Spaced Out: Local Lawyers Hope to Make Mars Exploration a Reality By Brandon Gee March 13, 2014 A Beverly-based

nonprofit has enlisted local lawyers to help achieve a goal that is, quite literally, out of this world. The mission of the organization, Explore Mars, is nothing less than to make humans a multi-planet species. Specifically, Explore Mars is working to advance the goal of sending humans to Mars within the next two decades. While they may not be the first issues that spring to mind, interplanetary exploration does raise a number of legal questions, in addition to scientific ones, according to Rosanna Sattler, chair of the space law group at Posternak, Blankstein & Lund, who helped set up Explore Mars as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Explore Mars team also includes Natick solo Richard A. Zucker, who serves as director of political outreach for the organization. Zucker was not available for an interview. Sattler says while there are several treaties in effect that address space exploration, the major ones are decades old and infused with Cold War mentalities. They also were written at a time when only superpower nations could conceivably reach space, whereas space exploration today is increasingly becoming the province of private enterprise. This is like the new Dutch East India Company, Sattler says. These are people who have hundreds of millions of dollars that they can lose, and theyve decided this is very important to them and they want to accomplish this. Sattler says a comprehensive legal system governing operations on celestial bodies does not yet exist, and that property rights present some of the biggest questions for Mars exploration. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty has a lot of provisions about what you can and cannot do with celestial bodies, Sattler says. You cannot say, I own the moon. That is the key treaty everybody has to deal with, and its obviously very old. It was meant to deal with countries, not with private companies that go into space.

Thats a problem since private entities essentially are leading the charge to Mars, setting ambitious goals to put humans there by the 2020s or 2030s. Those entities include Bigelow Aerospace, Elon Musks Space X and the nonprofit Mars One, which has received hundreds of thousands of applications from people who want to be among the first to set foot on the Red Planet. The number of U.S. federal launch sites and spaceports are now outnumbered by the number of non-federal ones licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration. They key thing is, can we own tracts of land? Explore Mars Executive Director Chris Carberry says. If Space X landed [on Mars], are they allowed to own the resources there? All these issues are going to come up, and there really isnt a framework right now. Whoever gets there first is really going to control it. Sattler says the question definitely needs to be answered since any manned trip to Mars in the foreseeable future would be one way. Theyre going to be the colonists who start the colony on Mars basically, she says. What that means is theyre going to have to live somewhere there. Theyre going to have to appropriate space to live. Theyre going to have to have mining operations, maybe. Thats all going to have to be sorted out. Other unresolved issues include whether laws and treaties that apply to astronauts those providing for their rescue, for example also would apply to colonists and space tourists. And while the Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects addresses questions of financial responsibility if, for example, a spacecraft damages another space object, aircraft or something on Earth, its dispute resolution procedures are available only to members of the United Nations. If the economic and scientific potential of space exploration is to be realized, Sattler says, there has to be a more reliable system for governing legal rights and obligations to inspire commercial confidence and attract investment. I think we need to expand the human race into space, she says. We need to tackle it and explore it just like Columbus did in America. Its a great economic opportunity for us to move forward.