Interplanetary Risk Regulation

Space exploration promises new opportunities but also new risks. After centuries of national settlements and international conflicts on Earth, and the Cold War era of two great power states racing to the Moon, today we see a rapidly proliferating arena of actors, both governmental and non-governmental, undertaking bold new ventures off-Earth while posing an array of new risks. These multiple activities, actors, and risks raise the prospects of regulatory gaps, costs, conflicts, and complexities that warrant reconsideration and renovation of legacy legal regimes such as the international space law agreements. New approaches are needed, beyond current national and international law, beyond global governance. We suggest that interplanetary risks warrant new institutions for risk regulation at the interplanetary scale. We discuss several examples, recognizing that interplanetary risks may be difficult to foresee. Some interplanetary risks may arise in the future, such as if settlements on other planets entail the need to manage interplanetary relations. Some interplanetary risks are already arising today, such as space debris, space weather, planetary protection against harmful contamination, planetary defense against asteroids, conflict among spacefaring actors, and potentially settling and terraforming other planets (whether to conduct scientific research, exploit space mining, or hedge against risks to life on Earth). These interplanetary risks pose potential tragedies of the commons, tragedies of complexity, and tragedies of the uncommons, in turn challenging regulatory institutions to manage collective action, risk-risk tradeoffs, and extreme catastrophic/existential risks. Optimal interplanetary risk regulation can learn from experience in terrestrial risk regulation, including by designing for adaptive policy learning. Beyond national and international law on Earth, the new space era will need interplanetary risk regulation.