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Two Nations, a Horrible Accident, and the Urgent Need to Understand the Laws of Space
Welcome to the world’s foremost training ground for saving space from disasters, disputes, and—perhaps one day—colonizers named Musk.
At that speed, a simple collision between satellites or pieces of space junk—which is a real risk in a crowded orbit—could trigger something known as the Kessler syndrome, a cascading event where shards of plastic and metal ricochet through the objects in low Earth orbit until they form an ellipse of trash around the planet like the ice and rock in the rings of Saturn. Much the way the colors of Liberia, Panama, and the Marshall Islands fly over nearly half the world’s merchant ships, Candidia started enticing satellite operators to register under its flag by charging them low fees and taxes and requiring very little disclosure of information. Around the same time, Weeks wrote a PhD dissertation that explored the origins of the Outer Space Treaty’s “province of mankind” clause—how it served as a somewhat hazy, conveniently ill-defined substitute for legal language that might have placed more explicit limits and obligations on its signatories.
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