A Poser for Legal Minds: Carrying Civil Liberties to Outer Space

It is one of the charms of the capital that, while the State Department was hearing from its negotiators in Geneva that the world was no safer from nuclear wrath; while 12 people were being killed in riots in South Africa and many more were dying in wars in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Iran and Iraq; and while mankind in a score of places continued to show questionable ability to govern the planet, a group of Americans, with the blessing of government, gathered in Washington to discuss how the human race might civilize outer space.

Lawyers, scholars, educators, historians and space specialists--including the last human being to walk on the moon--came together to frame a “Declaration of First Principles for the Governance of Space Societies.”

It is a wooden title for a fascinating effort to produce a document somewhere between the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution that might ensure that people from Earth will find peace and freedom on other planets and the neighborhoods in between.

Colonies Seen as Inevitable

At this stage, the 22 conferees are not yet clear on whether they have in mind a celestial new nation, a colony, territory or 51st state, but they are confident that space colonization is as inevitable as the westward movement of Europeans in 1492.

In their effort to form a more perfect universe, these thinkers are thinking now of American settlers in space, sent there in American spaceships. They say the United States should proclaim now that such settlers ultimately will be free to determine their own destiny, to govern themselves and become independent of the planet they left behind.

History might have produced a precedent, had George III sent the colonists off to the New World with written permission to throw a tea party.

The current intellectual effort to carry Earth’s unrequited hopes of tranquility to the stars is sponsored jointly by the Smithsonian Institution and the Center for Democracy of Boston University.

Further Meetings Planned

The conferees met, and will meet again, in the National Air and Space Museum, a spectacular monument to human progress and failure. Here are the aircraft that the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, that Charles Lindbergh flew to Paris, that the astronauts landed on the moon and that many nameless pilots flew in the great wars that didn’t end war.

“We need to try now to find ways to save space from the problems of Earth,” said George S. Robinson, associate general counsel to the Smithsonian and a prime mover of the conference. “We need to think about how to avoid the colonialism and revolution, the nationalism and war that accompanied the evolution of societies on this planet.”

Robinson, whose three law degrees include a doctorate in space law, thinks the rules of conduct by which people live on Earth will have to be modified for life out there.

Living in an alien, synthetic environment on another planet or in a colony orbiting in the void, Robinson says, will modify human functions and perceptions. Due process, negligence, reasonable behavior, even homicide might require new definitions.

Test Case Cited

Robinson cited the three astronauts of Apollo 13, who returned from the moon in 1970 with their air purifiers failing and their oxygen supply dwindling. Suppose, he said, the computers had shown that one man would have to die so the other two could live. “Would that have been intentional, acceptable homicide?”

These prospects did not daunt the assembled space thinkers, who are confident that human settlement out there is “desirable and inexorable.”

Man’s “restless curiosity” will be the chief propellant, they said. Several predicted that the first settlers will be the sons and daughters of people now living. David Challinor, assistant secretary for research at the Smithsonian, said he thought the movement would reach full stride by the middle of the next century.

Carl Christol, professor of international law at the University of Southern California and chairman of the aerospace law committee of the American Bar Assn., thought it important to stipulate that no one should be forced to go into space. That seemed to suggest that some unidentified country might try to use the stars as a galactic gulag.

“I believe,” said Harrison Schmitt, former astronaut and U.S. senator, “that the discovery, exploitation and settlement of North America took place in a more hostile and constraining environment than we will experience in space.”

84 Nations in Treaty

Schmitt, the last of the Apollo astronauts to tread the moon in 1972, is confident that both the moon and Mars will one day be colonized.

That promises to be peaceful. So far. The United States, the Soviet Union and 84 other countries signed a treaty in 1967 in which they renounced the right to claim any sovereignty, build any military base, test any weapon or conduct military maneuvers on the “moon and other celestial bodies.”

When they agree on a space document, the current framers hope to sign and celebrate it in a grand ceremony to be attended by the President, leaders of Congress and the chief justice, to coincide with the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution this year. They hope to gain approval of the charter at the United Nations next year.

Meanwhile, the space seminarians have taken home a tentative list of principles for study, amendment and improvement.

Of all the manifestoes since the world began, surely this one will have the farthest reach. “There shall be,” it says, “universal respect for human rights without distinction as to race, sex, language, religion, national or planetary origin.”

Rights in the Cosmos

It proclaims for everyone out there the rights of self-determination and freedom of speech, thought, movement and privacy in a cosmos that renounces force except for self-defense.

It declares that “each spacefarer” shall have “the right to purchase, own, control, and dispose of private property including space objects anywhere in the universe; the right to construct, operate and navigate spacecraft anywhere in the universe and the right to leave or to return to any celestial body (including Earth) or space settlement and to enjoy unimpeded transit anywhere in the universe.”

The participants went home in agreement that space should be “the common heritage of mankind,” a point that could prove to be a sticky wicket if other forms of life turn up to contest it.