Computer Says Maybe

Alix: [00:00:00] Hey there. Welcome to Computer. Says maybe this is your host, Alex Dunn. In this episode, I sat down with Heather Allansdottir, who has a book coming out. Actually, several books coming out about laws in space, and this is part of a couple of episodes we're doing exploring Legal frontiers that relate to technology.
Politics that I think have really nice symmetries and hopefully will help us unpack what good governance looks like when there's. Parts of the world, parts of the solar system that we have yet to make rules about. And I found myself sort of drawing some of the connections between my conversation with Heather and sort of other conversations we have all the time about technology, politics on topics that are much more complicated because there's so much more activity happening within them.
So this is the first of a few. We're not exactly sure how many. Episodes focused on this topic, and in this one we are gonna focus on space. So if you've got thoughts, questions, ideas about who should decide whether or not Elon Musk can launch [00:01:00] starlink systems into low earth orbit without any oversight and make a bunch of space junk, some of which falls back down to earth and potentially hurts people, um, if you've got thoughts, but maybe not a structured way of thinking about it, Heather is gonna come with the goods on that. And then we're gonna hear about laws of the sky. So thinking about, uh, drones and dystopia, I think of a world where companies are allowed to. Deliver things like coffee to you as a consumer. So take the worst parts of Uber, eats the worst parts of self-driving cars, and put those into the sky.
We're gonna dig into what has happened in Australia around drones, but in this episode we're starting with space. If you've got any other ideas for terrains where laws are being made, rules are being designed. Uh, contests are happening. We'd love to hear from you. We're thinking we're gonna do one on space, one on sky, and one on the sea.
So also if you know someone who can speak about underwater [00:02:00] sea cables, let us know 'cause we are looking for someone that can help us explore that topic. Um, with that, my conversation with Heather.
Heather: I am Dr. Heather Allansdottir. I am an academic of law at Beck University in London. I am also the founder of the Space Sustainability Company, Astro Ear, and I have a book on space law coming out later this year, which is called New Perspectives in Outer Space Law. Maritime law, aviation law and space law build upon one another like a crescendo.
Maritime law is very, very old. You know, that goes back to the Greeks in terms of the principles, how it got codified in like the law of the sea and public international law, maritime law and private law happens later with the development of international frameworks. Aviation law, obviously in the 20th century used his maritime law as the basis for a lot of its rules and regulations, and then out space law and lower orbit stuff consolidated that.
But there's some very, very [00:03:00] interesting moments in space where, because there is no paradigm for it, and the Outer Space Treaty was an amazing, incredible achievement and is also pretty thin. Doesn't have any kind of like, what should we do if in it? And so the only legal principles are really old school merit and law.
And where this manifested in a really amazing way is in the first, the crying in space as it's called. Do you know this story?
Alix: Crime in space? No, I dunno about this story. I know about the space force. I know about in, uh, for all mankind, that Apple series, when they bring a gun on the moon, I remember being like, uh, okay.
Anyway, but actual space crime, say actual,
Heather: let me talk you through the space crime. Okay. So no ice picks were involved.
Alix: Okay. It was
Heather: no, um, it wasn't a violent crime. So this couple were breaking up to women. Astronauts how Hollywood hasn't gone hold of this already. I, I have no idea. It's a script waiting to be written.
They were going through the like conscious uncoupling, like who gets to keep the Netflix password stage of [00:04:00] like the end of it that we've been through, you know, except what none of us have been through is one of them was on the ISS, and so one of them myself there and one of them is down, I believe in California.
I should check some of the details on this. I'm telling you the story from, from memory, from
Alix: strokes for instructional purposes. It's fine. Exactly,
Heather: exactly. All words to that effect. As, as we say in law, the one who was hurtling around the earth logged into the bank account of her former partner. The former partner who was down in California could see this when she logged in and when, um, you look, we, I'd cut your contact from that.
So this is fraud in violation of my privacy. So on and so forth, and not cool behavior. So reported it to the local police who, when she's hurling around the world, what, what do we do about this jurisdictionally?
Alix: Like who? Yeah, I mean
Heather: jurisdictionally. Like where, literally, where did this happen? And, 'cause we don't have any paradigm for that.
In international law they used. The concept of international waters are the high seas. So in maritime law, the [00:05:00] captain of the ship has this very interesting legal role for someone who, for the vast majority of time, is not a lawyer. Historically, the captain of the ship could make legal call, you know, obviously sign marriages, birth certificates, death, and so on and so forth that could actually make the judgment call.
This should be reported and which jurisdiction you're in. 'cause if you're on the high seas and the ball breaks out, the captain, the ship can go, all right, sunny boy, when we get to, uh, Porto, we're joing you in or, no, and we'll wait till we get to where, where, you know, interesting. And so they actually get to make that judgment call.
And so what the, the cops in, in California who were like, who was the captain of the ia, of the, who I think probably went, hi, I am Ian Scientist. I dunno what to do. And also like this is inappropriate and weird. What is happening? Well, what did he say? Um, okay, prosecute it in that jurisdiction in California, but could have gone, don't prosecute or prosecute in Belarus or prosecute in the Hague.
That one would be more [00:06:00] complex. But what made that judgment call? I think by virtue the fact that they were a Belarusian scientist going, I am busy, kicked it back to the state of California, then when hacky astronaut number two gets back down to earth, the police arrest her. But yeah, but that's the first crime in space and it utilized maritime law in order to discern and, you know, discerning a jurisdiction is gonna be more and more of a, of a deeply complex issue as outer space activity develops
Alix: further.
That's so interesting. I mean, I feel like. When someone on Earth does something in space that has a negative effect or externality on someone else that wants to do something in space. So thinking specifically about SpaceX, shuttle explodes or starlink satellite breaks, and then all of a sudden you've got like all this stuff, there's like a person.
Fucking asshole in the United States. He's like doing things in space, but he's here with us unfortunately, [00:07:00] until we can find a way to get him jet into space. How do you see the different ways space law? I. Needs to be decided or the kind of compartments in your head of like organizing these issues that are emerging.
Heather: This idea of kind of liability in a way, which is what you're getting at there with regards to space junk is a part of the picture. Not all of the picture at all, but a very, very important conversation that we needed to have been having like yesterday because space junk as we know is silting up so much that it might be what blocks us in and prevents us from being able to explore space further.
Space junk has gotten so clogged and dangerous. And you're completely right. The liability for that, we know, you know you broke it, you pay for it. We know you know what you do when someone dumps industrial waste in a valley, but the paradigms for how we prosecute for space liability are just emerging. So there was a case in 2014 in America that established a liability of a private company for space junk because of the damage it had done to another private company in space.
And that's a very important paradigm, even [00:08:00] though it was only in that jurisdiction. It's something that's gonna be used at least in other common law systems. It's also that the geopolitical ticking time bomb, a starlink rocket and a Chinese satellite. Got incredibly close to colliding again last year. If that had happened, if that had been the hill that either one of them had chosen to die with, again, you have a private company and this actually outlines what people call the second generation space exploration very well, that unlike the first generation of space exploration, we have multipolarity.
In terms of the nation states, instead of the bipolar antagonistic dynamic between the two superpowers that we had in the first generation space operation, and we have those private companies, those private companies are registered to companies, organizations, individuals in nation states, so we'll have their own relationship with that nation state that gets incredibly legally complex and geopolitically charged.
Alix: And also if you add oligarchy onto that, where basically a private [00:09:00] company is acting kind of in proxy as a state, but in a way that's a corrupt sort of entangled set of interests and relationships where he's like actively trying to take over NASA and all of its budgets. Is this like a UN thing? Like who even engages at that level of intersectional issues with states and companies in place?
Heather: One would hope that in this situation it goes to arbitration rather than. Tanks rolling across the border for which we have the UN Office of Outer Space Affairs. So the UN does have this. Role in space was sort of the custodian of the outer space truthy from 1967. They're like the custodian of the one international legal mechanism we have is the UN Office of Outer Space Affairs, which is based in Vienna, where that kind of arbitration would take place in the same way as international arbitration takes place in other spheres like.
The Caspian Sea and you have to get, you know, seven nations around the table to go, okay, where are the boundaries of the seabed, of the Caspian Sea? So we, we have mechanisms in place for that kind of international arbitration, and one would hope that that [00:10:00] is what it would go for. We also know that we live in an era where rule of law is, uh, not an entirely respected, and also that if someone who has more power, if a nation state decides that this is a hill they wanna die on, things could escalate very quickly.
That's a big concern.
Alix: Okay, so let's step back. How do rules about space get set? Like who
Heather: decides them? They were decided once. It's amazing that they got decided. So it is an astonishing feat that at the height of the Cold War. The international community, basically the people who had skin in the game, so that then USSR and the USA got around the table and drafted this document called the Outer Space Treaty, which is ratified the following, 1967.
The Outer Space Treaty is such a testament to basically the scientists in both camps. Pushing the governments to ensure that space is enshrined as a global commons. So the outer space treaty, enshrines [00:11:00] space as a global commons, that concept of the commons is something we need to guard very dearly and very closely in the second generation of space exploration, as is the sea and as is the Antarctica and the Antarctic treaty.
Obviously in the common law, legal tradition, we have the. Very old idea of the commons. Like, you know, I grew up in what is basically like Hobbit land. The Shire, we have the Commons, right? Which is the place where all the farm, anyone can keep their sheep and their cattle for the people is of the people.
And so the fact that the Outer Space Treaty was written, ratified and enshrined this idea of spaces of global commons. The too long didn't read version is no one can own the moon. You cannot claim sovereignty of the moon, and you cannot position yourself as the sole guardian of the moon, nor can you extract its resources for your one nation state's own end.
And the fact that that was ratified at the height of this bipolar antagonistic dynamic between these two nuclear superpowers is an astonishing feat. It's also a fossil like crystallizing this first generation of space [00:12:00] exploration. So because in the first generation of space exploration, we had two actors with skin in the game.
There are no provisions within it for non-state actors because that's not something that was foreseen by the people who drafted the artist space treaty. And so there. We get into very murky legal waters. Always quite worrying when your document says nothing. I started out in law working in comparative constitutional law.
My doctorate was on the constitutions that were written in the aftermath of the Egyptian revolution because Egypt had three constitutions in three years while during the revolution, while I was writing my PhD. So I got very interested in like, well, what is not said in a text and like the silences in governance documents.
Are all good, fun and games until a reality emerges where you need one. And then how do you go and thread them in? And I would basically hold the position that the Outer Space Treaty is this astonishing document given the like grubby nature of geopolitics and also desperately needs updating. And like, not [00:13:00] to freak you out, but we've got about two years to do it before two tech p billionaires and a couple of superpowers scramble for Africa, the universe.
And
Alix: that's it for all of us. I don't think people realize how much is happening. In right outside, like do you have a sense, I mean this might be outside of your expertise, but do you have a sense of the scale of starlink at this point in terms of I know that we can, it's now visible from Earth. You can see starlink, it like messes with people's telescopes and ability to see what's happening.
I'm just trying to get at like the stakes of like the next. Five years,
Heather: this, that on like, there were more rocket launches in the last two years and in the last 20 years.
Alix: Yes. Okay. So yes. Yes.
Heather: Two months. I mean, it's literally exponential and Yeah. With starlink, similarly, like, so yeah, there was a new story like a couple of weeks ago where everyone, like in a part of England was like reporting UFOs.
Is it Aurora? No, it's Elon. Um, yeah. Fucking Elon. Fucking Elon. I know, I know. I was thinking was like Dr. Robotnik and Sonic. She's like boing down [00:14:00] on us. A hundred
Alix: percent. That's him. But like he's less capable, but yeah.
Heather: And like as anyone who has both rationality and empathy, I'm obviously pretty terrified at this weird mutant marriage between the tech libertarians and the old school authoritarians and people who hijack democratic processes.
So the Trump Musk romance is very alarming, but what's very strange within it is. Obviously they don't completely align either. It's a very cdy, evidently temporary marriage of convenience for them to both get what they want for their own narcissistic ends. The must Trump alliance is terrifying, but the must trump fallout is also gonna be terrifying.
And my joke is that the season finale. Possibly of the world will involve like starlings surrounding the White House. You know, that's when Dr.
Alix: Nik like bops down on, you know, Dr. Evil. Going back to what you were saying about Egypt, which I was living there at the time, we don't have to go into it, but it was such a wild period because it was essentially this like existential set of questions of how a country was gonna [00:15:00] politically organize itself, be governed.
And like have essentially like a new founding period, those constitutional processes. There's like a direct through line to what you're describing with space law. Is that the through line for you? Like constitutional governance and like making collective choices about how to manage new rules and new systems?
Heather: Yeah. Like who gets to sit around the table to make the rules that govern us all Right. And also that kind of liminal moment before things ossify into the new order. Right. Which we lived through in, you know, there was this kind of moment in 2011 when it was like, okay, well will the young revolutionaries get a seat at the table?
But then again, these two antagonistic the on the one hand, and then you know, the military executive old guard on the other. Hijack it from the people saying we wanna commons. And you know what? More kind of emblematic, similar of a commons in many ways than Toria, right? So that is actually how I got into it.
I got into Constitution slightly before because I was living in Bosnia. So I saw the damage done by, if you've got white guys around a table in Dayton, to write a constitution and slap it onto a state doesn't play out well [00:16:00] after this because the revolutions disintegrated so painfully. For me was, I was like, I need some mental sobe, but I'm so fascinated in constitution drafting and how do we collectively write governance documents?
So I moved up to Iceland, which is why I have an Iceland Erni. They had a, like a revolutionary constitution drafting process around the same time that, you know, my friends read are in like Occupy or tar. Or
Alix: the pirate party, I presume,
Heather: right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And then had this, I call it the Google Docs constitution, this crowdsource constitution, deliberative democracy moment.
That was very interesting and it kind of fell apart in its own way as well, but it's very interesting. That was actually where I got into space. 'cause I was up there and Iceland is so small. Someone who knows someone that I was bumping into, like people who work for the Icelandic space Agency in a way that I wasn't bumping into, but people who work in space agencies and other countries, but also because Iceland is the terrain on earth that's closest to the moon.
So it's where they do all the testing for like the Luna Rovers and in fact, it's where the Armstrong and Buzz [00:17:00] Aldrin went to practice their walking in their moon boots. Before they went up. Like the
Alix: lava fields.
Heather: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean it's So June vibes there, like, that's where I made my segue into like, we need to update the, but also because having lived through the 2010s, watched all the, the revolutions of my friends implode and xenophobia, authoritarianism, reemerge.
I was just having a kind of like, okay, to process this decade, like where next? And I thought that this was an important. Question to address now because of, again, this sense of like temporal urgency. Now a lot of, you know, my friends and colleagues work on things like climate litigation, which I think is so important.
That's been such a huge shift of the last decade that we've gotten to a point where we're firstly like pushing for. Legal frameworks like eco side or crimes against the environment in international criminal law, but also that we have a lot of important strategic litigation in environmental law and and climate law.
But the state of urgency that I feel with space this painful like casm, I [00:18:00] feel with a lot my ideological bedfellows. In all other fields who say to me, we can't care about space because the world is on fire. My kind of counter argument to that is we need to care about space and we need to enshrine this as a global commons and update the outer space treaty because if we don't, two tech re billionaires will scramble for Africa, the universe, and that's terrifying.
Uh, one of the things I work on and care about a lot is this idea of decolonizing the skies. I've used the phrase scramble for Africa, the universe, and I've sometimes had pushback and had my own internal pushback about this, like the metaphor of colonialism. To describe this sort of military adventurism and tech libertarianism in space by virtue of the fact that because there are not humans in space, I want to be very careful making parallels with like European colonialism and the damage that it brought to millions of humans lives.
So I think that we need to obviously [00:19:00] recognize. That difference when we talk about space colonialism, but I do actually think it's the best language to use to describe the phenomena taking place.
Alix: I was actually thinking about how the governance challenges of space are almost the purest form of the same governance challenges we face here, but that it takes away a lot of the complexity and social and political complexity of dealing with governing people and then makes it in its purest form.
How do you set principles of governance as a Petri dish? It's incredible, and I think that colonialism as a frame, even if there's no people. It's an attitude and an approach of manifest destiny. Yeah, so I, I see why you might find it uncomfortable to talk about colonialism when there isn't the pain of people that are being pushed out and forced out and murdered in a space like settler colonialism implies you're settling on someone else's land and that, that doesn't quite work in this frame.
But I still can see why political fascistic, force [00:20:00] of control into the future, into new space and new territory that like, that's a helpful political paradigm. Articulated that
Heather: so well. My sister works on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land rights, education rights. And one thing that was so brutalizing in the Australian experience, I know less in in other contexts, but the international colonialism as a whole was the concept of terror.
Nullius. This belongs to no one and therefore it can be mine. Right? Which was overturned so powerfully in Australia. The the MABO ruling, which established native title, which said that actually. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders were the custodians of the land that the land hadn't been no, before Europeans came.
And the concept of Terra nullius is still the principle by which anyone who's defacto engaging in space engages with space. And I think that. It's very, very important that we like unpick that from both law and practices very, very quickly. I need to be very careful here that that doesn't perpetuate [00:21:00] the invisiblizing of indigenous peoples to use that parallel, but because we know that it's so damaging when things are marked as terra nullius and therefore gives those with power, the right to say this belongs to nobody and therefore it to be mine.
The Outer Space Treaty says that nobody can own the moon. It unfortunately gets very candy floss. How it actually ensures that that can't happen. People in their people. The worst instinct of people who have power is to find ways to dominate by stealth. One very interesting phenomenon right now, which again, I think maps onto European colonialism, so so well is time.
I know it's a joke, like I work on space and so now I'm interested in time as well to go space and time baby. But sorry, how very quantum give my dad joke, but is that the US government actually commissioned NASA to push for this effort to create this thing called coordinated Luna time, LTC. I dunno why they got all French in the, like how they do the acronym, [00:22:00] but because they got LTC.
But Luna coordinated time, coordinated Luna time, which would set the time zone of the moon. And I would of course said it to the American like I really to East coast time and that the moon would have a time zone and it would have one time zone. And this is something that the US government has then in term pushed NASA to push for.
And what's so interesting about that, so that's dynamic, right? What is the time zone of the moon when you're on the what time zone? Would you use? What time zone would another person use? But anyone who knows anything about history will just immediately think, okay, like Greenwich meantime, right? You cannot unpick Greenwich meantime from the Colonial Project, right?
Like who dominates the time, dominates the world, right? And so all of this kind of colonialism by stealth, the East India company wasn't the same as the Raj, but it certainly did a lot of damage. The guise of a company, Seely working in tandem. Colonizing power that I think for me really encapsulates the dynamic between like Musk and Bezos in the US state, for instance.
Alix: So when you think about [00:23:00] global governance in the context of the East India company, uh, and you think about like projecting that into the future and into the sort of physical realm of space. 'cause you mentioned arbitration earlier when we were talking about who would make a determination and that the UN oversees this, you know, foundational single.
Governing law, um, would arbitration happen the same way for a private company? As for a nation state,
Heather: we would have that. And you know, the way that we deal with disputes with multinational corporations, disputes with the multinational corporations and nation states have been happening before. Right?
Usually in situations where everyone has mark on their hands, you know, it'd be like ExxonMobil and France and everyone saying is like team. So yet we do have mechanisms for international arbitration for both companies and nation states and how to like untangle the messes that they get themselves in and do the filing and tidy that up in law.
The way that this is kind of charged in a way we possibly haven't seen before is that in the era of Space Force and Russia pulling out of like [00:24:00] again, the most important testament to international cooperation that we had, which was the ISS military activity can just kind of. Go up a step. And play out up here in ways that are kind of interacting with ways, and that's not hypothetical, right?
Like for instance, Musk with Starling King Ukraine. A complicated factor with this, for instance, is this, okay, we need to update the outer space treaty, which all me and my like. Space sustainability crew are on board with is also an argument being made by the people who I don't wanna be in the same room as like America and governmental officials who say, yes, we need to update the outer space treaty.
We've written this new one, it's called the Artemis Accords. And it's a lovely to do American imperialism with some of the same good provisions and just a lot of these are the rules of the games we'd like to work under, or Russia and China who've taken a look at that. Art has accord and gone, okay, we're gonna produce our own.
And so what's very unfortunate in this era in which anyone who's looking [00:25:00] at this goes, okay, the document we've got for this situation is not helping us grapple with our reality. You then have lots of people who. Okay, well sometimes the text makes the reality.
Alix: So does the US because the US is masterful at wielding influence of global governance mechanisms that they then don't subject themselves to.
It's like, it's like a hobby. I don't know. Um, like real, real good at it. It's incredible. Like in the human rights space, just the number of things that it's set up and then is like, we weren't gonna be subjected to it. We just wanted to shape it, and now we're gonna, you know, go after the people that were even involved in shaping it.
But with this dynamic, I mean, two questions. One is that. This stuff only works when everyone complies to the same set of things, I would imagine. And two, how did the UN convince the US to participate in this thing? From the beginning, I'm actually kind of impressed that there's like one piece of law that was global in nature in the US was like, okay, fine.
We'll follow those rules.
Heather: It was actually [00:26:00] really amazing. My understanding, I mean, I'm not a historian of the drafting of the outer space three T, but my understanding is, and maybe I've kind of slightly romanticized this, but it was. A lot of basically pacifist scientists or anti-authoritarian scientists in America, like Jewish scientists who'd fled 15, 20 years earlier, basically pushing very hard to go, you know, well, I'm gonna quit my position at MIT if you don't sign up to this, or, you know, I'm your best chance of getting a Nobel Prize this year, honey, so please sign up to this.
And that. There was, that was one of the great achievements of the Outer Space Treaty and it is, it is a really remarkable document. It's just that I think the best way to honor that spirit of internationalism and anti militarism is to go back to it and embed the provisions that it needs for the second generation space exploration.
Alix: So basically scientists with leverage, I. Were a part of the American scientific system and were able to effectively influence an instrument that was [00:27:00] so good that like it wasn't possible for them to propose something else or buck it in any way. And they were like, okay.
Heather: Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Alix: yeah. Essentially, huh, is my understanding.
And now that there's like, capitalism is like. Space. They're like, okay, now let's reconfigure our arrangement because we, we should get, we should be more competitive and ruthless.
Heather: Exactly. Yeah. Which is heartbreaking on a million levels, but one of them being that all of these endeavors are completely sidelining the scientific advancement of our understanding of space.
Which is what you know when every 8-year-old kid wanted to be an astronaut is what you know is what we had in our heart. The guy, it's beautiful, right? It's amazing. This's, just fascinating. This is something to explore and to learn and to, to honor and respect and it was those scientists that were so sort of central.
Im mobilizing to say, look guys, I know you wanna kill each other, but can you please just let us have this so we can go and do our research and get on with our work? Similar thing actually helped with the polls as well. Guys, I know you wanna like. Stick a flag and everything, but you know what, can I actually just [00:28:00] give us this for our scientific exploration and what's really heartbreaking about all of these things, including the fact that space junk might be locking us in?
Because I'm not an anti space exploration person by any means. The 8-year-old in me that wanted to be an astronaut still thinks space exploration is amazing. I would also advocate their space exploration is good for humanity, good for the environment. If you care about. Climate justice, social justice, equity, and science.
You should be pro space exploration and very, very concerned with what is happening. I've often found myself in this like clowns to the left of me jokers to the right kind of situation where like all my like friends with whom I agree with everything else. Tell me it's morally repugnant to care about space when the world is on fire and what they're trying to say in Correct.
What they're trying to say. Yeah, which I hold their hand while they work it through, is that they find musk morally repugnant and they find. Imperialism. It's a
Alix: concentration of power argument, not [00:29:00] like science and future argument where you say, like if you take Maria Mata's book, mission Moonshot, I think it's called.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, like and you think about like the economic and environmental and social and political implications of setting, and it's such a classic example of like, let's try and do this difficult thing with this set of principles and this set of interests. In shared prosperity, amazing things happen.
It's true, but if you have a douche with like a bajillion dollars, just doing it for kicks and not having any interest in actually doing it in a sustainable way or for the purposes of innovation and shared prosperity and exploration, like then yeah, I get like, let's not do that. That sounds bad.
Heather: Which is why it's so disgusting that Musk and you know, a bunch of them kind of position themselves of like the inventor, right?
They're like the socr and gadfly on the state. They're the maverick man, the innovator, because it's actually abusing the concept of scientific endeavor. For the end of [00:30:00] capitalism, but saying like, no, because I named this thing Tesla instead of Rockefeller. I anoint myself with the crown of like all that is good of like scientific advancement.
That's what's like and
Alix: genius.
Heather: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. The pure enlightenment brain of the white male, which you know, we must all like bow down to. So the book I have coming out in a couple of months that I co-authored. With an academic called Naman. Anand is with Springer. It's an academic book. It's called New Perspectives in Outer Space Law, and is sort of asserting like the tenants of the outer space treaty, the gaps in the outer space treaty, the realities and how that needs to be updated.
I'm also working on a much more pop book, which will come up next year. I was raised by my dad, so like dad jokes are like in my bones. Can I tell you how fantastic the title is? I respect you a lot. Tell me the case was face. I'm into it. It's so cringey.
Alix: That's great. It's interesting that you have two books 'cause I think sometimes academics don't benefit from the feedback loop of [00:31:00] their ideas being more popularly accessible, but also people that write popular books sometimes are like wrong about like everything.
When you're thinking about the two strategies behind those two books are like desires for that. Like what kinds of conversations are you trying to instigate in those two different audiences? I'm
Heather: so glad you've asked me. No one's ever asked me that. The academic book that's coming out this year is to participate in this conversation about what should the rules of the game look like, which is a, a growing concept.
So space legal, academia is mushrooming. Um, like five years ago there was no, there were like three master's programs like in the world where like. Space law is often tacked onto aviation law. Whereas now, you know, I see like, oh, there's an assistant professorship in space law. So the academics looking at this is growing more and more.
I'm setting up the Birkbeck Journal of Space Law as we speak, which we UK Journal of Space Law. That conversation is developing a lot. But the reason why I wrote the, or I'm writing the popular book, is because I wanted a book to hand to my friends to shut them up. Because I [00:32:00] was so tired of them saying, these people who I love and respect, and I've been on, you know, we organized protests against the Iraq war together when we were little spotty teenagers, and I still love them dearly say to me, how can you care about space when the world is on fire?
And then, so I wanted to literally just give them the case for space, because I feel that what's so frustrating about this situation is that certain figures have then come to. Dominate Ka what? What it means to explore space or to to expand in space, which are the libertarians, imperialists, colonialists, who I don't want to align with capitalists.
And so I think it's actually really important that we sort of remind ourselves of like the original goals of space exploration and how it is symbiotic with not only compatible with, but actually kind of a necessary component of caring about this earth and caring about the people on it and caring about the environment.
The fact we only know about global warming because of face exploration or as [00:33:00] we know of, of satellites, right? The data necessary for the paleoclimatologists who are going like, this is what it was like for 40,000 years. And so then here in the last 40 years where it goes, that's climate change. That's AMI climate change.
For them to make that position, they needed all the photographs. From like angles of the earth, of course became like the smoking gun in the case of a manly client. Oh my God. It's so compelling
Alix: when you see those time lapse. Yeah, I definitely,
Heather: yeah. One of the most heartbreaking things I went to while I was getting super into space stuff while I was up in Iceland was a funeral for I Glacia, and I never, I've never cried for a non-human before.
Fuck. Fucking ing thing I've ever been to. And then I had these Bangladeshi exchange students. I took them to this glacier. My dad, who works on like mega city slums and flooding, they were in Bangladesh when, you know, you may as well have tagged it, like we'll meet again because they're melting so quickly.
And the headline used the next week was like, floods in [00:34:00] Bangladesh and it's a 100% correlation. And it was so, yeah, it was so, so haunting to loop back. We have the smoking gun of. The proof for Manly climate change because of the satellites we put into low earth orbit. Then there's the arguments to do with asteroid mining.
If you can mine the, as you know, that the, the thing that we have in all our phones that comes from the DRC, that means there's been a conflict in the DRC that's killed over 4 million people. That if you can mine an asteroid that has that, instead of feeling the conflict in the drc, it's like the don't look up.
Plot line. Yeah. Right. Yeah. There is that. But I think also the, the thing that for me really secures it is proof that when we put things in place as a global commons, it does actually work when we enshrine things in international law as a global commons actually does have teeth. The Law of the Sea is actually very durable, very stable, and the fact that we have enshrined that so clearly because the teeth on things like Unclos are quite well established, it has actually [00:35:00] mitigated against a lot of the worst of what could otherwise happen.
The same is true of the Antarctic treaty, like no one's fighting wars over Antarctica, even though actually would be a pretty good place to secure. Whereas when I was in Iceland, I saw all the nasty Sealy ways everyone's getting their tentacles into the Arctic because the arctic's not protected by the same treaty.
It has the binary of the literal, non-literal state. And like all superpowers have blood on their hands. I remember seeing all these Chinese companies and they're the boat setting off to Greenland just as much as Trump was trying to, you know, colonize Greenland. And then Europeans got all like pissy and self-righteous about it.
And I'm like, Denmark, honey, you actually colonize Greenland. So. Don't get too like up in your high, don't get
Alix: all Bogan up in here. Yeah,
Heather: were like all those dumb Americans. And I'm like, guys, you literally stuck your flag in it. But the Antarctica is protected by the Antarctic treaty and protects it as a commons.
And that actually has enabled a lot of the amazing scientific collaboration that takes place [00:36:00] in Antarctica. The same is true of the Treaty of the Law of the Sea, and so the fact that we have this potential in the Outer Space Treaty, but we need to make it more robust, would actually enable a lot of the pushback that I think really needs to happen and needs to happen quickly.
That like spaces for all I. Even
Alix: that as a sentence basis for all I think is powerful. Yeah, yeah. But this is also why like it felt like one of the final Commons Commons is if that's how we make Plural Commons is. Yes. And it's why like the Space Force stuff felt so violating of something. So what are your thoughts on that as like a rupture of norms around how we think about.
Space, do you expect other national governments to set up space forces and like what do you see as the trajectory of that whole discourse?
Heather: Yeah, I think it's a race to the bottom now, not 'cause I think the states at the top, I think, uh, that it sets a very, very dangerous. Precedent. I think that yes, [00:37:00] space Force was a very, very concerning development, and it will then set the paradigm, like the binary of whether or not you are a nuclear power.
It becomes a catalyst for the worst kind of behaviors on the parts of all nations in ways that just entangle with the worst year of politics. I do have one little. Caveat to make within this. I might sound quite defensive here. I think the nation state is a fairly garbage concept. You know, my first degree was in history.
I know how the concept got born and I know the things that have been done in its name. So I'm not here to cheerlead the nation state as a concept. I think it's pretty garbage in the era in which the rules of the game of. Politics are, the nation state is powerful for all of the kind of two thousands anti globalization critiques that maybe companies are now more powerful.
The nation state, the entity of your national jurisdiction, right, or law is national. The nation state is still like the unit of power. One of the haves have nots of the coming decades will be whether or not the nation has a space agency. So one of the things that [00:38:00] I believe is part of space sustainability and is also part of decolonizing space is ensuring that majority countries, countries of like the global South.
I prefer the term majority have like capacity building for their own space agencies. That will be a net good. As much as we find the nation state a bogus concept, and as much as I don't particularly want majority countries recovering from colonialism and new colonialism to spend with all their GDP building rockets instead of building hospitals, what I think is that the global north and the UN need to capacity build.
Space agencies so they all get a seat around the table. So to like link back, 'cause we have this Cairo link to the liminal moment, like who gets to sit around the table and that the horror, where that gets snatched by the few people with power and they come up with the new rules and then those new rules.
Ossify. I think that it's really important that all nations get a suit around the table. For who devises the new [00:39:00] rules and the game for the second generation of space exploration. I had this colleague up in Iceland who was a theorist of small states, which is what you do when you're from a small country and there is no drama.
You know, we matter too. Yeah, I know. Exactly. So, so you had lots of friends in Luxembourg. It was very, very sweet. You know. No, well Luxembourg's super interesting 'cause that's the hub of the European Space Agency. Right. Uh, which I find so funny 'cause it's so tiny. Everyone on this street secretly an astronaut.
Like it's somehow very like sci-fi. It's like astronaut city, but it's the idea like small states operate in different ways to larger states and small states can work with others, other states in different ways. And so I think that they've. Fostering collaboration in this way as well, in ways that kind of undercut the follow capitalism of, uh, you know, the, the current space exploration endeavors is, is really important.
So, uh, for instance, actually really interesting work, um, [00:40:00] collaborations between nations in Sub-Saharan Africa cooperating on like space initiatives. So like, okay, you build your rocket launcher and then, you know, we'll build the engines over here and together we'll launch these initiatives. It's a huge question, right?
The former Yugoslavia, right? If Tito's vision of what that state should have been had carried on, like, would there have been a non-aligned exploration of the moon, right. Instead of this antagonistic bibo dynamic. So yeah, non-alignment for space is also something I, so, interesting.
Alix: Yeah. I mean, I, I feel like it hit me how much.
Connected to your point earlier that there's an exponential growth in activity combined with geopolitical shifts that make things a lot more complicated, combined with multiple entity types. Now having resources to do space exploration, so companies and nation states, plus the sort of collaborative nature and the collapse of global governance mechanisms, like that combination all felt like it came to a head when India was trying to [00:41:00] land.
That rover on the dark side of the moon and I was like, what is happening? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was kind of amazing in this moment 'cause it felt like it was like a single news story that kind of captured. So many different pieces of this, and it just like articulated this new frontier of questions and opportunity.
Even like I didn't know that they found ice on the moon, didn't they? Mm,
Heather: yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The scientific discoveries came of it, and yet it was so bound up with this whole, again, weird liminality, like the the Gram scheme moment, like Old World, new World, and we are in the time of monsters, but we are also in the time of possibilities, and we have this moment to steer it in different ways,
Alix: and then they landed successfully.
I remember it was like one of those kind of like when you're. Paying attention to a team in a, in a sports league for a whole season. The end of the season feels like so important and consequential and meaningful to you, but if you're not following and then you watch people that are, you're like, what is wrong with you?
Like, why are you [00:42:00] this excited? I actually like. Was following along in that one where I was like, 'cause some people follow all the SpaceX launches and then when they explode they're like, oh my God. And then this India one, it was like, are they gonna make it? Are they not gonna make it? And I felt like I was like following also along in a way that I normally wouldn't have.
And so it got like way more invested in it. So it feels maybe more outsized important to me than to other people. But so, 'cause that brings me to like maybe my last ish area of questions, which is. Materials. So you mentioned like maybe in asteroids there'll be, or comets, there'll be materials that can be used in a way that helps us on earth not, you know, continue to rely on the labor and lives of lots of people in places like the Congo.
There's also just like the potential of us people being in space longer because there's access to things like water in places. I mean, I presume that you think this whole thing of Musk going to Mars is like total. Bullshit.
Heather: Right? Why do you think a million people on on Mars by 2030? [00:43:00] Has he said that?
Fuck off. He said it so long ago. Now that we know he's, of course he does that thing. There'll be
Alix: driverless cars on Mars also at that time. Um, um, like what do you think about like extension? Of us elsewhere and how that affects how you think about legal structures. Because eventually might, maybe there be, will be people.
'cause we were talking at the beginning about how there are no people so it changes things. But,
Heather: so I do actually think eventually there will be people, I think there will be people the way that there are people on Antarctic and not the way there are people in la. Okay. Um, I think that there will be scientists, best case scenario, scientific outpost where people go do a stint.
The research, same way as people set off on that, you know, the boats from Chile and New Zealand. To go do the research in Antarctica. That's how I imagine it much more than LA on Mars by 2030 with your Tesla. Um, but sorry, I realize you can't see an eye roll on a podcast, but Yeah. Um, [00:44:00] however, actually more so than all my dear friends, I wanna have my book to, I actually think this argument about us becoming a multi-planetary species eventually isn't either completely wacko or.
Solely like fueled by narcissistic fellow capitalism. I think you can build a sustainability argument for it if range in very, very. Specific ways, you know? And I get people who say to me sometimes, okay, well it's actually anthrop centric to say we need to do this for the survival of humanity. There's an argument saying what?
Well maybe for the sake of the earth, like we need to like back off. I don't think that anywhere other than this planet will ever be the nucleus of like our species. AI in space I think is a kind of interesting conversation where again. It's okay to find that interesting without aligning with all the people championing it.
Because I think that a lot of the scientific discoveries that could take [00:45:00] place so that like the probe, so you know, with James Webb, it is astonishing how much more we know just because of these last few years. And again, like that graph maps onto the fellow capitalists graphs of all their rocket showing up in his face.
You just know, we know. Double the amount about space every year because of James Webb. I don't think there will be a million people on Mars. 2030. But I think in the coming decades there could be millions of Jane Web-like tools, possibly AI, that are mapping the universe in ways that will be completely astonishing to us.
And I think that is for good.
Alix: Yeah, no, I, I think so too, but I think it's good. When it's predicated on the idea that the knowledge that's generated and the value that can come from that knowledge is publicly owned and shared 'cause I think that's the piece that feels important and increasingly deprioritized in the context of these oligarchs as you're talking about this stuff.
It makes me realize though, that maybe there's a window of [00:46:00] opportunity, 'cause like. Musk wants to be seen. Like remember when he quote unquote, like open, sourced all of the patents from Tesla as a way to be like, I believe, and like, and he keeps talking about like humanity and survival. It feels like getting him into a conversation about like the principles of space governance and getting him excited about like Carl Sagan esque understanding of like the role of humanity in space.
That we could probably appeal to his maybe fake better nature on some of his feelings of self-importance and like he, because he tries to pretend like he would be very supportive of a global pact to align around a set of norms and, and public commons around space. But I also think he's an asshole that we shouldn't have to deal with ever.
Heather: It is interesting again because it's often technology has this kind of real kind of hinge role in a lot of this. A scalpel that can be used to stab or save a life tech in space at the moment as it's playing out, is deeply and damaging. And so, in a [00:47:00] strange way that's slightly been uncoupled from the scientific endeavor, which is very strange.
You need the tech, the technological tools for scientific endeavor. And so I think that this idea that let's heart, so ai. In the hands of scientists to map the universe is a beautiful and amazing thing, and we shouldn't be frightened of it. As much as we all understand the ways in which AI could be this like absolutely horrific force in the wrong hands.
Alix: Yeah, I think that's right. Okay. Well this was fantastic. I feel like, I don't know, this is gonna percolate for a few days. I still want, when does your
Heather: book come out? The academic book comes out in June. The case of space is coming out sometime in 2026. I'm not sure. I actually also have a book on polar law.
I. Coming out later this year as well. 'cause when I was up in Iceland, you're a maniac. No, I, I like they, they're like buses. I dunno if you say this in, in London we say it's like buses. They all come along at once. That'll be it for me. Then for a decade I'll, I'll probably go have another [00:48:00] breakdown like I did after Egypt.
You know, God GR Ram.
Alix: Okay. I hope that wasn't too. 2001, a Space Odyssey for you. I found it super interesting to take a step back and think about what good governance looks like, period, um, and how we might apply that to new frontiers. So I hope it was interesting to you. As I said, we're gonna do at least one more of these, um, focused on the law of the sky and, um, if you know people or have interesting ideas yourself about underwater sea cables and also potentially underwater sea mining, um, and have thoughts on, um, governance and legal structures around that, we'd be really excited to talk.
To you about that and we'll drop our email in the show notes so you can get in touch. But as ever, thank you to Georgia Iacovou and Prathm Juneja this time, um, while Georgia's out helping structure these conversations. Um, and Sarah Myles, our amazing producer who makes it all sound nice. And with that, we'll see you next time.