Essay: KEEPING LAW & ORDER IN SPACE

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IN all his long upward odyssey, man has never been confronted with anything quite like it. It is an ocean without shore, yet it bathes every nation's border. It is a military "high ground" of measureless potential, yet no nation has so far dared to exploit it. It is a resource of such proportions that man has only begun to tap it. And in all this vast province of opportunity called space, no writ runs. All the experience of quest and conquest, of discovery and exploration of the earth provides scant precedent for dealing with the promise and problems of space.

The first precedent was set by Sputnik 1, which, in 96.2 minutes in 1957, sailed blithely across the skies, bridging the theoretical boundaries of nations without so much as an izvinite or by-your-leave. What could any of the violated nations do about it? Nothing. None of them even thought to protest. That spontaneous abdication of national prerogative in deference to Sputnik's achievement still informs the approach to space nearly a decade—and thousands of trespasses—later. No established rules exist in space, and no method has yet been found to make rules effective there. No one has devised a way to station a traffic cop or patrol vessels to guard the boundaries of some theoretical mare nostrum of space. A canon of space law can thus be created only by mutual consent.

An Arch of Forbearance

So far, the approach to space has been remarkably amicable, even though that attitude requires the mutual tolerance of the U.S. and Russia, at present the only two space powers of any consequence. The reasons: neither nation is quite sure what the uses of space are; neither has determined whether it is possible to dominate outer space, or whether success would be worth the immense price. The result is a kind of detente, a protective arch of forbearance beneath which a small group of international lawyers have been scurrying about attempting to establish order. In particular, the legal subcommittee of the United Nations' 28-member Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space has been wrestling with the problems of bringing law and order to a new and uncharted world in the hope of having a draft treaty ready for General Assembly approval this fall.

The member nations involved in drawing up the space treaty have already agreed on nine of the roughly one dozen clauses planned for the treaty. Working in Geneva and New York, they have agreed to ban weapons of mass destruction from outer space, make the moon and all other celestial bodies ''the province of all mankind," conduct all activities in outer space under "international law, including the U.N. charter," and even to report to all other nations and to the U.N. "any phenomena they discover in outer space that could constitute a danger to the life and health of astronauts."