Until recently, those wanting to escape the effects of terrestrial light pollution could leave cities and travel to the countryside to observe the night sky. But increasingly there is nowhere, and therefore no way, to escape the pollution from the thousands of satellites being launched each year. ‘Mega-constellations’ composed of thousands or even tens of thousands of satellites are designed to provide low-cost, low-latency, high-bandwidth Internet around the world. This chapter outlines how the application of the ‘consumer electronic product model’ to satellites could lead to multiple tragedies of the commons, from the loss of access to certain orbits because of space debris, to changes to the chemistry of Earth’s upper atmosphere, to increased dangers on Earth’s surface from re-entered satellite components. Mega-constellations require a shift in perspectives and policies. Instead of looking at single satellites, we need to evaluate systems of thousands of satellites, launched by multiple states and companies, all operating within a shared ecosystem.

This chapter centres on the economic and political climate of the period in which the selected countries concluded their first investment treaties. This period coincides with the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, when, as a result of the end of the Cold War, states across the globe adopted trade and investment liberalisation policies, increased property protections, and promoted liberal legal internationalism. It does so through four country snapshots. It then discusses the political debate regarding IIAs at the highest political level – in national parliaments – and in the media. When it comes to the debates in national parliaments, four themes emerged: (1) general lack of substantive parliamentary engagement; (2) belief that foreign investment was sufficiently protected under national laws; (3) substantive engagement on issues related to free transfers; and (4) more pronounced discussion when the investment connected with trade liberalisation, such was the case of Mexico. Regarding the media debate, the period of the conclusion of the first international investment agreements (IIAs) shows an almost total absence of reporting and media engagement.

Space tourism began in 2001 when an American investment manager paid the Russian space agency US$20 million to travel to the International Space Station on a Soyuz rocket. In 2021, three US-based companies began launching tourists on their own rockets: Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and SpaceX. The emergence of Space tourism raises difficult issues. One such issue is the environmental effects of launches on the atmosphere and the corresponding implications for climate change. Space tourism also raises difficult questions of international law, including, where does space begin? Who gets to call themselves an ‘astronaut’? Do states have a duty to rescue tourists stranded in space?

The chapter focuses on how IIAs have impacted relations in public administrations through institutional rearrangements. First, we analyse how the intervention of IIAs influenced relations between different state agencies at the central level. Here, we look mainly at central state agencies’ struggles over the IIA portfolio and the attendant budgetary repercussions. Second, we look at how the IIAs impact the relations between the central agencies and their counterparts at the levels of individual states, provinces, and municipalities. This part deals with the management of the support for foreign investment projects and issues connected with ISDS management and defence. We highlight the related budgetary politics as well. Regardless of the variations, one element arises from all of the studied states: the gradual side-lining of the traditional actors tasked with international diplomacy in favour of more sectoral expert actors that base their expertise on the considerations of trade, commerce, finance, and the economy. It also became evident that the practices of centralisation, executive rule, and discourses that put a premium on the economic considerations of efficiency and competition have been preferred by the centre to rein in provinces.

The concluding chapter summarises the findings of the book and discusses their import. We highlight the constraining and empowering dynamics of IIAs in national governance and how they may influence the designing of more innovative and emancipatory economic policies, especially given the necessary transition to a green economy. We highlight some of the issues that developing countries, in particular, may want to consider.

The rapid development of mega-constellations raises difficult issues of international law, including liability for collisions involving satellites. Establishing ‘causation’ – that the actions of one satellite operator caused a specific collision with another space object and resulted in damage – could be a challenge, especially in the context of knock-on collisions where debris from an initial collision later collides with one or more spacecraft, including satellites. A further challenge is determining, in the absence of binding international rules on the design and operation of satellites, what is ‘reasonable’ behaviour and therefore what constitutes ‘negligence’. This chapter also addresses the interference to astronomy that is increasingly resulting from light and radio spectrum pollution from satellites. A full interpretation of the Outer Space Treaty leads to the conclusion that states are already required to take certain steps, including conducting an environmental impact assessment, before licensing mega-constellations, because of the obligation of ‘due regard to the corresponding interests of all other States Parties to the Treaty’.

Anti-satellite weapons that rely on violent impacts and create space debris are regarded as a major threat to the exploration and use of space, including the use of space assets for communications and Earth imaging. This chapter examines two ways in which the testing of such ‘kinetic’ weapons might already have become illegal. First, the accepted interpretation of Article I of the Outer Space Treaty may be evolving as a result of the changing practice of the parties to that treaty. In short, many states are behaving as if tests of anti-satellite weapons that create debris are contrary to the ‘freedom of exploration and use of space’. Second, the same practice and an accompanying opinio juris may be contributing to the development of a parallel rule of customary international law. This chapter also examines the legality of the use of kinetic anti-satellite weapons, as opposed to their testing. Two additional, separate bodies of international law are relevant here: the jus ad bellum governing the recourse to armed force, which includes the right of self-defence, and the jus in bello governing the conduct of armed conflict. A close analysis leads to the conclusion that any use of a kinetic anti-satellite weapon would be illegal today because of the growing crisis of space debris.

More than six decades after Sputnik, most rocket bodies used for space launches are still abandoned in orbit. In 2020, over 60 per cent of all launches to low Earth orbit resulted in at least one rocket body being abandoned in orbit. If that orbit has a sufficiently low perigee, drag from gas in the tenuous, uppermost regions of the atmosphere will gradually reduce the rocket body’s altitude and cause it to re-enter the denser, lower atmosphere in an uncontrolled way. This can occur at any point under its flight path, creating dangers for people on the surface and in aeroplanes. Moreover, many uncontrolled re-entries occur near the equator due to the trajectories of many of the abandoned rocket bodies. As a result, the cumulative risk from rocket body re-entries is higher in the states of the global South, as compared to the major spacefaring states. Yet launch providers have access to technologies and mission designs today that could eliminate the need for most uncontrolled re-entries, albeit at increased financial cost.

At least 14 space agencies have identified ‘in situ resource utilization’ as a necessary capability for long-duration missions, including crewed missions to the Moon, Mars and deep space. Attention is focused on the potential production of rocket fuel from ice and water-bearing minerals. If fuel can be sourced in space, it will not need to be lifted, at great expense, from Earth’s surface. But while the mining of asteroids and other celestial bodies offers benefits, it will also create risks. Mining that is motivated purely by resource extraction could overlook or even destroy important scientific information, while physical interactions with an asteroid could alter its trajectory and, in some circumstances, potentially create a human-caused Earth impact risk. There are presently two competing efforts to develop widely agreed rules on space mining. The first is an industry-friendly effort in which the United States is engaging in bilateral negotiations with dozens of states, encouraging them to sign the non-binding Artemis Accords. The second is a multilateral effort that fully considers the interests of non-spacefaring states and is taking place in the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.

The global governance regime for space is grounded in six decades of co-operation between the Soviet Union and then Russia on the one hand, and the United States and its allies on the other.

But continued co-operation is not guaranteed. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, some elements of international space co-operation broke down immediately. Other elements, such as the International Space Station, notably continued. More worrying, perhaps, is the heavy reliance of Russian and Ukrainian forces on satellites, including, in the case of Ukraine, satellites owned and operated by private companies. This raises challenging issues of international law, including whether these private satellites are legal targets. It also raises the question of how far Russia might go in this regard. What if it decided to target SpaceX’s Starlink mega-constellation?

In this and the following chapters, we examine how IIAs have featured as an argument in national lawmaking. Our focus has been primarily on the general legislative bodies with the power to issue laws applicable to the whole state, that is, national parliaments. We open the chapter with a discussion on the general parameters of the selected countries’ IIA-compliance review mechanisms in lawmaking. In the second part of the chapter, each state in our case studies is presented through a snapshot of an illustrative use of an IIA argument in lawmaking that is typical of that state’s experience with the IIA regime. As these snapshots are often related to contingent historical events and processes, we do not suggest that these uses are somehow essential to that state. Instead, they significantly overshadow the other instances of using an IIA argument in lawmaking in that state.

This chapter focuses on how different governance actors stress the constraining function of IIAs to achieve various goals and how they justify their actions. This chapter looks at how the IIA narratives have been used in reshaping national governance. This was chiefly through the narrative of IIAs as a disciplining and constraining force. We have identified that the general disciplining narrative about IIAs has three variants with different normative bents. These sub-types express how the governance actors evaluate the constraining potential of IIAs. On the one end of the spectrum, this disciplining effect may be viewed as flatly undesirable; on the other end, the constraint is viewed through a largely positive lens as a cultivating and educating force. Somewhat between sits the view of IIAs as simply something one must learn to live and deal with. Generally, the disciplining narratives about IIAs view IIAs as an incarnation of legal rationality superior to other rationalities, such as political or democratic rationality. Other considerations, even those pertaining to national constitutional arrangements, were cast in an inferior position and viewed as obstacles to a smooth implementation of IIAs.

In this chapter, the most common narratives relating to the function and purpose of investment treaties are analysed that emerged from our data. The overarching discursive framework of the narratives about IIAs’ purpose was marked by the faith in their important role in economic development of the studied countries (IIAs as articles of faith). This broader view was undergirded by the idea of a linear and progressive march of history, in which earlier state and economic formations are eventually transformed into the universally superior social order of capitalist legality, rule of law, and good governance (IIAs as progressive economic development). This broader progressive narrative about IIAs was translated in more specific narratives about IIAs in specific temporal and spatial contexts. International investment agreements were, thus, viewed either as a natural necessity, as a necessary (lesser) evil in the march towards economic progress, or simply as benign instruments that merely reflect the progress already undertaken. Finally, IIAs were also signed to express cultural affinity and played a symbolic role in showing political like-mindedness (IIAs as symbolic tokens of political affinity). In some cases, IIAs helped to project countries’ self-perception of their position in the stylised international relation hierarchy as ‘developed states’.

Humanity’s ascent into space began in 1929 when the German Army tested its first rocket, the A-1. But while militaries have always accounted for a large portion of human space activity, their use of the space environment has been constrained by a mutual self-interest in preserving access to it for communications, navigation, reconnaissance, weather forecasting, arms control verification and early warning. In 1962, the ‘Starfish Prime’ nuclear test demonstrated that nuclear explosions in space pose a major and indiscriminate threat to satellites. This prompted the United States and the Soviet Union to negotiate the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, which prohibits nuclear tests in space. This chapter addresses such tensions between the expansion of military capabilities in space and the need to keep space free of direct conflict. The chapter highlights the growing need for a treaty to ban the testing of ‘kinetic’ anti-satellite weapons, i.e. weapons that rely on violent impacts to destroy a satellite and thus create space debris. Although Russia tested such a weapon in November 2021, the very next month the United Nations General Assembly created an ‘Open Ended Working Group on Reducing Space Threats through Norms, Rules and Principles of Responsible Behaviours’. The chapter concludes with an examination of the potentially destabilising effects of an imminent extension of military activities to cis-lunar space, the region between Earth and the Moon, including special Moon–Earth orbits.

Some 66 billion years ago, a cataclysmic collision between the Earth and an asteroid ten to 15 kilometres in diameter caused the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. In 1908, an asteroid 50 to 70 metres in diameter levelled over 2,000 square kilometres of forest in Siberia, while in 2013 an asteroid 19 metres in diameter produced a shockwave over Chelyabinsk, Russia, sending over a thousand people to the hospital. The field of ‘planetary defence’ involves the detection, characterisation, risk assessment and, if necessary, deflection of asteroids and comets that have the potential to strike Earth. Yet there has been a lack of high-level diplomacy on this issue. In particular, the low probability of a major Earth impact happening in our lifetime makes planetary defence a low priority for political leaders, despite the existential consequences of impacts and their eventual certainty of occurring. There is also a shortage of widely agreed international law, including on the potential use of nuclear explosive devices for deflecting asteroids. Most importantly, there is a lack of agreement on who is responsible for vetting the science, assessing the risks and making decisions if Earth were faced with an actual impact threat. Is it the United Nations Security Council that decides? What if a Security Council decision is blocked by one of its veto-holding permanent members? Would a state that acted unilaterally be excused any illegality because of the necessity of its actions, according to the international law on ‘state responsibility’?