CHAPTER 6A Celestial Magna Carta

The Ethical Roots of a Discipline

Governing space, as it had been for spaceflight itself, was initially a matter of speculation. The question of space law first appeared in a 1910 treatise by the Belgian lawyer Emil Laude, who predicted after the Wright brothers’ historic flights that new codes would eventually govern the “ether” beyond the layers of breathable gas through which the first airplanes were then passing. If not “aerial law,” Laude asked, then what? “It may be hazardous to predict,” he concluded, “for the term Ether itself only hides our ignorance and we dare not propose the term Ethereal Law. But certainly it is a question of the Law of Space.”⁹

Interest in the legal implications of the “ether” increased as trans-Atlantic engineers began experimenting with liquid-fuel rockets in the 1920s. When the Soviet Union held an air law conference in Moscow late in 1926, a senior official from the USSR's Aviation Ministry, V. A. Zarzar, observed escalating debates about a “theory of zones” that divided the air (subject, the theory went, to national jurisdiction and control) from the regions above (which many agreed should transcend such jurisdiction). Presaging Soviet objections to satellite reconnaissance three decades later, he asked if, in the event that aircraft were powerful enough to fly “at such tremendous altitudes, at improbable speeds,” what would prevent one nation from flying high over the territory of another? “We only point out that the ‘theory of zones,’” he wrote in a published version of his talk a year later, “is not so ‘stupid’ as would appear at first glance.”¹⁰

He was right. By the early 1930s German leaps in rocketry propelled human activity beyond the threshold separating the “zone” of the air from that of space. Closely following these developments and similar advances in Europe and the United States, Vladimir Mandl, a Czechoslovakian lawyer, writer, and engineering professor, perceived the onset of a new realm of legal practice and in 1932 published the world's first monograph dedicated to it, Das Weltraum-Recht: Ein Problem der Raumfahrt (The Law of Outer Space, a Problem of Spaceflight).¹¹ In this short treatment, Mandl proposed a clear delineation, based on the unique capabilities of spacecraft, between legal rules for space and those for other shared spaces such as the air or the high seas. Because the medium possessed many unique and challenging qualities, space law would be “quite a different phenomenon than is the present law of jurists,” Mandl predicted. Above all, traditional claims of national sovereignty would have to make room for more flexible regimes, for beyond Earth there began a vast area “independent [of] State power.” In language that resembled his contemporaries at the British and American space societies, he suggested that spaceflight would diminish the importance of national territory and erode the power of state governments. No longer having “subjects,” national governments would exist in a state of equality with their environs, and new communities based on personal ties would come to replace traditional loyalties.¹²

By 1957 most practitioners of space law, which by then had coalesced into a lively and expansive subfield, were concerned less with the existential problems of “the future” than the immediate legal consequences of the Soviet satellite and the onset of practical space exploration. There existed, all agreed, a glaring void in the available body of international law to deal with satellite communications, the allocation of radio frequencies, liability for damage caused by fallen spacecraft, and sovereignty over objects launched into space, celestial bodies, and the medium itself. “If you find yourself in command of a satellite in the ionosphere and you encounter a Soviet satellite,” warned Philip C. Jessup, a Columbia University law professor, “you had better send back for instructions because the law books will not help you any” (figure 17).¹³

Over the course of 1957–1960, the pace and novelty of US and Soviet space feats prompted lawyers to urge international agreement on a set of basic principles that would guide spaceflight away from the Cold War and toward its intended applications in scientific research and economic growth. The Soviet Union successfully orbited the first living organism, a dog named Laika, on November 3, 1957, though the animal died of respiratory failure within hours. The United States followed suit at the end of the following January with its inaugural satellite, Explorer 1, which confirmed the existence of the Van Allen radiation belts. Luna I made the first heliocentric orbit around the Earth in January 1959. It was the first to fly by the moon (it was intended to impact the lunar surface) and succeeded in taking the first measurements of solar winds. The world's first communications satellite, its first weather satellite, and the first photographs of the Earth from orbit followed quickly behind.

FIGURE 17. “Isn’t it time you were getting me in orbit?” Amid rapid technological achievements by the superpowers, many asked if legal constraints for space activities and for the medium of space were falling perilously behind. “Isn’t It Time You Were Getting Me into Orbit?,” Christian Science Monitor, July 30, 1961,14.B Outer Space 14.B.11 International Space Law 196, box 344, RG 59, General Records of the Department of State; Office of the Secretary, Special Assistant to the Secretary of State for Atomic Energy and Outer Space, General Records Relating to Atomic Energy Matters, 1948–1962, USNA.

Amid these accomplishments the example of the atomic bomb conditioned early deliberations about how governments should proceed in space: failure to place nuclear weapons under international control in the mid-1940s, many contemporaries argued, taught that if legal frameworks lagged behind technological developments, the capacity for governments and international law to control events would dissolve.¹⁴ “Good intentions,” wrote one observer, “may be overtaken by events.”¹⁵ The pace of accomplishment threatened to launch the superpowers beyond “a point of no return” at which political rivalry and likely another arms race would become inevitable. The gap between ever-progressing technological capabilities and the formulation of rules to govern those capabilities, many lawyers agreed, “had widened to the point that the peace of the world is threatened.” To avoid the mistakes of the bomb, space lawyers “must become eagles and stop being turtles,” implored one New York attorney as late as 1965. The current pace was simply much too slow.¹⁶

Urgent as the need for a new coda of space law appeared to be, an equally voluminous body of legal thought, particularly in the halls of decision, advocated a more restrained approach emphasizing precedent, the requirement of facts, and the necessity for law to follow political realities. This “positivist” school of space law held that governments should “make haste slowly” in constructing a new legal order for space.¹⁷ Chester Ward, judge advocate general of the Navy, put the matter colloquially: “It would be futile for a state legislature to attempt to draw up a state highway code without knowing the performance characteristics of modern automobiles and trucks,” he wrote in the JAG Journal seven months before Sputnik. “The legislators would have to know the ability of modern drivers and the driving hazards of the highway system.” Efforts to write laws for the space environment would be “just as futile” without sufficient knowledge of physical conditions in the medium and the particular and ever-changing qualities of spacecraft.¹⁸ Space law, in brief, “should be based on the facts of space.”¹⁹ The State Department's counsel, Loftus E. Becker, thought attempting to move too quickly on codification would invite conflict, not prevent it. No nation, including the United States, had objected to Sputnik's overflight of sovereign national territory. Tacit approval of overflight had continued with subsequent launchings on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Given this fortuitous legal development, why not wait for technological and political events to determine the shape of the law? NASA counsel John A. Johnson made a similar conclusion in perusing the mountain of new material on laws for space. “The fact that the recommendations of eminent legal scholars on this subject have been revised several times during the past few years,” he explained to Congress in March 1959, “indicates the impracticality and, I might suggest, the imprudence of any comprehensive effort to settle this question with finality at the present time.”²⁰

Positivist approaches to this profound new legal field existed in constant tension with another body of interpretation to which the OST would eventually owe its greatest intellectual debt: the “naturalist” school of space law.²¹ Naturalists held that international law flowed from human intuition about morality and ethics, that justice was rooted in “conditional and absolute” truths about human nature. They believed people possessed an innate knowledge of right and wrong from birth. The law was not “intangible and nonexistent” as the positivists believe; it did not derive from kings or legislatures. Rather, it predated organized attempts to codify the law. Indeed, natural law did “not exist in code form and has never existed in statutory form.”²² Haley, the natural school's leading light, frequently referred to the theories of natural law developed by the Spanish renaissance scholar Francisco de Vitoria, who held that human conduct existed before courts and statutory law and that the law constituted “a state of mind” controlling human behavior. Vitoria had aspired to extend individual principles of morality to international law upon receiving sobering reports from the New World regarding maltreatment of its native populations. Indian communities, he thought, should be afforded the same sovereign rights that nations in the Old World had enjoyed.²³

Human beings, Haley and his colleagues maintained, must predicate space law on the same moral percepts with which they, as individuals, were naturally endowed. Crafters of space jurisprudence should operate well outside the boundaries of contemporary international relations and reach for rules that all could agree were “beyond terrestrial disagreement.”²⁴ Such precepts could be found, for example, in the writings of Aristotle, Epictetus, Seneca, Mohammad, Ahikar, Abdullah Ansari, Sadi, Confucius, Mahabharata, Rabbi Hillel, and the New Testament. Haley was particularly taken with the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant.

Haley's cosmopolitan and humanist approach to outer space was most evident in a novel legal concept he introduced in the mid-1950s called “metalaw,” a forward-thinking field of legal practice that sought to establish ground rules for how human beings should relate to other intelligent life in the universe. He derived the word from the Greek meta, which connotes “transcendence,” and from the Old English lagu, a body of binding customs. Metalaw therefore implied erecting codes that would operate “beyond our present frame of reference.”²⁵ In a reversal of the Golden Rule, metalaw's central tenet was that if human beings should come across other life-forms in the universe, those beings should be treated as they wished to be treated, not as human beings had traditionally treated each other. “To treat others as we would desire to be treated,” Haley wrote in his most significant work, Space Law and Government, “might well mean their destruction.”²⁶

Haley's writings on metalaw are remarkable for their simplicity, imagination, and moral clarity. He insisted on four basic rules: that landing on a planet upon which life was assumed to exist first required a reasonable determination that no harm would come to that planet; that human beings must be invited by the life-forms on a given planet before a landing could occur; that astronauts decontaminate themselves both before landing on a new planet and before returning to Earth; and in attempts to communicate with foreign planetary systems, lines of communication must be kept perpetually open.²⁷ Anticipating his detractors, Haley wrote that even if a given planet was home only to primordial life-forms—even “an amoeba!”—humans would still need to respect their right to live in isolation from “the bleak and devastating geocentric crimes of mankind.” Creatures ranging from single-celled organisms to sentient bipeds must first evolve into beings capable of understanding and relating to humans in ways that would promote peace and mutual habitation. This fundamental rule, Haley argued, was so central that “it would be better to destroy mankind than allow its violation.”²⁸ Here was the kernel of what Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, would later introduce as the Prime Directive, the guiding principle of the United Federation of Planets prohibiting interference with the internal development of alien civilizations.

Haley contrasted metalaw with what he called “anthropocentric law,” the historically bound legal customs of human beings, both on an international level between states and at more local levels between businesses and individuals. Despite the civilized language and tradition of legal practice, Haley thought it to be fundamentally “self-serving”: it protected property, wealth, and the interests of those with power in their dealings with those with less.²⁹ While having provided a measure of order in human societies, the legacy of anthropocentric law was too crooked to justify its transplantation to activities in space, where Haley assumed the human future would unfold. To guard against “galacticide,” space lawyers should “take a look again at what happened to the Indians.”³⁰ If brought into the cosmos, traditional legal practices would produce results “similar to the Spanish destruction of Native Mexican and Peruvian civilizations in the 16th century or to the American trampling on native … tribes during the time of the westward push.”³¹ Continuous wars, colonialism, and strident nationalism had warped the bases of international law that figures like Vitoria and Hugo Grotius—both heroes of Haley's—had established as “fathers” of the discipline. “The indefinite projection of a system of anthropocentric law beyond the planet Earth,” Haley wrote after Vostok and Mercury spacecraft had already catapulted humans into space, “would be the most calamitous act man could perform in his dealings with the cosmos.”³²

Alternatives were available. Haley's recommendations for novel legal structures were each predicated on guaranteeing that imperial greed, violence, and jingoism were “never permitted in space.”³³ He suggested establishing a sovereign, independent authority to which “every human being would be a citizen by virtue of his existence.” Every country on Earth would surrender its jurisdiction over space technology, such that no nation could launch, or even own, a space vehicle without a license. This supranational authority, working from premises of natural law, would administer every aspect of human activity in space, from public safety and health to immigration. “All of these regulations,” Haley explained, “would conform to the most universal and enlightened principles of freedom.”³⁴ Though mainly focused on the behavior of states and international organizations large enough to weaponize or pollute space, these reforms aimed at earthly poisons existing at every level of society, all the way down to the individual. Haley proposed banning from space any person “who would exclude others for any political reason” and the “nefarious (or impiously wicked).” The “moral make-up” of such persons was “inimical to the concepts of fundamental justice on which space law must be founded.”³⁵

The circulation of these ideas through trade journals, law conferences, and congressional committees marked the increasing currency of what many legalists referred to as “negative” or “prohibitory” space law. Negative space lawyers sought to curtail national space activities, to set limits on what the nature and goal of space exploration should be. As the name “prohibitory” suggests, lawyers like Haley wished to bar certain activities from space, particularly those that might be interpreted as militaristic, imperialistic, or those advanced in the interests of blind profit. Negative space law emphasized the importance of forecasting, of predicting what directions new technologies would push the law, and how the law might preempt changes that might rock the political boat. Accordingly, it privileged theory over practice. It placed future possibilities before present needs. And, most centrally, it valued morality over pragmatism.³⁶

Consider, for instance, the “Magna Carta of Space,” a declaration of legal principles for the cosmos promulgated by the Inter-American Bar Association at its annual meeting in Bogota, Colombia, on February 2, 1961. This draft treaty proposed that space and celestial bodies become the common property of all people. It forbade nuclear experiments in space and decreed that “war, in, by, or through space is hereby banned forever.”³⁷ The document's principal author, New York lawyer William A. Hyman, was “an angry, provoked idealist.” ³⁸ He was angry because superpower competition threatened to inaugurate a frightening prelude to space-based warfare capable of snuffing out life on Earth. He was provoked because the inaugural flight of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had taken place at an altitude bordering on what many recognized as the dividing line between air and space, a region that might precipitate conflict over sovereignty. And he was an idealist because he believed in the power of international law to cut off these developments at the pass. He hoped that the United Nations, to which he submitted his Magna Carta in May, would adopt the document hook, line, and sinker. But its absolutist provisions prevented its serious consideration by international space lawyers. Ban war in space “forever”? Governments must bestow the fruits of resource exploitation in space to “all people”? Such pretention smacked of the defunct League of Nations Covenant or the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Despite receiving a Papal Medal from Pope Paul VI for his efforts, Hyman struggled to capture the audiences necessary to legitimate his charter.³⁹

Although the Magna Carta of Space gained little traction, one could observe the circulation of more substantive precedents for negative law. Two days before Sputnik, Polish Foreign Minister Adam Rapacki submitted to the UNGA a plan to demilitarize Central and Eastern Europe by banning nuclear weapons from the region. Though the “Rapacki Plan” was rejected by the United States and NATO, it became the foundation for the “nuclear free zone” treaties negotiated from the 1960s through the mid-2000s; eventually all of Latin America and the Caribbean, the South Pacific, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Central Asia would be forbidden soil for the bomb.⁴⁰ In December 1959 twelve nations with resource and territory interests in Antarctica signed a landmark agreement that closed off the continent from claims of national sovereignty, nuclear weapons testing, and “any measure of a military nature.” The accord declared that Antarctica was to be used for peaceful purposes only and established freedom of scientific exploration for all nations. Four years later, the Soviet Union, the United States, and dozens of other countries signed onto the LTBT, which prohibited signatories from conducting nuclear weapons tests underwater, in the atmosphere, and in outer space.

Negative legal approaches also manifested themselves in a series of UNGA resolutions on space. On December 20, 1961, the UNGA adopted Resolution 1721 (XVI), which encapsulated many of the principles that would later become binding articles of the OST. It commanded states to apply international law, including the UN Charter, to outer space and other celestial bodies and declared them free for all nations to explore and exploit without traditional claims of national sovereignty. The resolution attempted to position the United Nations at the center of global space cooperation by encouraging states to report launchings to the secretary general and to provide for the free exchange of information relating to space activities. Two years later, the UNGA issued resolutions 1884 and 1962. The former called on states to refrain from orbiting any object carrying nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction, installing such weapons on celestial bodies, or stationing them in space “in any other manner” (see chapter 5). The latter recapitulated a number of positions from the 1961 resolution, but notably added that states would bear international responsibility for damage caused by spacecraft, that such craft would remain under national jurisdiction while outside national borders, and that the exploration and use of outer space was to be carried out “in the interests of all mankind.” Astronauts, likewise, were to be considered “envoys of all mankind” and thus to be given international assistance in times of distress and emergency.⁴¹

By the middle of the 1960s, however, many interested observers grew wary that continued development in space technology would outpace the capacity for mere declarations of policy to regulate behavior in space. “It must be remembered that international law is effective only to the extent that it is accepted by nations through their accession to a treaty or convention or through custom and practice over a period of years,” Senator Albert Gore (D-TN) reminded Americans. “A resolution adopted by a substantially divided vote in the UNGA on a controversial cold-war issue will not be accepted as ‘law’ by those nations which vote ‘no,’ and it will not have the force and effect of law.”⁴² Arthur Goldberg, the US ambassador to the United Nations, thus warned the UNGA in December 1965 that within a few years “the need for a treaty governing activities on the moon and other celestial bodies will be real.”⁴³

This estimate proved conservative. Within six weeks, the Soviet Union's Luna IX spacecraft became the world's first vehicle to make a soft landing on the moon and to send photographic data of its surface back to Earth. Surveyor 1, the US soft lander, quickly followed suit in May. Legalists in the State Department and in the COPUOS Legal Subcommittee fretted that the timeline for a manned lunar landing might preclude a formal agreement banning sovereign territorial claims to space. Such claims, warned a State Department position paper, “would extend existing conflicts beyond the confines of earth” and restrict national freedom of access, exploitation, and research of celestial bodies. Best to preempt the moon mission through the law.⁴⁴

East and West, North and South

The United States took the initiative regarding a binding agreement on space activities when President Johnson issued a statement to news correspondents at his Texas ranch on May 7, 1966. He proposed a treaty that might encapsulate many of the principles outlined in the Antarctic Treaty and the 1961–1963 resolutions. These included provisions excluding claims of national sovereignty on the moon and other celestial bodies; ensuring freedom of scientific research and facilitating international cooperation; sanctioning studies to ensure states could avoid harmful contamination of space; mandating the aid of astronauts of one country by other parties to the treaty; and the banning of nuclear weapons, weapons tests, and military maneuvers. “I am convinced,” Johnson claimed, “that we should do what we can—not only for our generation, but for future generations—to see to it that serious political conflicts do not arise as a result of space activities.” Two days later, Arthur Goldberg submitted a letter to COPUOS chair Kurt Waldheim requesting an early convening of the group's Legal Subcommittee to discuss the feasibility of negotiating such a treaty. Waldheim agreed, and Goldberg quickly submitted a draft treaty to the Soviet Union's representative to the United Nations, Nikolai Fedorenko. By the end of the month, Gromyko requested that negotiation of an outer space treaty be added to the agenda for the twenty-first session of the UNGA. Soviet and US delegates submitted their respective drafts on June 16.⁴⁵

The two drafts were remarkably similar. Each contained provisions forbidding the stationing of nuclear weapons on celestial bodies and in space; recognized the role of international organizations in governing the development of space activities; outlawed claims of sovereignty and national appropriation on celestial bodies; declared that space activities were to be only “peaceful” in nature; provided for the freedom of exploration and use of space on the basis of equality; and proclaimed activities in space subject to international law. As negotiations began in Geneva on July 12, US and Soviet delegates were in 80 percent agreement, Goldberg later recalled. This fact derived in large measure from the transplantation—sometimes word for word—of principles and provisions expressed in earlier agreements on space and Antarctica that the United Nations had ironed out over the course of the past half-decade.⁴⁶

Similarities between the draft treaties, as well as later testimony that the negotiations had been “swift,” “courteous,” and “business-like,” masked significant disagreements that hampered and eventually stalled the talks in August.⁴⁷ For starters, the US treaty applied only to celestial bodies, whereas the Soviet draft extended to space generally. The US draft provided for the reporting of all space activities to the secretary general (read: the public), whereas the Soviet draft was silent on the issue. Over the course of more than three weeks, delegates clashed on liability for damage caused by spacecraft, the safe return of astronauts to their countries of national origin, and options to escape the treaty, among other differences. Some of these problems proved uncomplicated: for example, US delegates quickly agreed to the notion that the treaty should be extended to all of space; the implications of such an extension did nothing to interfere with American plans for space. The Soviets, in turn, quickly withdrew their reservations about US “barracks” on the moon, understanding that this expression did not imply a “military” installation.⁴⁸

Two issues proved far thornier. The first was the right to inspect foreign installations on the moon and other celestial bodies to verify that parties to the treaty were abiding by its principles. US negotiators insisted on “full access at all times,” a more liberal and literal provision than the Soviets’ insistence that “visits” be conducted “on a basis of reciprocity,” an arrangement whereby parties to the treaty would have to acquire the permission from the host country to inspect a given facility. The Soviets fairly pitched this language as necessary to protect a base's operations and personnel from unsafe interruptions, but US negotiators were quick to label their position simply another iteration of the old Soviet refusal to allow inspections of any kind. Indeed, the US delegation feared that the Soviet Union might use the “reciprocity” clause to argue that if the USSR did not inspect the facilities of other nations, those nations, in turn, had no right to inspect Soviet installations.⁴⁹

Equally contentious was the issue of whether parties should be able to erect satellite-tracking facilities on foreign soil, regardless of the host country's wishes. The Soviet delegation insisted that any signatory that might provide access to tracking stations to another signatory must, by law, open access to all parties on a basis of equality. Gromyko was afraid of “discrimination against the Soviet Union” if “relatives” of the United States extended privileges to their allies but shuttered their doors to Soviet engineers. In contrast, the US delegation insisted that signatories should negotiate access to tracking facilities on a bilateral basis. Any sovereign nation had the right, per the UN Charter, to maintain control over access to its territory on a case-by-case basis. In a meeting between US and Soviet diplomats on September 22, Secretary of State Dean Rusk insisted that while the United States was happy to open access to tracking facilities for the Soviet Union on US territory, it could not compel other countries to do the same. Rusk reasoned that if Soviet negotiators clung to total equality of access, the two sides “would have to face the very real possibility that the US and the USSR would be the only two countries signing the outer space agreement.”⁵⁰

State Department officials considered the impasse over tracking stations an intentional ploy by the Soviet Union to stall talks until political conditions made a space treaty more favorable.⁵¹ The US delegation received help from influential delegates from Brazil, Mexico, Japan, and Australia (each of these countries had negotiated bilateral agreements with the United States on tracking facilities), who vocalized their objections to the Soviets’ equal access provision.⁵² Goldberg remarked that the idea of leasing land to whatever foreign spacefaring nations were so inclined set off a “hailstorm” of criticism in the Legal Subcommittee.⁵³

With two deadlocks in place, a nervous energy pervaded the State Department's communications with its UN delegation as the talks in Geneva ended on August 4. Rusk emphasized to Goldberg that agreement on the outlying issues in the treaty should be ironed out as soon as possible (the negotiations would come to Manhattan in mid-September), for a quickly negotiated treaty would show that the superpowers could cooperate “even in the face of the Vietnam conflict.” Early agreement on a space treaty would also help exclude matters of space law that might complicate the treaty, namely the issue of communications satellites. In attempting to negotiate a treaty as quickly as possible, however, the US delegation should not forfeit its position on the most important differences, such as access to foreign installations on the moon and other celestial bodies.⁵⁴

Following his orders on September 22, Goldberg agreed, in a token concession, to include a statement in the operative clauses of the treaty that parties should “consider” granting access to tracking facilities to all signatories but fell short of Soviet demands. Gromyko replied that this phrasing did nothing to settle the issue and that US negotiators needed to “show more imagination.”⁵⁵ The Soviets softened nevertheless, for they not only recognized that their position was politically untenable but recoiled at the idea that the United States, with the sanction of international law, might establish tracking stations on Soviet soil! In exchange for agreement that visits to foreign installations on the moon and other celestial bodies be carried out on a basis of reciprocity and with “reasonable advance notice,” Fedorenko surrendered equal access to tracking stations. Construction of such facilities would continue to develop bilaterally.⁵⁶

Major differences between Soviet and American versions of the space treaty confirmed the widely held view that negotiations were a matter of superpower politics, a tired East-West confrontation. Yet from the very beginning of the negotiations, and indeed beforehand, it was clear that agreement on any international space treaty would be as much a matter of North-South tensions. Surely, the emergence of this dynamic did not come as a surprise: the talks unfolded amid an explosion of “developing world” participation in UN activities during the 1960s as European colonialism gasped its final breaths in the Global South. From 1958 to 1967, when the General Assembly voted to approve the OST, UN membership grew from 82 to 123, with most of the new additions having newly won their independence. Adding fuel to the fire was the fact that many of these countries—Algeria, Guyana, and Kenya, for example—were then contributing territory and facilities to Western space agencies for the purposes of either launching or tracking satellites. The construction of some of these facilities had occurred under colonial rule. US and Soviet officials well understood these circumstances and attempted to “head off the snow-balling of support for unsound or disadvantageous international measures” forwarded by the “have-not” countries, mainly by including references in their respective draft treaties about the need to explore space for the benefit of all.⁵⁷

Mollifying the developmental and technological aspirations of the former colonies proved easier in theory than in practice. Leaders in Egypt and India spearheaded a growing frustration among developing nations over neglect by the UN's economic agencies. This animosity generated a transformation within the United Nations in which security matters, which had once preoccupied UN energies, gave way to problems of wealth disparity and development, a trend highlighted by the creation of the G–77 in mid-1964. “Put crudely,” observes the historian Paul Kennedy, “the ‘have-nots’ (the South), encouraged by the socialist bloc and First World radicals, were challenging the ‘haves’ (the North and its institutions) about the existing balance of economic power. Distribution, not growth, was back on the agenda.”⁵⁸

These attitudes quickly permeated the COPUOS's considerations of the treaty drafts. The Brazilian delegation to the Legal Subcommittee insisted that the language in the Soviet draft regarding the necessity of carrying out space activities “for the benefit of all peoples irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development” be moved from the preamble to Article I, where the provision would become operable.⁵⁹ Similarly, the United Arab Republic (UAR), a sovereign political union consisting of Egypt and Syria, motioned that a new paragraph be added to the first article ensuring that “States engaged in the exploration of outer space undertake to accord facilities and to provide possibilities to the non-space powers.”⁶⁰

The donation of these facilities would help developing countries participate in the modern economy built by space technology. If outer space were to become “the province of all mankind,” Global South representatives agreed, the fruits of exploration should be shared with all, regardless of whether one country or another had contributed labor, technology, or capital to the effort. As J. W. Fulbright, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, would speculate about the developing world's intentions in senatorial review of the OST, “it leaves the impression that they were expecting the use of … Comsat [the Communications Satellite Corporation, created by the US government] be given to them free of charge, so to speak.”⁶¹

The COPUOS's developing world representatives were occupied with broadening the treaty's ability to bar the spacefaring states from advancing their national power through space technology. The UAR, for example, proposed an amendment to the treaty whereby broadcast satellites would be forbidden from disseminating “hostile propaganda,” a phrase that was ultimately expunged in favor of broadcasting that would promote “friendly relations” between nations.⁶² India's delegation, moreover, considered it “disastrous” that the United States had not expanded its articles on nuclear weapons in space to include conventional weapons as well. Mongolia agreed, arguing that the superpowers’ provisions legitimizing the use of military equipment had created a breach through which future weaponization would unfurl.⁶³ That satellites for weapons targeting and orbiting military bases would still be permitted was anathema for emerging space powers reading the drafts’ soaring language about the exploration of space for peace.

Representatives from the developing world feared that outer space would become merely the latest pie to be divided among hungry, neocolonial competitors. It was the “self-interest of nations,” thought many African and Asian members of the COPUOS, that prevented the realization of a global commons in space.⁶⁴ In language resembling the legal absolutists of previous generations, some urged halting manned exploration altogether until humanity could prove itself mature enough to extend civilization to other planets. The most eloquent proponent of restraint was Liberia's longtime president William V. S. Tubman, who insisted that the space programs of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Europe represented the “unbridled, unthinking, hollow quest for knowledge” rather than a “purposeful, thoughtful, creative search for understanding.” Tubman placed space technology at the end of a long line of scientific and technological achievements that had offered salvation and liberation but delivered, for many, social calamity. He connected the cotton gin and the pyramids to slavery, the spinning jenny to child labor, and the discovery of quantum mechanics to the atomic bomb. “History,” he reminded his colleagues at the United Nations, “demonstrates how easily, how often and how unhappily man's knowledge outstrips his understanding.” The developing nations of the world were watching “in awe and apprehension” as humanity reached into the heavens “with the same imperfect hands and inadequate understanding [that] have marked his progress through the ages.” He concluded that man was as yet too immature, too undisciplined, too obsessed with knowledge (rather than wisdom) to pry open the secrets of the universe. “We can only believe that man owe[s] it to himself to pause and reflect before plunging willfully on the path he has chosen.”⁶⁵

Tubman called for an international moratorium on space exploration to last up to ten years and urged his “sister African States” to spearhead negotiations for the ban. The global consequences of exploration justified the Global South's active and equal participation in political decisions about the cosmos. Liberia and her neighbors were not participants in the space race, “but no matter how small, no matter how struggling, no matter how poor we may be, we share the same heavens with the greatest Powers.” By connecting the history of European imperialism to the future of the developing world, Tubman forcefully argued for an equal stake in global space politics: “Their catastrophes are usually ours; their failures of understanding affect our lives as intimately as their own; their concentration of money, imagination, scientific endeavor and national ambition on a headlong, impatient and wasteful race for knowledge which they cannot even take the time to study affects our lives, our hopes, our future just as it does their own.”⁶⁶

Appeals such as Tubman's did not fall on deaf ears. Though Global South negotiators failed to achieve more sweeping rules on the developmental and military elements of the space treaty, the final version of the document reflected a measure of success. The preamble's promise that space exploration would be carried out “for the benefit and in the interest of all countries” irrespective of wealth or technology was transplanted to the treaty's first article. The Soviet Union agreed that access to foreign soil for tracking stations should be negotiated on a bilateral basis. Per Article II, neither the United States nor the USSR could lay claim to the moon or any other celestial body, a stipulation that seemed to signify the coming end of colonialism. Most important, perhaps, representatives from developing countries ensured that they had a continued voice in space politics, for the treaty mandated that member states conduct space activities in accordance with the UN Charter.

Having secured a measure of compromise between negotiators East and West, North and South, the OST received a unanimous endorsement from the Political Committee of the General Assembly on December 17, 1966. Two days later, the UNGA voted—again unanimously—to approve the accord.

Doors Left Ajar

Reaction to the OST was mixed. With few exceptions, US and Soviet officials, particularly those who had negotiated the agreement, were ebullient. Johnson, Rusk, Goldberg, and others waxed triumphantly about the treaty having marked a “historic year for all humanity.”⁶⁷ Johnson predicted that upon landing on the moon, US astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts could now meet each other as “brothers” rather than as national rivals. Dobrynin held out hope that the agreement would contribute to the settlement of international conflict back on Earth; at the very least, the treaty was a good omen for the possibility of agreement on the NPT then being negotiated in the UN's Eighteen-Nation Committee on Disarmament. The OST seemed to prove, noted the Wall Street Journal, that the Soviets “don’t feel constrained to shun any agreement with the US until the war in Vietnam ends.”⁶⁸ Editors across the country congratulated the diplomats who participated for exhibiting “vision” that had been absent at the dawn of the atomic revolution. Negotiators had profited from previous experience: it was easier to secure agreements before technological developments made such concords impossible. The negotiators could be praised for anticipating the pressing international implications of spaceflight and setting parameters by which competition would be minimized, cooperation maximized, and nuclear weapons barred from yet another shared commons. “The world surely will have occasion to look back to this day,” the Washington Post opined, “as one that set the nations on the right path and on which the great powers made a wise decision to shun the military exploitation of celestial bodies and of outer space for narrow, nationalistic purposes.”⁶⁹

FIGURE 18. In the wake of the OST, two competing visions of space politics permeated public discourse. One was Johnson's and others’ idea that the OST might provide momentum for the superpowers to find agreement on earthly political issues. The other interpretation, exhibited in this 1966 Herbert Herblock cartoon, was that the treaty was highly ironic—and limited—in the face of racial tensions in the United States, the arms race with the Soviet Union, and the war raging in Vietnam. A 1966 Herblock Cartoon, © The Herb Block Foundation.

There were healthy doses of skepticism, too (figure 18). The most common criticism levied against the treaty negotiators was that they had worked to forbid military activities that neither the Soviet Union nor the United States sought to perform in the first place. “There are no ‘wars of liberation’ brewing on Jupiter or Canopus,” chided the Chicago Tribune, and “nothing to gain … from a military installation on the moon.”⁷⁰ The New York Times agreed that the treaty's benefits were “more psychological than practical.” The editors argued that far from stemming the arms race on Earth, the treaty was signed amid an escalation in superpower tensions.⁷¹

The triumphalism of ratification was further undermined by persistent confusion—stemming from the treaty's “fuzzy” language—about what the OST had prescribed. What did it mean, exactly, that space was henceforth to be “the province of all mankind”? Did the treaty's provision about exploring the cosmos “for the benefit of all countries” connote technology transfer, resource allocation, or merely data sharing? To be sure, the treaty included unambiguous passages banning military bases, weapons testing, and maneuvers, but even these terms were poorly defined. Many observers asked why a military communications station did not count as a “base,” or why spying on other countries with satellites constituted a “peaceful” activity. Others were frustrated that “weapons testing” applied only to celestial bodies—research on laser, kinetic energy, and fractional orbit weapons for near-Earth space could continue. It was possible, some observers argued, that the treaty's opaque language would precipitate, not prevent, conflict. Joshua Lederberg, breaking with his more laudatory colleagues at the Post, predicted that within a few years’ time, the Soviet Union and developing countries would wield the opaque language in the treaty as “a propaganda club” against any US space activity suspected of having military applications.⁷² Provisions for access to space facilities “on the basis of reciprocity,” seconded one lawyer, had opened a window for the Kremlin to deny the United States access to future Soviet space stations and moon bases. Soviet leaders could reasonably claim that if the USSR refrained from inspecting US facilities, it could fairly deny access to American or UN inspectors. “The treaty is a step forward,” he concluded, “but those who would hail it as a solution to all the problems of war in space are overoptimistic.”⁷³

Some critics went as far as to say there should be no treaty at all, that human beings were better off aggressively militarizing space so that nation-states could eventually transition international conflict to—and contain it in—the void. Air Force leaders had throughout the 1960s envisioned a future for war in which, conflict having moved to space, civilian populations might be spared. The moon, especially, might prove a battleground on which political outcomes could be decided, a recess playground where power hierarchies could be created and managed.⁷⁴ If the OST reflected a willingness on the part of the Soviet Union to make concessions, insisted the Tribune, “it would be more sensible to outlaw war on earth, where people can get killed, and to do our fighting in outer space or, better still, on the moon.”⁷⁵ By the time the US Senate ratified the treaty, no less than Senator Eugene McCarthy (D-MN), soon-to-be Democratic presidential candidate, endorsed the idea that it was “preferable to have [war] in space rather than where people lived.” Instead, McCarthy scolded, the United States and the Soviet Union should be working on a treaty pacify the Earth and to wage war only in space.⁷⁶

The breadth and depth of criticism levied against the OST must have unsettled its proponents, for the treaty had not yet been ratified by the US Senate. When the dust cleared, Goldberg and others had little to fear, for as with the UNGA vote, the Senate ratified the treaty unanimously. And yet, just as with the UNGA vote, the support the OST received is misleading. When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee conducted hearings on the treaty beginning in March 1967, it was far from clear that members of Congress, particularly those concerned about how the OST would affect national defense, would agree on the advisability of a treaty that impinged on US military space activities. A litany of security-related questions permeated the Senate over the course of three meetings: Would the Soviets now have access to US reconnaissance satellites? (No.) Would the United States be able to inspect a Soviet moon base? (Yes.) Would the treaty preclude observation from space? No. If at some point in the future the United Nations established a space police, would it be permitted to orbit nuclear weapons? (No.) Could the United States inspect other satellites to ensure that there were no nuclear weapons on board? (No.) Despite having been briefed by the director of defense research and engineering about questions that could possibly arise during the hearings, Rusk, Goldberg, and State Department counsel Leonard Meeker labored to convince the nation's leaders that the OST would benefit US security.⁷⁷

To help reassure the Senate, Rusk brought in Earle “Bus” Wheeler, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then busy trying to stabilize the war in Southeast Asia. Wheeler assured the assembled politicians that the treaty would not quash American military space activities; in fact, he predicted, it would likely result in a doubling of efforts. A ramped-up satellite reconnaissance program, for example, would be needed to ensure that the Soviet Union was abiding by the rules of the treaty, and a renewed commitment to research and development for ASAT ordinance was needed to counteract the conventional space weapons that were still permitted.⁷⁸ In a world increasingly armed to the teeth with weaponry, Wheeler added (quoting a report the Foreign Relations Committee had itself composed seven years earlier), “arms control ought to be viewed as part of our military and national security policy and not as an alternative to military policy.” “Strength alone will not suffice,” he reminded the Senate, and “threats to the peace can be reduced and perhaps eliminated by stabilizing expectation and demands in the frontier areas of modern technology.” The OST would supply that stabilization.⁷⁹

Endorsement from the one of the Pentagon's highest-ranking officers was welcome, but doubt persisted. Many congressional leaders argued that the OST would fail to enhance national security given the Soviets’ propensity for duplicity, furtiveness, and disregard for international law. The treaty was “nothing more than a scrap of paper” to the Soviet Union, insisted Strom Thurmond (R-SC).⁸⁰ Because the treaty did not permit inspection of space vehicles in outer space—as distinct from the moon and other celestial bodies—the United States had to rely on its own reconnaissance and strategic analysis capabilities to determine whether the USSR was complying with the treaty's provisions against nuclear weapons in space. Deputy Secretary of State Cyrus Vance assured skeptics that while the Soviet Union could indeed orbit a small number of nuclear weapons without the US government's knowledge, such a small contingent of weapons would not constitute a significant threat. As had been elucidated in the NSC, the Congress, and the press over the past ten years, bombs launched from orbit were technically and economically unfavorable compared with traditional ground- or submarine-launched ICBMs. In any case, the US capacity to detect such weapons was growing by the day. Between 1963 and 1965, the United States had launched twelve Vela satellites, which were designed to detect nuclear detonations in the wake of the LTBT. NASA's MOL (which would be canceled in 1969), was capable of the same detection.⁸¹

When it came time for a vote on ratification on April 25, the Senate swallowed its earlier skepticism with a 88–0 “yes” vote.⁸² Here, the considerable propaganda value of the treaty was manifest: simply put, no senator wanted to vote down an agreement that barred nuclear weapons from space, forbade military installations and maneuvers on the moon, and declared space free to explore by all—especially on one's own.

Within months, the treaty confronted its first real test, and again it appeared to fall short of its promises. The widely touted notion that the agreement was the foundation of an apolitical and pacific utopia in space immediately bumped up against Soviet tests of a terrifying new weapon in near-Earth orbit. Just two days before US officials shook hands with Dobrynin, the Soviet Union attained its first fully successful launch of the fractional orbital bombardment system that had so frightened the Kennedy administration earlier in the decade (figure 19). This modified super-heavy ICBM was engineered to enter a partial orbit of the Earth, where retro-fire rockets would slow the missile enough to lower it out of orbit and into a predetermined trajectory. Tests of the weapons had been going on since at least December 1965, but the Kremlin had given them no public designation. The CIA would soon listen in on Soviet boasts of the weapon during a parade in Moscow: these missiles could “carry the most powerful nuclear warheads and deliver them to any point on Earth. These are ballistic rockets; they can also be used for orbital flights—a very heavy type of rocket.”⁸³

FIGURE 19. Accompanying the text of McNamara's statement on FOBS in the New York Times, this drawing depicts the orbital trajectory of a FOBS missile compared with a traditional land-launched ICBM. The shaded areas emanating from Anchorage, Alaska, and Thule, Greenland, represent the US Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS). FOBS, the theory went, could orbit a warhead over Antarctica and penetrate US airspace from the south, thus bypassing the BMEWS. New York Times, November 4, 1967, 2.

In a press conference assembled so hastily that State Department officials—concerned that FOBS was a violation of the treaty—were unable to attend, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara briefed the nation about the Soviets’ new weapon and tried in vain to reassure Americans that the balance of power had not been turned upside down. To assuage concerns that FOBS would “confound our defense and come in through the back door,” McNamara reminded his audience that while FOBS missiles were indeed harder to detect by radar and faster to their targets, orbital bombardment in general was far less accurate and less destructive than systems using conventional land- or submarine-launched ICBMs. In any case, he added, the United States would soon operationalize an “over-the-horizon” radar capable of bouncing signals off the ionosphere to detect weapons using orbital trajectories. This effort represented a level of instrumental sophistication in missile technology, whereas FOBS remained “a system in which the disadvantages far outweigh the advantages as far as the attacker is concerned.”⁸⁴ Rather ingenuously, too, McNamara suggested that FOBS missiles did not violate Article IV of the freshly minted OST because they did not make a “complete” orbit of the Earth. Although some officials, particularly at NASA and State, considered FOBS to be a clear violation, the Johnson administration was careful not to rattle cages over a comparatively disadvantageous weapon already in the testing phase.

The NSC agreed that for the sake of the space treaty FOBS should be considered “an extension of the ICBM problem.”⁸⁵ Article IV of the OST was not intended to cover ICBMs and weapons such as FOBS that presumably would carry warheads only in times of war. “We must be careful to avoid vague charges which cannot be substantiated that the Treaty has been violated,” wrote the NSC's Spurgeon Keeny. “Such hasty actions can lead to counter charges that we are interested in employing the Treaty for a tactical, political advantage when it so serves our purposes. This can only serve to degrade the Treaty in the eyes of the world.”⁸⁶

To most observers outside the White House, however, it appeared as though the Soviets were thumbing their noses at the new agreement. To ordinary Americans, FOBS was just another “unholy device” of a destabilizing, costly, and unpredictable arms race.⁸⁷ Stewart Alsop wrote to his Saturday Evening Post readership that because FOBS was likely a compensation for the Soviets’ lag in bombers and conceived as a second-strike weapon, the orbiting missile was essentially “an anti-people weapon,” a city-buster.⁸⁸

Accordingly, many feared that the United States would react to FOBS by initiating its own orbital bombardment program. Others, in turn, demanded such a course of action. Representative William L. Dickinson (R-AL) went so far as to call for McNamara's resignation considering the secretary's nonchalant response to what the latter considered to be merely the Soviet's latest toy.⁸⁹ “It is plain that there are gaping loopholes in [the OST],” the New York Times presciently observed two days after McNamara's statement, “loopholes which military technologists have no intention of leaving unexploited.”⁹⁰

Four years later, in 1971, the Soviet Union would cease testing of fractional orbit missiles. McNamara's assertion that the FOBS weapons tested from 1965 did not carry nuclear weapons was true: the warheads were kept in separate storage facilities until 1972, after testing had stopped. The extent to which the OST entered into Soviet calculations about whether the FOBS program should continue is a matter for debate, although a report filed by the Russian Strategic Military Forces in 1991 suggested that the United States’ lack of an efficient ABM system in the 1970s—not international law—accounted for the program's slowdown.⁹¹ Though the treaty survived the FOBS scare, many were left wondering if the peaceful cooperation in space during the decade, reflected in the 1975 joint US-Soviet Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, could be attributed to the ethical standards set by the treaty or, more cynically, the mutual restraint of the superpowers amidst fiscal, technical, and strategic limitations.

The Outer Space Treaty in History

How are we to judge the Outer Space Treaty in history? Was the agreement, as Dolman has argued, merely “the jumbled consolidation … of conflicting precedents”?⁹² Did it accomplish nothing more, as the Chicago Tribune accused late in 1966, than the “sale [of] our peace-loving consciousness”?⁹³ There are reasonable arguments to be made for the affirmative. No nation has transgressed the treaty's article on nuclear weapons, but the provisions in question do nothing to prevent the conventional weaponization of space.⁹⁴ Nor does the treaty addresses the “real need” of space law: environmental protection, particularly debris mitigation.⁹⁵ Although the OST includes a provision requiring any space activity with the potential to contaminate outer space be subject to international consultation, it does little to hold member states accountable for pollution. Observers looked through the treaty in vain when in 2007 the Chinese government shot down its own weather satellite using a projectile ASAT weapon, or when a US Iridium satellite collided head-on with a Russian Kosmos vehicle two years later, a crash that spread vast clouds of debris along the satellites’ former orbital trajectories. Fifty years on, the OST remains a flawed document.⁹⁶

Inflicting further harm to the OST's legacy is the swiftness with which the COPUOS's Legal Subcommittee negotiated the agreement, as well as the unanimity it enjoyed in both the UNGA and US Senate. This apparent ease led some observers, both at the time and since, to speculate that nothing worthwhile had been accomplished. How could it have been so easy, after all? Both superpowers had significant interests in space exploration—particularly military applications—and each had imbued its space activities with the power to convey its government's social, economic, technological, political, and moral qualities. Over the previous decade, US and Soviet officials had clashed on a legal definition for space, the legitimacy of satellite reconnaissance, the creation of the COPUOS, and an agreement to ban nuclear weapons from space and celestial bodies. Why, many critics asked, should provisions as comprehensive and ambitious as those in the draft treaties require any less combativeness, mistrust, and obstinacy?

But neither the speed with which the OST was negotiated nor the unanimous support it enjoyed in the United Nations should distract from the opposition levied against it from both cold warriors who thought it would hamper US military space programs and voices on the left, like McCarthy, who thought its provisions did not go far enough. During the negotiations, Soviet obstinance regarding access to foreign soil for tracking stations, international access to future moon facilities, and the definition of “military” space activities threatened to torpedo the accord, as did US stubbornness about the necessity of reporting space activities to the secretary general. Global South representatives in the Legal Subcommittee advanced a formidable agenda that ensured space exploration would not continue without the interests of the developing world at hand. Whatever the vote tallies may at face value indicate to historians, then, agreement on such comprehensive rules for space was no cakewalk.

Jaundiced views of the OST that appeared in senatorial debate, contemporary editorials, and in some recent scholarly analysis stem in part from a one-dimensional view of the treaty as an instrument of international law. Because the treaty demilitarized space in only the spirit—not the letter—of the law, it was, and remains, easy to label the OST merely an empty box “wrapped in many silken flags and tied with much gold braid.”⁹⁷ But, as its deeper history suggests, the treaty was more than the sum of its legal parts. It was a reaffirmation of political ideas about outer space that had been circulating in Europe and the United States well before the space age had begun: that exploration should be advanced for peaceful purposes only, that it should be cooperative, and that its benefits should be shared with all. Space exploration, boosters convinced the public, would be a fixture of humanity's future—best to preemptively bar from this future the “viruses” of war, colonialism, nationalism, and historic animosity. In this way, it is just as easy to view the OST as the apotheosis of H. G. Well's socialism, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's utopianism, and John McConnell's pacifism as it is to view it as an image-making tool of the United States and the Soviet Union. Indeed, the treaty received the unanimous support it did not as a juicy piece of Cold War propaganda but rather a genuine argument that the Cold War should stop at the edge of space. This was an argument easily adopted not only by two large, spacefaring countries trapped in an arms race but also to the numberless people for whom spaceflight was still a distant possibility.

The OST also offered much of practical use. It served as the most important link in a chain of international legal arrangements for space dating from the late 1950s to the mid-1980s. The treaty built on and codified important precedents laid out in the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, the “bombs-in-orbit” resolution of 1963, and the UN Declaration of Legal Principles, adopted that same year. It also established basic legal tenets from which subsequent agreements were built, a role that has made the OST “quasi-constitutional.”⁹⁸ From 1968 to 1984, the OST birthed four additional agreements establishing rules for activities on the moon; liability for damages caused by spacecraft; the safe return of fallen astronauts; and the registration of space vehicles.

It is important to remember, too, what Earle Wheeler reminded the Foreign Relations Committee during Senate ratification: with or without a treaty, it was possible for the United States or the Soviet Union to enact policies or begin weapons programs in space that harmed the interests of peace. With a treaty on the table, Wheeler observed, “there are psychological and world opinion factors which would … exert a restraining influence upon a state contemplating violation of the treaty.”⁹⁹ Indeed, in global debates over Soviet tests of FOBS, space-based antiballistic systems such as SDI, kinetic energy weapons, and ASAT weapons, the OST served as a platform upon which the case against militarization and weaponization was laid. It is reasonable to speculate that if basic principles on the exploration and use of outer space had not been the subject of agreement among OST signatories in the late 1960s, then international rivalry in space might have compelled national governments to pursue the vision of space propounded by the USAF earlier in the decade.

More immediately, the OST had seemingly arrived in the nick of time, for the superpowers were accelerating their headlong sprint into space. Less than a month later after the signing ceremony Venera 3 impacted the Venusian surface, becoming the first spacecraft to land on another planet. Luna 10 orbited the moon on April 3, 1966. Over the course of the year NASA's Gemini program demonstrated the feasibility of extravehicular activity, practical work capability in space, direct-ascent rendezvous, and spacecraft docking. On January 27, 1967—the very same day that US, Soviet, and British leaders met in the White House to celebrate the OST— a launch simulation failure led to a fire that killed Apollo 1 astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee; the lessons learned from this horrifying accident (no crewed missions flew for twenty months) increased flight control accountability and supplied future spacecraft with a slew of additional safeguards. Despite blows like Apollo 1, it was clear that the treaty—and by extension the entire “sanctuary” paradigm—would soon meet its greatest test: men were headed for the moon.¹⁰⁰