What Is Space Law? A Plain English Guide to the Rules Above Us

Ask ten people what space law is and most will describe something like maritime law for rockets. That is not far off, but it misses the part that matters commercially. Space law is not one rulebook. It is two layers that behave very differently.

The top layer is international. Five UN treaties negotiated between 1967 and 1979, plus a set of General Assembly principles and guidelines that are not binding but get followed anyway. This layer moves slowly. The last treaty was opened for signature in 1979 and almost nobody joined it.

The bottom layer is national. Every country that lets private operators launch or run satellites has built its own licensing regime, and those regimes are rewritten every few years. This is the layer that decides whether a company can fly.

If you only read the treaties, you will understand the constitutional theory and none of the practice.

The five treaties, and why only three matter day to day

The UN Office for Outer Space Affairs publishes the ratification tables every year. As at 1 January 2026 they looked like this.

Treaty	In force	States parties
Outer Space Treaty 1967	10 Oct 1967	118
Rescue Agreement 1968	3 Dec 1968	100
Liability Convention 1972	1 Sep 1972	100
Registration Convention 1975	15 Sep 1976	77
Moon Agreement 1979	11 Jul 1984	17

Look at the last row. Seventeen parties, none of them a major spacefaring state. The Moon Agreement is the treaty everyone cites in arguments about lunar mining and the one nobody with a rocket has signed. It is a useful piece of evidence about what states were willing to accept in 1979, and very little else.

The Outer Space Treaty is the one that does the structural work. The Liability Convention and the Registration Convention fill in the detail on damage claims and on who has to tell the UN what they launched.

The sentence that built the whole licensing industry

Article VI of the Outer Space Treaty says that states bear international responsibility for national activities in outer space, including activities carried on by non-governmental entities, and that those activities require authorisation and continuing supervision by the appropriate state.

Activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty.

Outer Space Treaty, Article VI

Read that again with a commercial eye. A private company cannot be a party to the treaty. So the treaty reaches private activity by making the state answerable for it. If a US company puts a satellite in orbit and it causes damage, the claim under international law runs against the United States, not the company.

No government accepts that exposure without control. That is why the FAA licenses launches, the FCC licenses spectrum and orbital debris plans, the UK Civil Aviation Authority licenses UK operators, and India routes everything through IN-SPACe. Article VI is the reason those agencies exist in their current form.

Liability: two regimes, one of which has never been used

The Liability Convention splits damage into two categories, and the split matters enormously.

Under Article II, a launching state is absolutely liable for damage caused by its space object on the surface of the Earth or to aircraft in flight. No fault needs to be shown. If a stage falls on a house, the launching state pays.

Under Article III, damage caused anywhere other than the surface of the Earth, which in practice means collisions in orbit, is governed by fault liability. The claimant has to prove the other state was at fault.

The Convention then does something remarkable. It never says what the standard of care is. There is no definition of fault, no orbital rules of the road, no priority scheme. That gap is the single biggest reason the Liability Convention has never been formally invoked for an on-orbit collision, including after the 2009 Iridium and Cosmos collision that produced thousands of trackable fragments.

We wrote about how that plays out in practice in our piece on debris liability.

Nobody owns the Moon. Resources are a different question.

Article II of the Outer Space Treaty is one sentence long and it is the most argued over sentence in the field. Outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.

That settles territory. It does not obviously settle extracted material. Four states have now legislated to say that a company can own what it extracts: the United States in 2015, Luxembourg in 2017, the UAE in 2019 and Japan in 2021. Seventy states have signed the Artemis Accords, which record the view that extraction does not by itself amount to national appropriation.

Critics answer that Article VI attributes private conduct to the state, so a state licensing extraction is doing indirectly what Article II forbids directly. That argument is not going away, and the COPUOS working group on space resources is due to produce draft principles during 2026.

What a space lawyer actually does

Here is the honest version of the job, for anyone deciding whether to go into it.

Licensing and regulatory

Getting a client through the FAA’s Part 450 launch process, an FCC space station application, an ITU filing through a national administration, or the equivalent in the UK, India, Japan, New Zealand or Australia. This is the bulk of the work and it is closer to aviation and telecoms regulatory practice than to public international law.

Contracts

Launch services agreements, satellite procurement, hosted payload deals, ground segment, data licensing, in-orbit servicing. The distinctive feature is the cross waiver of liability, a reciprocal no-fault waiver that turns the whole supply chain into a set of self-insured silos. We explain how that works in our piece on launch contracts.

Export control

Spacecraft and their components sit on the US Munitions List under ITAR Category XV or on the Commerce Control List in the 9×515 series. Getting this wrong is a criminal exposure, not a commercial one. It occupies a lot of junior time.

Finance and insurance

Launch and in-orbit insurance placement, export credit, satellite backed lending, and increasingly the diligence around megaconstellation financing.

Public international law

Real but small. Treaty interpretation, COPUOS delegation work, advising governments on national legislation, academic writing. If this is the part you find interesting, plan to combine it with something that pays.

Where to start reading

Start with the Outer Space Treaty itself. It is about 2,500 words and you can read it in fifteen minutes. Then read Part 450 or the FCC’s Part 25, not because you will enjoy it, but because it will show you the distance between the constitutional layer and the working layer.

Our directory of regulators and primary sources links straight to the official text of everything mentioned here.

Questions people actually ask

Is space law actually binding?

Yes, at the state level. The Outer Space Treaty and the Liability Convention are treaties in force with over a hundred parties each, and they bind the states that have ratified them. What they do not do is create rights and duties directly for companies. Private operators are bound by the national licensing rules their government imposes to discharge its treaty obligations.

Who enforces space law?

There is no space court and no space regulator with global authority. Enforcement happens in two places. Nationally, licensing agencies enforce licence conditions, as the FCC did when it fined DISH Network $150,000 in October 2023 over an end-of-life disposal failure. Internationally, the Liability Convention provides for state-to-state claims and a Claims Commission, whose award is only binding if the parties agreed in advance that it would be.

Can a private company own part of the Moon?

No. Article II of the Outer Space Treaty rules out national appropriation of celestial bodies by any means, and Article VI attributes private activity to the licensing state. Whether a company can own resources it has extracted is a separate and unsettled question. The United States, Luxembourg, the UAE and Japan have legislated to say yes. The COPUOS Legal Subcommittee is working on draft principles.

Where does outer space legally begin?

There is no agreed legal boundary. The most cited figure is the Karman line at 100 km, used by the Federation Aeronautique Internationale, but it appears in no treaty. Some states, notably Australia, use 100 km in domestic legislation. The United States has historically avoided fixing a line at all. COPUOS has had the delimitation question on its agenda since 1967 without resolving it.

What qualifications do you need to practise space law?

A law degree and a qualification in a jurisdiction that licenses space activity, then regulatory experience. Specialist LLMs exist at McGill, Leiden, the University of Mississippi and elsewhere, and they help with credibility and network. They are not a substitute for time spent on licensing files, telecoms regulation or export control.

Primary sources

1. UNOOSA, Status of International Agreements Relating to Activities in Outer Space
2. Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, 1967
3. Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects, 1972
4. NASA, Artemis Accords and signatory list
5. COPUOS Legal Subcommittee, Working Group on Legal Aspects of Space Resource Activities