IN SPACE, no one can hear you stream. Self-styled “space nation” Asgardia is planning to put a data centre in orbit, beyond the reach of Earthly laws, but lawyers say that leaving the planet isn’t enough to get around them. As more organisations seek to exploit space in this way, it’s time we decide how to govern the final frontier.
Asgardia announced itself last year as a space-based nation, independent of countries on Earth, and has since convinced 180,000 people to become citizens by filling out an online form. Now it is planning its first foray into orbit, with the launch later this year of a compact satellite called Asgardia-1 holding a 512-gigabyte solid state drive filled with data chosen by its citizens.
Asgardia-1 will hitch a ride aboard a resupply mission to the International Space Station, and will orbit Earth for five years before burning up in the atmosphere. While in orbit, more data can be uploaded using radio signals.
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A spokesperson for Asgardia says the data will be vetted before being put into space to avoid any legal challenges. For now, Asgardia-1 is likely to contain family photos and messages with the data held “under Asgardian jurisdiction”. But if they really are under Asgardian jurisdiction, a similar set-up could be used as a data haven, beyond the laws of Earth.
How might this work? Servers on the ground offering pirated video can be seized by governments, but in space that would be trickier. Personal information stored in orbit would surely be safe from governments too. For the privacy conscious, maybe above-the-clouds storage is just what’s needed.
“For those who are privacy conscious, maybe above-the-clouds storage is just what’s needed”
International treaties say it’s not that simple. The United Nations Outer Space Treaty requires that nations provide “authorization and continuing supervision” of space activities by “non-governmental entities” under their jurisdiction.
Asgardia-1 will be sent into orbit from a NASA launch pad, so the US government, a signatory to the treaty, will be legally responsible for what Asgardia-1 gets up to. If the storage aboard was used for illegal purposes according to US law, the US could hold Asgardia to account. At least that’s the theory. The Outer Space Treaty has never been tested this way.
“There’s no precedent here,” says Joanne Wheeler, a specialist in satellite and space law at London law firm Bird & Bird. “The Outer Space Treaty gives general principles that were negotiated at the end of the 60s to try to stop nuclear weapons in space. The idea of data centres in orbit simply wasn’t on the agenda,” she says.
If someone sent a server into space, they would have to explain its purpose to get a licence from the nation they were launching from. But once in orbit, revoking the licence for doing something illegal may have little effect. In principle, the owner of the satellite could control it from anywhere in the world.
So efforts to prevent space data-havens need to be international ones. One approach, if a satellite goes rogue, might be to blast it out of space. China tested this in 2007 by destroying a derelict weather satellite with a missile launched from Earth. But the country received international condemnation, because blowing things up in orbit increases the risk of deadly space junk hitting other satellites. Perhaps that means Asgardians and their ilk really will be untouchable once freed from the clutches of Earth.
This article appeared in print under the headline “It’s time to update the laws that govern space”
