty, specifically in some of the articles and what the realities of info sharing actually are in space?
PB: The Outer Space Treaty is one that sets out really broad principles. There's very little in the treaty, that is prescriptive, right? And we often think about law as being you know, thou shalt do this and thou shalt not do that. This outer space treaty is a lot of you should do these things. And we hope you do these things. But it's not prescriptive in that manner. If you break down the treaty, one of the core things that you'll see, more than anything else in that treaty, is the idea of we need to share information. We need states to understand what's going on in space so that they can work together in space. And the outer space treaty itself, I mean, the core goal was to create an atmosphere where there was to reduce the potential for conflict in outer space. And so this idea of information sharing within the Outer Space Treaty is really important in that the hope is, right? It doesn't, it never says you shouldn't have conflict in space. It says, 鈥淗ey, talk to each other. Hey, share information with each other.鈥 And the goal of that is to actually create an atmosphere wherein states feel comfortable talking to each other about space so that they will avoid interference, where they will avoid conflict. And I would argue that that is the critical function of the Outer Space Treaty is to get states to talk to each other on a very basic level to avoid conflict, to understand what each other doing, and to make sure that when they go into space, that they understand the operations that they're doing won't conflict with another state's operations.
AK: 聽So, it's really about, you know, following the carrot and being a good citizen out there and modeling for each other what the change we want to see in space.
You mentioned, it's good to be nice, and it's nice to be good in space. The U.S., the U.K., Russia, and certain states are pushing for norms of responsible behaviors. But those are non-binding more in the realm of principles. Can you tell us about what's going on in the US in relation to other state space operators when it comes to information sharing, and technical and regulatory provisions?
PB: So, we talk about space situational awareness. It's really the idea of knowing what's going on in space. But we often, you know, think that well, you know, it's up there in space. We know what's going on. It's easy, right? But what we really know about space is predictions. It's the future. And it's because satellites are in unpredictable orbits, right? So, when you have a sensor looking up at space, satellite goes over it, and it measures it. And then we feed that into an algorithm that makes a prediction on where that satellite will be the next time it comes around. Now, obviously, the more sensors that we have, the better algorithms that we have, the better knowledge that we have of what's in space. But when we talk about SSA data, it's really based on what sensors we have, what measurements we've taken, and what predictions we can make about where satellites are going to be. And this is really important, right? Because things that are moving in orbit are moving at very high velocities, right? A very small piece of anything in space and space debris is just little pieces of satellites can cause a major impact. And the example that I love to give is that there's this wonderful photograph of the window shield of the space shuttle, and the windshield of the space shuttle was 12 inches thick glass, and a paint chip has caused a major divot in the windshield, right? And I can't imagine being an astronaut on the space shuttle and watching a paint chip divot the windshield. But to be able to avoid debris in space, we need good data. And the data is the first problem when it comes to space traffic management, is understanding where things are. And so space situational awareness, that the data that underlies that, is critical to understanding what's going on in space, and how we can avoid future collisions that create more space debris.
AK: And so better data collection is a challenge because all of this data is encouraged in information sharing, but not required. Right?
PB: Well, so it's a challenge on two parts. One is just the collection of it, right? If we look at the U.S. system, the U.S. has sort of the biggest and best system on space situational awareness. And now, this system is built on our ability to monitor, actually, nuclear attacks, right? We have radars that are pointed at the sky to pick up ICBMs, intercontinental ballistic missiles. But our system is very much placed in the northern hemisphere. So, that's the data that we're getting.
So, if you want better data, you need more sources. And you need sources from all over the world. And so one of the challenges with data is getting the sensors that you need, and being able to cooperate with other actors in other places to get their data and put it together. So, that's sort of the first problem is actually collecting the data.
The other problem is sharing the data is making sure that the data is distributed. And now the United States actually has a pretty robust program for this. We collect space situational awareness data, and we process that data. And when it looks like there might be a conjunction鈥攖hat means two things colliding in orbit鈥攚e will share that data with the operators that are concerned and say, 鈥淗ey, just so you know, we think that there's the potential that you might collide with another object, and maybe you should do something there.鈥 But that idea of sharing the data is very important, and we do it. But it's not now at a聽 point where that's happening globally, right? We can't, we're not integrating our data necessarily with other data sources. And other data sources aren't necessarily integrating with our data sources. And there is a big problem in, actually, the fact that, you know, one side might be collecting data and coding it in one way. And we might be collecting data and coding it in another way. And those two data sources aren't compatible. So, there are the slew of problems with both the collection of the data and the distribution of the data that fall into the problem of SSA.
AK: So, who has the authority or the right to compel any of this? There's no police force in space? So, are there leaders among the states?
PB: No one has the ability to compel. Therein lies one of the problems. Now, states themselves might have the ability under domestic law to compel their specific operators. But, you know, if the United States says, 鈥淗ey, China, you know, you guys are gonna run into our satellite,鈥 they can't make China move their satellite, they have to hope that the operators that are involved will come to an accord. And this is the problem, right? There's no ability to compel. It is based on cooperation.
Now, the good news鈥攖hat sounds that sounds bleak鈥攖he good news is that space operators do want to keep using space. They recognize the risks that are up there. It's not like we are, space is full of bad actors that are just like, 鈥淗ehehehehe! I'm gonna run my satellite into that satellite.鈥 That's not how space works, right? Because these are really valuable assets, right? Space is not cheap. Space operators put really valuable things in space, and they don't want to see them crash. And so there is an incentive to make sure that we avoid these collisions. And even if the collision is one that, you know, maybe you might want to roll the dice on, it's going to affect your future operations. And most space operators are looking towards what am I going to launch next? Well, you can't launch anything if you've caused a lot of debris. So, nobody has the ability to compel.
Whether there are leaders, yeah, I do think there are leaders and I think there are very clear leaders, right? The United States is a leader. I would say that China is a leader. I would say that Russia is a leader. Now, the problem is, is that these three states obviously have some geopolitical tensions amongst them. At the same time, they all have the same interest in preserving the space domain, so that they can benefit from it. And so I've argued before that one of the clear things that the United States can do is begin to be a leader in the idea of responsible behavior in space and space traffic management to ensure this. I would say the same thing is true of their adversaries, Russia and China, who also have a number of space assets that bring benefits to their states. And so the ability to ensure that the space environment is one that can be used by all is critical for all of these states. And so they all have a vested interest in being a leader in ensuring that there is not the creation of extra debris.
AK: Could you speak to the problem of forum in negotiation, like how do we even begin these negotiations?
PB: So, this is sort of the problem right now. And I kind of reference that there are geopolitical tensions between these three major space fairs. And this is sort of a critical problem, I think when it comes to sort of overarching space governance, not just space traffic management, but space governance in general.
In general, the United States has opposed for two decades now, any new rules in space, they think the rules that we have are useful. Now, there might be some slight change in that. But that's been sort of the position for a while. China and Russia, on the other hand, have really endorsed this idea of we need legally binding rules, right? They have to be legally binding. Now the shift that we've seen in the U.S. is well, maybe we should have norms, right? Maybe we should have something that's not legally binding, but we should have something that's more politically binding, more, kind of, softer but gives us a framework. And this leads to the problem of forum, right? Because what this means is that states when they begin to discuss these things are trying to push them into different forums.
China and Russia put forward a draft Treaty, which is what we call the Conference on Disarmament. But the Conference on Disarmament has been deadlocked for two decades. And when I say deadlocked, no law comes out of the Conference on Disarmament. Nothing really comes out of the Conference on Disarmament, except for talk. Other states see the idea of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space as a viable forum. But that's not a place where we're likely to see a binding treaty. And so there's a problem there.
Other states have turned to the UN General Assembly. But again, we're not gonna see binding rules out of the UN General Assembly.
A whole fourth option that tried to end run around all of this was something that we called the European Union Code of Conduct. But it was not in any forum. And so it got shut down for not being in any forum. And so forum becomes a problem because we don't know where to begin to talk about these things. Do we seem to have some natural forums? UN General Assembly, UN COPUOS, as well as the CD, but at the same time, states aren't aligned on where they think this discussion should be. And that leads to a problem of actually beginning to make progress on the substantive issue.
AK: What are your hopes, if we were just going to kind of boil down what Dr. Blount鈥檚 hopes are for the future, in terms of the evolution of norms and cooperation in space traffic out there?
PB: My hope would be and this may be might spread beyond space traffic is that we see a bit of de-escalation. I think that one of the problems that we have in space right now, and we don't have to look very far in history, right? In 2007, China tested an antisatellite weapon. In 2008, United States tested an antisatellite weapon. In 2019, India tested an antisatellite weapon. And just this past year, in 2021, Russia tested an antisatellite weapon.
All of these states are sending signals to each other, right, hat we can do this thing. When you pull up a satellite in space, that creates a massive amount of debris. And so the problem here is that we're not moving towards cooperative efforts, we're moving towards competitive efforts. And these competitive efforts are the ones that are going to actually lead us down a road that that is not productive, right?
If we want to use the space environment, if we want the space environment to be sustainable into the future, we have to find a way to begin to actually make forward progress on talking about how we use the space environment in the long term, without disrupting each other, without causing interference. And I don't think the problem is on the commercial end, right? The commercial end definitely wants to keep using the space environment. Now, there are risks that are posed by that, but they want to keep using space environment. The real risk right now is on the military and how the military鈥攚e've seen what one might call saber rattling in space with all these of these ASAT tests. And I think the critical problem right now is getting states to begin to at least have discussions about core principles that guide our activities in space. And so my hope, Dr. Blount鈥檚 hope, would be that we actually can sit down to the table and have those discussions. Because the problem right now, and this relates back to the problem of forum is that we're not even sitting down to the table. We're having fights over process. And we should be having discussions over principles.
AK: Since you we kind of touched on this in your response about commercial activity in space, I'm curious if we could just kind of as a bonus question ask about space resources and mining asteroids. Could you speak to any regulation around that or is it just kind of the Wild West in that case?
PB: What we've had for a long time is a core sort of international law debate over whether or not you can go out and exploit resources, right? And it's one of the things, I describe it as, you know, when I first started in the space law community, I would go to conferences, and somebody would mention space resources and suddenly everybody in the room would be angry and yelling at each other, right? Because people have really strong opinions on the idea of property, right? Just the simple idea of whether or not you can own something, right? People got furious about it. I think that's changed a lot. Right? We have in the past several years, we've seen a number of states passed laws that allow the exploitation, the commercial exploitation of resources.
So, the United States in 2015, Luxembourg did it in 2016, the UAE did it. And China has recently done it. And I think that there are a handful of other states that are beginning to think about these type laws. So, we've begun to move past this, like, base question of whether or not it's legal. And we're moving more into a question of how do we do this, right? And I like to use the example of the moon, right? I you're on the moon, and you launch something off of the moon, it has global effects, right? Because the moon's gravity is such that when your thruster hits the surface of the moon, it blows up a bunch of dust, and that dust keeps traveling, just keeps going and going and going, going, going going. It literally affects the entire surface of the moon, right? It goes until it hits something. Newton鈥檚 second or third law, one of those laws, one of Newton's laws, right? So, this is a problem, because let's say that I've set up my moon mining operation, and another entity has set up their moon mining operation, they could launch something and actually cause damage to me. What if we want the same place? Right? The south pole of the moon is supposed to be very valuable for its water resources? What if I get there and somebody else is already there? What if I have built a very specific satellite to go to a specific asteroid based on the physical properties of that asteroid? And right before I'm about to launch somebody else is, like, 鈥淥h, yeah, we launched, we're headed to that asteroid.鈥 I've now invested tons of money in something that is worthless. And so these are the problems that we're facing now, when it comes to space resources is how do we figure out these coordination processes amongst states as they move into this realm, and not just among states, but amongst all operators?
Now, I have to tell you that I'm a bit of a pessimist on the economics of this. I don't think that we're about to see, like, massive resource exploitation in the next 10 years. But it is likely coming over the course of X amount of time, right? And we should begin to think about how do we leverage coordination processes? If there are no state or commercial interests that want to do this, how do we allow them to do this in such a way that other operators in the future will be able to do it as well? And those are the big questions that I think we're facing right now when it comes to space resources.
AK: Maybe you'll be at the front of that conversation just seeing that it's coming, that it's coming. I knew you would be a great guest to have because I have watched a few of your YouTube videos on space and you tell some great stories about satellites.
You can follow P.J. Blount on Twitter at @blountsfolly, that鈥檚 spelled B-L-O-U-N-T-S-F-O-L-L-Y. Dr. P.J. Blount has published and presented widely on the topic of space security law, and has given expert testimony on space traffic management before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Space. And P.J. was gracious to join the law school as part of our two-part Space Course series. You can learn more about 红桃视频鈥檚 Space Law data and Policy Program and upcoming events at law.uw.edu. The SLDP program is part of SPARC, the Space Policy and Research Center, which brings together researchers across the UW with policymakers and industry professionals to advance space technology and policy. SPARC sets the course for Space Research and Policy partnerships in the Pacific Northwest.
This was so much fun. Thank you very much for joining us today. P.J.
PB: Thanks so much.
