A defunct satellite orbiting earth was blown to pieces by an Indian missile last month.

While US and Russian security officials panicked about what would happen if fragments of the satellite collided with the International Space Station (ISS), lawyers on earth tried to figure out if anything illegal had happened.

If India’s missile damaged the ISS, which cost $150 billion to build, could the country be sued? If so, how and where would the case be tried?

According to the Telegraph, ever since the first man-made objects were launched into space in the 1950s and 60s, the laws governing what happens there have been almost non-existent.

Most of the rules that do exist were drawn up in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty agreed by Washington DC and Moscow in one of the earliest achievements of the detente between the two superpowers that followed the 1964 removal of Nikita Krushchev.

Back then, despite the bitter rivalry of the Space Race, with only two serious contenders things were relatively straightforward.

Although dozens of countries including the UK ratified the treaty, it was in effect a bilateral deal struck between Russia and the US, which actually held similar interests.

Obviously, these days, Russia and the US aren’t the only countries with competitive space programs. In China, there’s even a training base where people can prepare for life on Mars.

Not only has US and Russian dominance of outer space been undermined by emerging  powers like India and China but Silicon Valley tycoons including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are firing ever larger numbers of rockets and micro-satellites into orbit – some no bigger than a rubik’s cube. That is ensuring outer space is becoming a far more crowded and complex place.

So how do you determine who owns the moon, for example? How do you determine territories in space, at a time when space tourism is about to become a reality?

With hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into the industry, the commercialisation of space is proceeding at a breakneck pace.

Some individual nations including the US have started to introduce their own laws to give companies the right to pursue commercial projects in space – fine until a dispute emerges with a non-US company.

Without clear international framework, there is a risk that the process could descend into a haphazard free-for-all.

As the Indian missile incident showed, there’s a lot at stake.

[source:telegraph]