Speaker
Description
On September 2019, the Outer Space community has seen an unprecedented event. One of the SpaceX’s Starlink constellation satellite was potentially about to collide with ESA’s Aeolus. Despite the fact that the risk was acknowledged to be very low and after the US DoD sent several warnings, SpaceX yet still refused to move its satellite. ESA eventually decided to transfer its own satellite up to a higher orbit.
This event illustrates the current context in Outer Space on several levels. First, it clearly shows how busy low orbits are progressively becoming and thus, how hazardous Outer Space activities could eventually become because of a rising collision risk and a subsequent potential debris crisis. Second, international organizations and national public authorities are no longer able to force rising private giants to comply with safety measures, even in such a critical emergency situation. Third, the legal and regulatory frameworks, either national, regional or international, lack clear and enforceable rules to deal with such rising issues that threaten the very viable access to Outer Space for all entities from every nation.
Even if active collision avoidance maneuvers are routinely performed by space agencies, some situations like the Starkink case may require a specific set of guidelines and, correlatively, a new dispute resolution mechanism which would be specifically designed to address such dispute that typically follows the following pattern:
(i) should one of several satellites be moved and;
(ii) who should move as well as determining under which conditions, especially related to timing?
The purpose of this intervention is therefore to present several proposals for relevant guidelines and a dedicated dispute resolution mechanism.
Regarding the international guidelines that could be implemented on an international level, clear rules could be taken and adapted from transportation sectors, such as air and railroads. Moreover, because the Outer Space is now predominantly related to economic interests, ideas could be transposed from the network-based sectors, such as telecommunications and energy. In this regard, such guidelines may be based on fundamentals principles such as the right to access, which is found both on International Space Law and on network industries’ worldwide standards of regulation. Moreover, a specific attention is required on the level of certainty required to characterize such dispute and, if this condition is satisfied, to activate the dispute resolution mechanism.
Thus, in the case of potentially colliding satellites and under certain conditions, such threat could trigger a well-know mechanism regularly used in network industries: dispute resolution mechanism.
Such arbitration-like scheme should be adapted for Outer Space activities specificities. Thus, this intervention will also present a possible architecture to implement such mechanism within the existing international institutional landscape. Key parameters such as procedural aspects, duration or enforcement will be reviewed to propose a dispute resolution tool adapted to potential multi-jurisdictional conflicts with critical timing requirements. Such jurisdictional-assisted decision making procedure could eventually help guarantee space safety.
