Description of the video:
Undated atmospheric video footage of a rocket launch, without sound.Eytan Tepper
Research Professor, Space Governance & Security
Director, Space Governance Lab
Ostrom Workshop
eytepper@iu.edu
Scott J. Shackelford
Executive Director, Ostrom Workshop
sjshacke@iu.edu
Join us on LinkedIn: Space Governance Lab
Academia at the Final Frontier
The IU Space Governance Lab hosts research projects, a speaker series, and a Working Group. The Lab also coordinates joint grant applications for numerous funding opportunities. The Lab further offers courses and seminars on space law, space governance, and space security. Supervision is provided for students’ thesis. The Lab also offers opportunities for Visiting Scholars from around the world.
IU Space Governance, Business, and Security Speaker Series
The Space Governance lab brings senior space professionals from the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space and the UN Office of Outer Space Affairs, NASA, the McGill Institute of Air and Space Law, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., the Secure World Foundation, Harvard Business School, and more to the Ostrom Workshop or offer Zoom sessions throughout the academic year. Watch the Ostrom Workshop News and Events for more information.
The Ostroms’ work has been adapted to a wide range of sectors and disciplines, from fisheries and forests to climate change and, more recently, to the final frontier. There is a growing literature on applying polycentric principles to space governance, and more broadly addressing collective action problems including orbital debris and space weaponization. Nevertheless, the Working Group hosts discussions employing other theories to space governance.
The Working Group holds monthly meetings of space law & governance with scholars and professionals from around the world sharing their research and ideas. The Group welcomes members and discussions employing the Ostroms’ work and other theories, of various disciplines, to space governance.
To join, register to the mailing list
Space Governance
This multidisciplinary course explores the principles and rules applicable to human space activities and how they are established. The institutions and treaties at the core of space governance are Cold War remnants, challenged by the new era of space exploration, where commercial corporations are gradually taking the lead in a race to harvest the riches of space, and are on track to become ‘corporate-sovereigns’. There is a consensus on the need to update the multilateral regimes but not on how to achieve it. The US is promoting its own governance vision with a series of acts that may set the foundations of the space economy - and hence also society - for generations to come. Military uses of space, key to modern warfare, face fragmented regimes, and the emerging space-cyber nexus is lacking any regime, though it is becoming the main mode of space warfare, as the war in Ukraine demonstrates.
Is outer space the new ‘Wild West’? Who makes the laws applicable in space? Can space regulation develop in a battered multilateral system? How are the legal foundations of the space economy different from those of the Earth economy? What are the regimes applicable to space warfare and space-cyber security? Can the emerging bottom-up institutions addressing various challenges complement multilateral and national regulation? These and other questions will be discussed in this course on the final frontier of international affairs.
