In the Woomera Manual, International Law Meets Military Space Activities

The law of outer space, like so much else about the exoatmospheric realm, is under stress. The prodigious growth in private-sector space activities (exemplified by SpaceX’s proliferating Starlink constellation, and other corporations following only shortly behind) is matched by an ominous surge in military space activities – most vividly, the creation of the U.S. Space Force and counterpart combat entities in rival States, the threat of Russia placing a nuclear weapon in orbit, and China and others continuing to experiment with anti-satellite weapons and potential techniques. The world is on the precipice of several new types of space races, as countries and companies bid for first-mover advantages in the highest of high ground.

The law of outer space, in contrast, is old, incomplete, and untested. A family of foundational treaties dating to the 1960s and 1970s retains vitality, but provides only partial guidance. Space is decidedly not a “law-free zone,” but many of the necessary guard rails are obscure, and few analysts or operators have ventured into this sector.

A new treatise, the Woomera Manual on the International Law of Military Space Activities and Operations, has just been published by Oxford University Press to provide the first comprehensive, detailed analysis of the existing legal regime of space. As one of the editors of the Manual, I can testify to the long, winding, and arduous – but fascinating – journey to produce it, and the hope that it will provide much-needed clarity and precision about this fast-moving legal domain.

Military Manuals

This Manual follows a grand tradition of prior efforts to articulate the applicable international military law in contested realms, including the 1994 San Remo Manual on Naval Warfare, Harvard’s 2013 Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research Manual on Air and Missile Warfare, and the 2013 and 2017 Tallinn Manuals on Cyber Operations. The Woomera Manual was produced by a diverse team of legal and technical experts drawn from academia, practice, government, and other sectors in several countries (all acting in their personal capacities, not as representatives of their home governments or organizations). The process consumed six years (slowed considerably by the Covid-19 pandemic, which arrested the sequence of face-to-face drafting sessions).

The Manual is co-sponsored by four universities, among other participants: the University of Nebraska College of Law (home of Professor Jack Beard, the editor-in-chief), the University of Adelaide (with Professor Dale Stephens on the editorial board), the University of New South Wales—Canberra, and the University of Exeter (U.K.) The name “Woomera” was chosen in recognition of the small town of Woomera, South Australia, which was the site of the country’s first space missions, and in acknowledgement of the Aboriginal word for a remarkable spear-throwing device that enables greater accuracy and distance.

Comprehensive Coverage of a Broad Field

Three features of the Woomera Manual stand out. The first is the comprehensive nature of the undertaking. The Manual presents 48 rules, spanning the three critical time frames: ordinary peace time, periods of tension and crisis, and during an armed conflict. There may be a natural tendency to focus on that last frame, given the high stakes and the inherent drama of warfare, but the editors were keen to address the full spectrum, devoting due attention and analysis to the background rules that apply both to quotidian military space activities and to everyone else in space.

Complicating the legal analysis is the fragmentation of the international legal regime. In addition to “general” international law – which article III of the Outer Space Treaty declares is fully applicable in space – two “special” areas of law are implicated here. One, the law of armed conflict (also known as international humanitarian law) provides particularized jus in bello rules applicable between States engaged in war, including wars that begin in, or extend to, space. But the law of outer space is also recognized as another lex specialis, and it accordingly provides unique rules that supersede at least some aspects of the general international law regime. What should be done when two “special” areas of international law overlap and provide incompatible rules? The Woomera Manual is the first comprehensive effort to unravel that riddle.

The Law as It Is

A second defining characteristic of this Manual is the persistent, rigid focus on lex lata, the law as it currently is, rather than lex ferenda, the law as it may (or should) become. The authors, of course, each have their own policy preferences, and in their other works they freely opine about how the international space law regime should evolve (or be abruptly changed) to accommodate modern dangers and opportunities. But in this Manual, they have focused exclusively on describing the current legal structure, concentrating on treaties, customary international law, and other indicia of State practice. This is not the sort of manual in which the assembled experts “vote” on their competing concepts of the legal regime; instead, Woomera addresses what States (the sources and subjects of international law) say, do, and write. The authors have assembled a monumental library of State behaviors (including words as well as deeds, and silences as well as public pronouncements), while recognizing that diplomacy (and national security classification restrictions) often impede States explaining exactly why they did, or did not, act in a particular way in response to some other State’s provocations.

One feature that enormously facilitated the work on the Manual was a phase of “State engagement.” In early 2022, the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense of the government of the Netherlands circulated a preliminary draft of the Woomera Manual to interested national governments and invited them to a June 2022 conference in The Hague to discuss it. Remarkably, two dozen of the States most active in space attended, providing two days of sustained, thoughtful, constructive commentary. The States were not asked to “approve” the document, but their input was enormously valuable (and resulted in an additional several months of painstaking work in finalizing the manuscript, as the editors scrambled to take into account the States’ voluminous comments and the new information they provided).

Space as a Dynamic Domain

Third, a manual on space law must acknowledge the rapidly-changing nature and scope of human activities in this environment, and the great likelihood that even more dramatic alterations are likely in the future. Existing patterns of behavior may alter abruptly, as new technologies and new economic opportunities emerge. The Manual attempts to peer into the future, addressing plausible scenarios that might foreseeably arise, but it resists the temptation to play with far-distant “Star Wars” fantasies.

The unfortunate reality here is that although the early years of the Space Age were remarkably productive for space law, the process stultified shortly thereafter. Within only a decade after Sputnik’s first orbit, the world had negotiated and put into place the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which still provides the cardinal principles guiding space operations today. And within only another decade, three additional widely-accepted treaties were crafted: the 1968 astronaut Rescue Agreement, the 1971 Liability Convention, and the 1975 Registration Convention, as well as the 1979 Moon Convention (which has not attracted nearly the same level of global support and participation). But the articulation of additional necessary increments of international space law has been constipated since then – no new multilateral space-specific treaties have been implemented in the past four decades, and none is on the horizon today.

Sources and Shortcomings of International Space Law

The corpus of international space law is not obsolete, but it is under-developed. We have the essential principles and some of the specific corollaries, but we are lacking the detailed infrastructure that would completely flesh out all those general principles. Some important guidance may, however, be found in State practice, including the understudied negotiating history of the framework treaties for space law, particularly the Outer Space Treaty. The Manual provides important insights in this area, notably with respect to several ambiguous terms embedded in the treaties.

The authors of the Woomera Manual, therefore, were able to start their legal analysis with the framework treaties – unlike, for example, the authors of the Tallinn Manuals, covering international law applicable to cyber warfare, who had to begin without such a structured starting point. Still, the Woomera analysis confronted numerous lacunae, where the existing law and practice leave puzzling gaps. The persistent failure of the usual law-making institutions to craft additional increments of space arms control is all the more alarming as the United States, NATO, and others have declared space to be an operational or war-fighting domain.

Conclusion

It is hoped that the process of articulating the existing rules – and identifying the interstices between them – can provide useful day-to-day guidance for space law practitioners in government, academia, non-governmental organizations, the private sector, and elsewhere. The prospect of arms races and armed conflict in space unfortunately appears to be growing, and clarity about the prevailing rules has never been more important. It is a fascinating, dynamic, and fraught field.

IMAGE: A satellite orbits Earth. (via Getty Images)

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