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Welcome to In-Orbit, the fortnightly podcast exploring how technology from space is empowering a better world.
[00:00:00] Dallas Campbell: Hello space travellers and welcome to Outer Orbit. In these short little bonus secret episodes we're going to be continuing the conversation from our main episode, focusing in on a particular topic or an idea or a point of view. In today's episode we are joined by PJ Blount and we're going to be exploring space traffic management. What is it? How do we keep space operations safe? Space orbits usable? And space accessible for decades to come while ensuring the future trajectory of the space industry.
PJ, thanks for hanging out. First of all, can I just ask, actually, which we never really established, how do you get into, how does one become a space lawyer? Like what's the, like, what was the sliding door moment in your life where suddenly...
[00:00:54] PJ Blount: So my origin story is that I impulse bought space law. I was doing an LLM in public international law at King's College.
[00:01:02] Dallas Campbell: Hang on, what's an LLM?
[00:01:04] PJ Blount: A master's of law, a master's of law. So I had gotten my law degree in the United States and decided to come to an LLM, a master's and so It was in public international law and I signed up for a space law class because it fit my schedule and then not enough students took the class, so it didn't make and the professor was like, well, you know, if you want to write your thesis for your dissertation in space law, I'll supervise that and I said, that sounds funny and so I wrote my thesis on space law and then a job opened up and I was like, Hey, I've got a writing sample for this and, I got hired at the university of Mississippi and I've been doing space law ever since.
[00:01:41] Dallas Campbell: That's great, what was your thesis? Am I allowed, are we allowed...
[00:01:44] PJ Blount: Yeah, it was on jurisdiction in outer space and so, I kind of put forward this hypothetical, you know, what if somebody gets mugged on the moon, who's got jurisdiction to prosecute that crime?
[00:01:56] Dallas Campbell: I kid you not, that's one of the things that was on my list of things to ask. Like what happens if someone kills you in space or like what happened? I was trying to think of the worst case scenarios that could happen, like not the worst case, but maybe the stupidest scenarios, the craziest scenarios.
[00:02:13] PJ Blount: Well, I mean, you know, and just the actual answer to this is it depends on the mission that you're on, you know, there's usually some sort of Command Authority on a mission. So if you're on the International Space Station, there is Command Authority in each module of the space station has its state's criminal law, imposed on it. So you are under the jurisdiction of the criminal law. There's actually this question that somebody's posed before, you know, if somebody walks off the Russian module into the American module and says, I want asylum, have they essentially, you know, jumped into another territory and able to claim asylum? And we don't have a really good answer for that.
[00:02:50] Dallas Campbell: Okay, here's the question I really want to ask. We're always told how much stuff there is now in low Earth orbit and I was kind of thinking to myself, traffic management, you know, with cars on the road, we have certain laws, like you drive on the left or you drive on the right, what side of the road do we drive on in space?
[00:03:09] PJ Blount: Well, we don't, we drive on the side of the road that we want to drive on in space, and we hope for the best. Now, I mean, so the notion of traffic management in space is something that has been talked about for a long time. The problem is, and this kind of goes back to the conversation that we were just having, is that to have management, you need some sort of authority and to have authority, states need to give over some bit of power and sovereignty and at this moment, states are very unwilling to
[00:03:39] Dallas Campbell: Can I just stop? What do you mean they have to, what do you mean have to give over some sort of sovereignty? In what sense?
[00:03:45] PJ Blount: Well let's say there are two satellites and they're careening towards each other in space and a decision has to be made as to which one is going to maneuver out of the way of the other one. At the moment, what we have is coordination, all the operators in the states, they talk with each other, they work on a solution, but there's no law that makes them come to a solution. If we have a management system, that means that there is some entity that can say, Satellite X is the one that has to move and so you've given over some power in order to have a dispute resolution mechanism.
[00:04:20] Dallas Campbell: In the same way that a driver on earth has given up some sovereignty because they agree that they have to drive on the left.
[00:04:28] PJ Blount: In a sense, I mean and I think the big difference is, you know, our traffic laws are part of our domestic legal system, which is very different from the international legal system. The international legal system, the notion for you to be bound by something is that you consent to it. I didn't ever go out and consent to the traffic laws, I just, they just are there and so there's a very different sort of footing for the controlled entities within it. But yeah, I mean, your analogy holds a little bit.
[00:04:56] Dallas Campbell: It's a poor analogy, but I, but it's just when you say sort of traffic management, I immediately think of, you know, road traffic management here on Earth.
[00:05:05] PJ Blount: Well, you know, it's interesting. I gave a lecture just yesterday where I talked about space traffic management and I talk about this idea that in space what we have is what I call the liability trap. If you think about the way that we got the laws on the road, right? We had an accident and suddenly somebody looks down and goes, well, that accident could have been avoided if we had a rule that says that drivers are going to drive on the left side of the road, and so we clean up the accident, we put in the rule. Later on, somebody runs into the back of somebody. Well, that could have been avoided if we'd had a rule about having indicators on our cars. So, these sorts of things, you know, we have an accident, we think about it, we get a new rule. The problem in space is if we wait for those types of accidents to get the rule retroactively, we have created a bunch of debris in space that doesn't clean up the same way that a road accident does. So, the problem is that if we think about it in terms of the road, we end up being reactionary, and we need to be, you know, reactionary is not a good footing in space, I would say.
[00:06:08] Dallas Campbell: Yeah, well and also we've been on using roads on Earth a lot longer than we've been in space. So like you say, those sorts of ideas and rules have built up over time. Although I'm always bewildered when I think about roads on Earth, if you invented them today and you said, right, we've got these kind of two ton automobiles sort of driving in different directions and someone said, well, how are you going to stop them bumping into each other? And someone said, well what we're going to do is we're going to just paint a line down the middle of the road and that'll be enough, you'd think that you're absolutely bananas, you think you'd be crazy, but it kind of works. Tell me about historically with space traffic management. When did it first become a thing? When did somebody first say, Oh crikey, we better get some rules of the road here.
[00:06:53] PJ Blount: I mean, as a concept, I really think it's been talked about since and I can't point you to the exact moment where it came out as a concept, but late 90s, early 2000s. But I would say that it's really just a concept, right? There is no space traffic management system as of yet. It is something that, that states and operators talk about a lot, but we have a hard time getting to an actual operational system.
[00:07:19] Dallas Campbell: Presumably in order to put in an operational system, all these different nations have to agree, like this is how it's going to be, is that fair?
[00:07:31] PJ Blount: Yeah, I mean, you need stakeholder buy in, across the board and so, I mean, the United States adopted a, space traffic management policy three, four, maybe five years ago and the whole notion was, well, we need space traffic management, but the truth of the matter is that's lovely for the United States, but they can't do it alone, because they can't compel another state to move their satellite, they can't establish unilaterally these rules, so it takes stakeholder buy in, not just from states, but also from commercial operators.
[00:08:03] Dallas Campbell: So you've got international politics to deal with, plus commercial politics to deal with and so this is the reason we don't really have any fixed traffic management laws as such yet. I mean, actually, maybe you could tell us kind of where are we with, is the aim to get everyone signed up and the world to agree, this is how we're going to manage stuff in space and everyone will sign up to some kind of grand charter signed with a quill, in ink.
[00:08:32] PJ Blount: I think for some people that talk about it, yes, that is the goal. I mean and look, maybe that's the most elegant solution is that we have an international authority, they essentially tell people where they can and cannot be in space and you know, that works. However, that is not a very likely outcome. so where we would be right now is I would suggest that we have a coordination system operators talk to each other. We have information sharing regimes via national governments, via the International Telecommunication Union, via the United Nations Office on Outer Space Affairs and we have commercial entities that sell this data as well and so through all of these processes, operators in space and states that represent those operators essentially negotiate with each other as to where they're going to be in space and this has, by and large, worked.
[00:09:26] Dallas Campbell: So you just, we just kind of muddle along, that's kind of where we're sort of muddling along scenario and that's where it's going to keep going for the foreseeable.
[00:09:36] PJ Blount: Well, I mean, you know, six years ago when there were 450 satellites in orbit, yeah, hey, this works, this works. We're at over 6, 000 satellites in orbit right now, because of the rise of Starlink and OneWeb and so we have to begin to question, you know, to what extent will these negotiations continue to work? Especially when the value of your satellites is constantly decreasing and so the risk to a company of losing a satellite becomes less.
[00:10:06] Dallas Campbell: So just, I mean, actually maybe you could paint a picture for us. If it is a bit wild west still and obviously we're getting more and more satellites in low earth orbit and the law surrounding traffic management is a little bit muddled and a little bit fudgy and a little bit off the cuff, what could happen? What would be a kind of worst case scenario?
[00:10:25] PJ Blount: I would say that it's not necessarily Wild West, right? There are frameworks, there are things that are at play. But worst case scenario is that we have a non orbit collision of two satellites, which is going to be a massively destructive collision. It's going to create a lot of space debris and if it's in the right orbit, it's going to deny access to a specific area of space that could be a valuable area of space and so that type of collision is what we fear. I mean, here's the other thing though, right? Operators tend to take into account the notion that they've put a high value asset up there and they want to protect their asset and so it's not like we have a bunch of teenagers up there driving our satellites. We have sophisticated businesses, but the issue becomes one of, you know, how do we manage that, over time? And as we get more and more satellites, how do we manage various stakeholders?
[00:11:22] Dallas Campbell: Got it. Tell me, I'm interested in what you would do. Like, what's the one thing, like if you could wave a magic wand and go, actually, you know, the thing that we really need to sort out is this, what would that be?
[00:11:33] PJ Blount: I think that if I could wave my magic wand, I would wave it in such a way that we could begin to get the United States, China and Russia, to begin to talk constructively about security in space and safety in space and I think that until we get past that impasse, it's very unlikely that we see any progress in this area.
[00:11:55] Dallas Campbell: That's really interesting. I mean, thank you so much for talking to us.
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