Government

Space Law, Like All Law, Frowns Upon President Trump

Since Trump appears serious about his "Space Force," we have to be serious about space law.

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I haz spaac

The “Space Force” idea, promoted by President Donald Trump, is stupid. We all get that, right? It’s an idiot brain doodle from a child-king who couldn’t calculate the force of a celestial object if you told him its mass and acceleration.

But, if we’ve learned anything from the Trump Era it’s that you actually have to waste precious time and energy explaining to people why stupid ideas are wrong. Back in the day, you could just say “that’s dumb” and the idiot would slink away, ashamed, wiping the drool away from his lips as he contemplated the herculean task of reading an entire book devoid of pictures.

Now, those people run the world, and the joke is on us. So we must get down in the muck with fools and try to explain to them, in simple language, why nearly every thought in their little heads is wrong or unworkable.

The Daily Beast dove into all the problems with having a “space force,” which Trump seems to think would be some kind of intergalactic military arm that would allow us to fight our enemies in the stars.

The first problem, of course, is that what Trump is proposing is illegal under international law:

“The Outer Space Treaty does allow the presence of the military in space—they have been in space since the beginning—but they are restricted in what they can do,” Professor Joanne Gabrynowicz, Director Emerita of the National Center for Remote Sensing, Air, and Space Law at the University of Mississippi School of Law, told The Daily Beast. “For example, they could not do anything with nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction—those are strictly prohibited in space.”

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, of which the U.S. is both a signatory and ratifier, prevents any nation from declaring sovereignty over space or heavenly bodies, and prohibits space-faring countries from blocking other nations from exploring space. There are further restrictions over military presence on heavenly bodies like the Moon, which according to the treaty “shall be used exclusively for peaceful purposes.”

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I wrote a paper once on the Space Treaty (3L year man, I suggest you try it). It’s really a fascinating document — a cold war era agreement to not nuke the moon.

And it more or less specifically prohibits anything an imagined “space force” might reasonably do. You can’t claim sovereignty of space: “first” does not apply to the freaking Moon. Every nation has a right to free exploration of space.

It should go without saying that setting off nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in low Earth orbit is specifically prohibited, as it was the whole point of making the treaty.

The United States is a signatory to this treaty, and ratified it. It’s binding.

Of course, Donald Trump has no respect for treaties or promises made by the United States. He’s turned the U.S. into a rogue state, and you can bet he’d violate the hell out of the treaty if Fox News told him to.

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But, luckily for humanity, Trump is 72. Even if he is “dictator-for-life,” he likely won’t last long enough for the “space force” technology to catch up to his megalomaniac dreams.

Trump might not understand the laws of man, but the laws of nature are not so easily broken.

Is Trump’s ‘Space Force’ Against Space Law? [Daily Beast]

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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