International Law
Oct. 21, 2019
Private parties can help space law blast off
Private actors like SpaceX can contribute to formal lawmaking by standing in the shoes of national governments — they can be lawmakers by attribution.





Melissa J. Durkee
J. Alton Hosch Associate Professor
University of Georgia School of Law
Yale Law School

Space mining is no longer the stuff of science fiction, thanks to SpaceX, Google's Lunar XPrize and a raft of entrepreneurial companies the world over. But is it legal? Through "attributed lawmaking," business activity could help make it so.
Earlier this year, SpaceIL, a small Israeli company, launched a moon lander called Beresheet. SpaceIL began working on this mission years ago in a bid to compete for Google's Lunar XPrize -- a $...
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