After weeks of delay, on Thursday, January 9, Orbital Sciences Corp. launched the Cygnus space capsule on its first cargo-carrying mission to the International Space Station. Machinery breakdown, cold weather, and solar storms may have delayed the launch for a few weeks, but Cygnus safely arrived at the International Space Station three days after launch. … Read more
A state’s jurisdiction once went from the depths of Hell to the heights of Heaven. Airplanes challenged this tradition, and satellites ended it. Since then, the upper limit of a state’s sovereignty has been long debated. Today, there is a distinction between airspace—where a state is sovereign—and outer space—which is res communis. Despite the distinction, there is … Read more
Congress passed the Arms Export Control Act in the 1970s to prevent sensitive technology from being exported to US adversaries. To accomplish this goal, the Act created the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which authorized the Department of State to create a set of guidelines to control and license sensitive exports. ITAR’s purpose is to further … Read more
In December 2004, the United States representative to the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) commented that the Registration Convention—the international treaty mandating that states provide certain location and function information about things they launch into space—serves three purposes: it provides traffic management information to the spacefaring community, enhances safety, and … Read more
Things falling from space have certainly caught our collective interest in the last few days. And while it’s been the extraordinary meteors in recent days, manmade items tumble from the sky more often than you might imagine. These are expensive contraptions that sometimes have “sensitive” applications. So, as you might imagine, there is a legal … Read more
In late 1976, eight “States traversed by the Equator” convened in Bogotá, Colombia to discuss their rights over a natural resource which—to them—had been unfairly removed from their sovereignty. Specifically, these states felt that their rights to control natural resources had been unfairly abridged by Article II of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which cements … Read more
The Denver Journal of International Law & Policy is one of the oldest international law journals in the United States and is ranked internationally. It is managed and edited by students at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law.
