We’ve made massive strides in space travel over the last couple of years.

Independent companies like SpaceX are working towards making space tourism a reality and NASA successfully landed a rover on Mars.

The problem with space is that, while we clearly want to spend a lot more time up there, we haven’t put a lot of thought into how it should be governed.

Back in April, when a defunct satellite orbiting Earth was blown to pieces by an Indian missile, nobody knew what to do about it.

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.

Now, NASA is investigating what could be considered the first crime perpetrated in space, reports The Verge.

…one of the agency’s astronauts was accused of illegally accessing her wife’s bank account during her stay on the International Space Station. Investigators have yet to decide if the event actually constitutes a crime, but this case does raise questions about how we should handle criminal activity in space in the future.

The astronaut, Anne McClain (below), who spent 203 days in space aboard the International Space Station earlier this year, has been accused of identity theft and improperly accessing the private financial records of her estranged spouse.

Over the last 50 years, the people who have flown to space have been, for the most part, representatives of their nations’ governments, such as NASA astronauts or Russian cosmonauts.

But nation states no longer have sole sovereignty over space. Some private companies are actively working to send paying tourists to space, either for a few brief minutes to experience weightlessness or to stay long-term in hotel habitats. As space opens up to a wider array of people, the behaviors that occur here on Earth are bound to occur above Earth, too. “The things humans do don’t stop when we get into orbit,” Michelle Hanlon, the associate director for the air and space law program at the University of Mississippi, tells The Verge.

True. And humans, historically, don’t have a good track record when it comes to model behaviour.

The current case that NASA is investigating shouldn’t pose too many problems. It seems that, even though the crime was committed in space, it’s being handled as a US issue, covered by US law.

It does, however, open up questions about what can and can’t be considered criminal activity when a crime is committed outside of the jurisdiction of any country on Earth.

Things would have been hairier, though, if this complaint had been lodged by an international partner aboard the ISS. If a dispute arises in orbit between two members of differing countries, the two governments would have to consult with one another and figure out which type of law to use. But there is a time limit on how long the countries can bicker over jurisdiction. If they can’t come to an agreement after three months, the government of the alleged victim is granted jurisdiction if the alleged perpetrator refuses to cooperate with the negotiations.

Okay, so there’s a protocol for nationally owned spacecraft. What happens when a crime is committed on a commercial spacecraft?

That’s when the law starts to get more complicated. The US’s legal obligations for space are all laid out in a document called the Outer Space Treaty, a more than 50-year-old agreement between 109 nations that sets up guidelines for how to explore space peacefully.

The treaty is very clear that governments are responsible for what their commercial companies and private entities do in space. The document notes that each nation has “jurisdiction and control” over any registered object launched into space, as well as any personnel. That means the US has jurisdiction over anything US tourists do in space.

In order to meet its treaty obligations, the United States came up with a special provision of the US Code to address matters of criminal conduct that might arise in space, as well as other dubious areas. Known as the “special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States,” it covers how to handle criminal complaints outside of any nation’s jurisdiction. If a US national were to, say, assault someone on a commercial space station, then this special type of jurisdiction would kick in.

The special maritime law mostly covers big crimes like murder, manslaughter, maiming, kidnapping, rape, assault, and robbery.

For lesser offenses, such as hacking or identity theft, it’s unclear exactly if this would apply. The law also becomes murkier if there is an incident that involves multiple people from multiple nations.

If, for example, three people from Brazil, South Africa and America are all hurt in a Russian space hotel, there isn’t really a clear-cut way to proceed, legally speaking.

Space exploration and tourism, in this sense, is going to have to rely on the ability of multiple nations and governments to cooperate with each other to determine a clear system of law.

We can’t even get the world’s leaders to agree on a plan to combat global warming, so this should be interesting.

[source:verge]