Outer Space — A Legal Issue

Abstract

Years before the first man-made objects were launched into orbit around the Earth, the legal aspects of this new kind of human activity had become a subject of legal thinking. It is not surprising that most of the early writers on space law approached the subject with a background in air law. However, not all air law specialists were able to properly differentiate the problems relating to questions arising from the prospective space flights from the issues of aviation. Nevertheless, the author of the first monographic study on space law, Dr. Vladimir Mandl, an attorney at law in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, who later became Professor of Industrial Law at the Czech Technical University in Prague, recognised the specific nature of space flights and the prospective legal issues, notwithstanding that he too was a specialist in air law. His study on space law, published in Germany in 1932, was based on the assumption that the prospects of reaching outer space by means of rockets would raise a variety of new issues not settled by air law, which regulated only the legal regime of airspace and aviation.1