The Long Duration Mission
The Space Diplomacy Newsletter-The Diplomat's Dashboard
I want to begin The Diplomat’s Dashboard (one of the four pillars of The Space Diplomacy Newsletter as announced in a previous post) with a tribute to Paul Larsen.
Paul was a very prominent space lawyer and dear friend whose co-authored book Space Law: A Treatise is one I teach from as do a lot of my colleagues.
Earlier this year, he sent me a signed copy of the third edition, and an idea began to form in my head about how to bridge his legal knowledge to the practice of space diplomacy. I asked Paul to drop me a line and went away on a trip, but by the time I got back Paul was on his own journey to the stars. He was a presence in Seattle, and is much missed by many here and around the world in our space law and policy community.
As a lawyer, Paul was a problem-solver. His work covered an immense range over a long period of time. He marked the progress and the continuities in the space law regime, and its evolution from old space challenges to new space concerns. There is an extraordinary amount of very thoughtful and timely scholarship that he put together. He helped set us off on what I see as a long-duration, constantly-evolving mission for space diplomacy.
I was honored that he wrote two pieces in works I edited, both of which illuminate the unprecedented directions of the new space age. One was an article on “Commercial Operator Liability in the New Space Era,” part of The New Space Race symposium for the American Journal of International Law Unbound (2019), and a chapter on the “Geopolitics of Global Navigation Satellite Systems,” in The Oxford Handbook of Space Security (2024). I wish I could have engaged him on the themes that I see across them interwoven with his earlier works – mega satellite constellations, liability, geopolitics…
My takeaways from these works for The Diplomat’s Dashboard are…
· Recognize that space diplomacy is consistent with the spirit of the international space law regime but the actual forms and channels through which it operates in practice are tremendously varied.
· Define clear national benefits and interests from space activities before going after them through space diplomacy with external partners who are also guided by the same imperatives for mutual gain.
· Be aware of heightened liability risks for damages from all kinds of new civil, commercial, or military space industrial architectures that have local content.