Legal Issues on Sub-Orbital Space Tourism: International and National Law Perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Travelling to space became an affordable reality for the general public with SpaceshipOne's flight to an altitude above 100km, which was the first successful private sub-orbital flight. Ever since, several private companies have been making efforts to develop their own sub-orbital vehicles to meet the enthusiasm and demands of the public. However, emergence of sub-orbital space tourism has also opened floodgates for several unsolved legal problems and divergent State practices which need harmonization. First and foremost issue is determining the regime of applicable law, air law or space law, to hybrid sub-orbital vehicles which have features of both aircraft and space object and which travel through both airspace and outer space. It is important to resolve the issue as basic principle of aviation law is that the sovereignty of States over airspace and it is radically different from the fundamental premise of space law, which is freedom of exploration and use for all States. Another important issue is that of authorization and safety oversight as even though sub-orbital vehicles are designed to carry humans, they are not as tried and tested as aircrafts which normally carry humans. Thirdly, passenger liability and third party liability are significant issues with respect to sub-orbital flights due to the risks associated with space travel. This paper looks into international laws as well as national laws of space-faring nations to find out solutions to these legal issues. It is contemplated that space tourism will become a general norm in future. Also, there is a possibility of transportation from one point on earth to another via outer space, which will significantly reduce travel time, becoming a reality. Hence, it is imperative to come up with a harmonized legal regime for sub-orbital vehicles.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".