It’s been a while since I looked into this, but if I remember correctly the space treaty is currently a major obstacle to industrializing space, due to making mostly impossible to have almost any form of private property of asteroids, or the moon, or other planets, and creating a large fraction of regulatory ambiguity and uncertainty for anyone wanting to work in this space.
When I talked to legal experts in the space for an investigation I ran for FHI 3-4 years ago, my sense was that the space treaty was a giant mess, nobody knew what it implied or meant, and that it generally was so ambiguous and unclear, and with so little binding power, that none of the legal scholars expected it to hold up in the long run.
I do think it’s likely that the space treaty overall did help demilitarize space, but given a lot of the complicated concerns around MAD, it’s not obvious to me that that was actually net-positive for the world. In any case, I really don’t see why one would list the space treaty as an obvious success.
I am not an expert on the Outer Space Treaty either, but by also by anecdotal evidence, I have always heard it to be of considerable benefit and a remarkable achievement of diplomatic foresight during the Cold War. However, I would welcome any published criticisms of the Outer Space Treaty you wish to provide.
It’s important to note that the treaty was originally ratified in 1967 (as in, ~two years before landing on the Moon, ~5 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis). If you critique a policy for its effects long after its original passage (as with reference to space mining, or as others have the effects of Section 230 of the CDA passed in 1996), your critique is really about the government(s) failing to update and revise the policy, not with the enactment of original policy. Likewise, it is important to run the counterfactual to the policy never being enacted. In this circumstance, I’m not sure how you envision a breakdown in US-USSR (and other world powers) negotiations on the demilitarization of space in 1967 would have led to better outcomes.
your critique is really about the government(s) failing to update and revise the policy, not with the enactment of original policy.
This feels like a really weird statement to me. It is highly predictably that as soon as a law is in place, that there is an incentive to use it for rent-seeking, and that abolishing a policy is reliably much harder than enacting a new policy. When putting in place legislation, the effects of your actions that I will hold you responsible for of course include the highly predictably problems that will occur when your legislation will not have been updated and revised in a long time. That’s one of the biggest limitations of legislation as a tool for solving problems!
It’s been a while since I looked into this, but if I remember correctly the space treaty is currently a major obstacle to industrializing space, due to making mostly impossible to have almost any form of private property of asteroids, or the moon, or other planets, and creating a large fraction of regulatory ambiguity and uncertainty for anyone wanting to work in this space.
When I talked to legal experts in the space for an investigation I ran for FHI 3-4 years ago, my sense was that the space treaty was a giant mess, nobody knew what it implied or meant, and that it generally was so ambiguous and unclear, and with so little binding power, that none of the legal scholars expected it to hold up in the long run.
I do think it’s likely that the space treaty overall did help demilitarize space, but given a lot of the complicated concerns around MAD, it’s not obvious to me that that was actually net-positive for the world. In any case, I really don’t see why one would list the space treaty as an obvious success.
I am not an expert on the Outer Space Treaty either, but by also by anecdotal evidence, I have always heard it to be of considerable benefit and a remarkable achievement of diplomatic foresight during the Cold War. However, I would welcome any published criticisms of the Outer Space Treaty you wish to provide.
It’s important to note that the treaty was originally ratified in 1967 (as in, ~two years before landing on the Moon, ~5 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis). If you critique a policy for its effects long after its original passage (as with reference to space mining, or as others have the effects of Section 230 of the CDA passed in 1996), your critique is really about the government(s) failing to update and revise the policy, not with the enactment of original policy. Likewise, it is important to run the counterfactual to the policy never being enacted. In this circumstance, I’m not sure how you envision a breakdown in US-USSR (and other world powers) negotiations on the demilitarization of space in 1967 would have led to better outcomes.
This feels like a really weird statement to me. It is highly predictably that as soon as a law is in place, that there is an incentive to use it for rent-seeking, and that abolishing a policy is reliably much harder than enacting a new policy. When putting in place legislation, the effects of your actions that I will hold you responsible for of course include the highly predictably problems that will occur when your legislation will not have been updated and revised in a long time. That’s one of the biggest limitations of legislation as a tool for solving problems!