Governing activities in outer space: responsibility, liability, regulation and the role of insurers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As we have seen from the numerous high profile launch failures and accidents that have occurred between 2014 and 2016, space activities are still ultra-hazardous in nature, despite sixty-plus years of technological development.These activities range from essential to modern life (ex., telecommunications) to futuristic and forward thinking (ex., space tourism).In order for these activities to not only continue, but also develop and grow, this inherent risk must be managed.Further complicating the risk dynamic in outer space, States are required to take liability and responsibility for the activities of their nationals in space, including private entities and individuals.The reality of this relationship is that while States wish to promote the development of their domestic space industries, they will also usually require certain levels of insurance and indemnification to protect the State against potentially costly mishaps.With regard to outer space, political will is lacking at an international level to create new binding rules for activities in space.Likewise, States are reluctant to unilaterally impose stricter (even if ultimately beneficial) regulations on their entities for fear that their domestic industries will flee abroad to greener pastures, creating a regulatory prisoner's dilemma.These factors create a scenario where the major space insurers responsible for writing policies across national boundaries may be uniquely positioned to enforce or at least promote mechanisms to increase safety and sustainability in the commercial PrefaceWhile there is a well-recognized lack of will to (over)regulate the space industry for fear of stunting the growth of this highly risky sector, I argue that it is helpful and, indeed in the long term, necessary to provide oversight and regulation in this field, both for legal (under the international space law regime) and policy reasons.The primary purpose of this thesis is to provide an innovative approach to governance of the space industry: insurer mandated and incentivized standards acting as regulations to protect the sustainability and financial viability of the industry moving forward.While I recognize that this method may be less
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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 | 0.016 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| 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".