Teaching Space Law to Younger Generations
Dr. Güneş Ünüvar
Editor-in-Chief, Pulsar Blog
Postdoctoral Researcher, Luxembourg Centre for European Law (LCEL), University of Luxembourg
DIMAS (Diplôme d’initiation aux métiers aéronautiques et spatiaux) and Space Law
On May 17th, 2024, I had the distinct pleasure of visiting Lënster Lycée International School (LLIS) in Junglinster, Luxembourg to engage with high school students and to talk about space law and policy. I was invited to LLIS in the context of the DIMAS programme (Diplôme d’initiation aux métiers aéronautiques et spatiaux), a collaborative project between several Luxembourgish schools which offers secondary education and vocational training students an introduction to various aeronautical and space professions. This involves providing them with training prior to higher studies in aeronautics and aerospace. The coordinator and one of the teachers of the programme at LLIS, Damir Dodić, has a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering. It is also important to note that all participants, teachers and students alike, do this in addition to their curricular work. They voluntarily stay at school every Friday afternoon just for these lectures since October 2023. The sacrifice and determination it takes to voluntarily stay at school at the end of each week for months is no joke.
Even as a scholar and lawyer with plenty of experience in teaching and public speaking at academic conferences, as well as other forms of public outreach (including media interviews), the preparation for this one-day visit was not straightforward. I had the impression that my particular experience and teaching style would not apply to a group of high schoolers. Everything I had taught or presented up until that point was either to peers (professors, practicing lawyers, or PhD candidates) or to master’s and bachelor’s level students at various universities. One can assume that all of these groups above have a certain degree of knowledge in (international or national) law, so a lot of things could be presumed to be known. Space law is a technical, specialized, ‘niche’ subject even for those specialized in international law. If I had a euro for each time I heard the phrase “I didn’t even know there was a space law!” from a fellow lawyer, I could easily afford my own spaceship.
Space and Our Innate Curiosity
How, then, was I supposed to make this relatable to high school students? For me, this was completely new territory — and while it was somewhat daunting, it was equally exciting. Explaining something complicated or technical in simpler terms, they say, is a good indicator that one knows the subject well. With this in heart, I began preparing my classes. I focused on the fundamentals, building bottom-up: what are some of the key issues to which anyone could relate about outer space? Everybody likes to think about the stars. Everybody, at some point in their lives, looked up to the skies and stars and wondered why they are the way they are. I decided to start with this innate curiosity we have about space and what is above us. I wanted to give them a quick recount of why space is part and parcel of every culture — and how our fascination with the Sun and the Moon and the stars probably gave us our first spiritual experiences as the human civilization.
In the morning, this is how I started teaching to a class of 13 to 15 year-old students. After having established that space is not only for sci-fi geeks and that we are all predisposed to be curious about it, I talked about what kinds of activities we are currently engaged with in space: satellite operations, exploring the Moon and Mars and eventually beyond. Then, I asked them whether they think laws and lawyers had any place in outer space. This question surprised some of them. “Do you mean, like, Murphy’s law, or laws of physics?” one student asked me. When you are a lawyer trapped in your legal echo chamber, a question like this can surprise you to no end. “I mean legal rules and legislation, or perhaps international laws,” I clarified.
One student, for example, wrote that “there should be law in space if humans are in space, as anywhere humans go law needs to follow.” Another observed that “since the beginning, humans have always felt the need of owning something they discover or find. Wars over the centuries prove this. That is why it would be very positive for laws to be established.” Another passionately noted that “it can easily become an extravagant display of disgusting wealth very quickly… although i think it could be necessary”, while one student observed that there should indeed be laws, “or else people would start to claim land and there would be no peaceful space exploration. Also, people can come together to create more technology and can go further.” One student brought up the issue of ‘colonization’. Finally, one student succinctly concluded that “it barely [made] sense.”
Having avoided mentioning any policy-related issue before asking the question on whether law or lawyers should exist in outer space, I can assure the readers that these reactions are pure observations by the students themselves. Anyone with even the most superficial knowledge of the state of policy and legal affairs in space law will immediately see the parallels between these reactions and the current state of affairs and discussions in multilateral fora, such as the UN COPUOS.
Colonizing Space?
I lead the discussion with the term ‘colonization’. What does it mean to colonize a place, as opposed to, for example, ‘using’ or ‘exploring’ that place? Students quickly contextualized what colonization means, noting that on Earth, it had very negative and exploitative connotations. When I asked them to elaborate, they noted that colonization occurs when a group goes to a country with a native population there, and subjugates and harms that native population. The colonizer then uses the natural resources and the native population gets nothing out of that interaction — only harm and suffering. I pushed a bit more: “So, can we colonize space? As far as we know, there are no populations there.” One student responded that “we can still harm the environment in space — that can also be colonization.”
This observation inevitably conjures up images of reckless and ruthless destruction of environment by colonizing powers. Indeed, the destruction wrought upon a territory by colonization is so multi-faceted that we often forget what it does to environment. It reminded me how the British literally blew up a ridge in Guatavita, Colombia to drain a lagoon so that they could pillage the gold that was reportedly at the bottom. They could not find anything, but the effects of the environmental catastrophe that followed still resonate to this day. It is not farfetched to imagine a mining company in space blowing up hills and ridges or craters in hopes of finding valuable subsurface resources or extracting water ice.
The class eventually contended that we could indeed colonize space, if we go there to exploit and destroy — and if we act irresponsibly and with no regard to the consequences of our actions. As this debate was continuing (between the students, with little or no intervention on my side), I had realized that I dramatically underestimated my audience. I felt very happy about how sophisticated and nuanced the debate had become. Even though I had prepared multiple other topics to discuss, this first question (out of nine questions I had prepared for discussion) took up all of our allocated time, and we had to conclude.
The second group I taught in the afternoon was older: 16 to 18 year-old students. The first question I posed was the same as my morning group: do we need law and lawyers in space? The answers were similar: “it is crucial to establish legal frameworks to govern activities such as resource extraction, territorial claims, and even potential conflicts”, or that “yes, or else there will be no consequences to immoral actions committed in space and there will be no limits to our actions.”
Space Mining and Owning Space
We then turned our attention to the specifics of space mining. By this point, I had told them that there were some international agreements that set the ground rules in outer space — you are free to use and explore outer space, but only peacefully and cooperatively. In addition, you are not allowed to ‘claim’ any territory in outer space, and no celestial object can be owned by any state or non-state entity.
Then, I asked them what they thought about owning a part of a celestial object. “What if you mine the Moon and extract chunks of it — can you own that?” The overwhelming majority said that yes, you could; or you should be able to as long as the celestial object remained intact. “But what is intact?” I pushed back. “If you remove half of a comet made mostly of water ice, would you say the comet is intact?” This intrigued them, and as they scrambled to find an answer to this question, I assured them that nobody knew the answer to it as it was not clear at all. What is the boundary between mining an asteroid and ‘appropriating’ it? There is indeed no magical answer.
Both classes were very concerned by the encroaching influence of the hyper rich (the “one percent”, one called them), and thought that allowing them to act without rules in space can only be bad news. Unsurprisingly, Elon Musk’s name came up multiple times, mostly with negative connotations. Most students disapproved of his aspirations to ‘colonize’ Mars, and contended that whatever he wanted to do there, it had to be done in accordance with a space law. I assured them that Mars was not a lawless place — that international space law applied to it, and that Elon Musk could not seize it without breaking an international law rule or two.
“But how do we enforce this law?” one student asked. If you are an international lawyer reading this, you must be smiling bitterly. “There is no police force to enforce it,” I said. “International law is a system based on good faith and the conviction that if you agree to something, you will comply with it. If not, there are international courts and other tribunals. Otherwise, there are more ‘informal’ ways of enforcing, such as economic sanctions. But it is very, very complicated,” was all I could say. They weren’t impressed.
Space Debris (and How to Fix It)
The final topic we covered was the Earth orbit and space debris. The week before, I was told, they had visited SES, one of the biggest satellite operators in the world. It is headquartered in Betzdorf, Luxembourg, a fifteen-minute drive from LLIS. I asked them what they learned there. They told me about the expansive uses and functions of satellites, how we depend on their functionality to use applications like Google Maps. They also pointed out that space debris is an important issue, and that when a satellite is no longer functional, it tends to stick around the orbit a while longer and sometimes it is removed to a higher orbit, called a ‘graveyard orbit’.
I asked them if they knew how much space debris currently orbited Earth. When you tell a group of students “tens or hundreds of thousands, depending on their size,” that is one thing. It is another thing entirely when you show them. I quickly opened the internet browser and showed them the eye-opening, real-life visualization of space debris provided by Wayfinder. They collectively gasped when I told them all pink dots they saw on the live map represented defunct satellites or pieces thereof: space junk. They served no purpose, and the more space junk there is, the more likely that they will slam into something that is functional and create even more debris.
They immediately started thinking about ways to prevent it. “Can we clean up or recycle them?” one asked insightfully. “That is the plan,” I answered, and noted that there are many companies and projects trying to find a feasible way of doing just that. “It is expensive, though,” I added, “each pink dot you see on the map costs millions of US dollars to clean up. Multiplied by a couple of hundreds of thousands, you’ll get a rough idea.”
“What Can I Do?”
Something remarkable happened at the end of the class: something that has never happened to me before after a university course. A student came up to me and told me that he wanted to ask a question. “Go ahead,” I told him, expecting something related to law or the facts that we had discussed. “What can I do?” he asked eagerly. I was a bit taken aback, and asked him what he meant. “About the space debris, for example,” he clarified. “This is my future,” he said passionately. “I don’t want the orbital debris to block us out of outer space. This is my future, and they are ruining it.” he repeated. This was easily the most meaningful question that was asked all day, and served to prove that what I intended to achieve that day was achieved.
This brief experience at a high school taught me many things, but one thing stands out. Education and awareness about space activities, the legal and political framework governing their future, is not something that should be confined to any particular level of education. It should start as early as possible. This is indeed their future. Today’s decision-makers may see some of the destructive effects of impending global catastrophies such as climate change or an irredeemably polluted Earth orbit, but his generation will feel the brunt of both if we do not start acting responsibly. I had expected to speak about the basics of outer space activities and what kinds of rules and principles are in place today to a group of high schoolers, but I ended up doing much more. They are extremely smart, insightful, and most importantly — they are ready to act.
It is our responsibility to share what we know with them as peers and fellow Earthlings — not to patronize them, but to show them what can be done now and how they can help prevent their parents messing it all up.
