Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hi. I'm Frans von der Dunk, professor of space law at the University of Nebraska-
Lincoln's unique
L.L.M. program for space, cyber and telecommunications law.
In the early days of 2011,
the space shuttle experienced it's last flight, and apart from a number of
political and strategic considerations
there are also a number of important legal aspects which result from that
development.
In the short term it means that
the U.S. government and NASA are dependent upon foreign service providers...
foreign transport service providers... for transporting U.S. astronauts or U.S. cargo
to the international space station...
notably the Russians, and that's of course, where the political issues and
strategic issues come in. In a somewhat longer term however,
the most important change will be that private enterprise will step into the
gap , and is actually already preparing to do so,
and as a consequence
there will be need for additional regulation because if a U.S. astronaut
or government cargo will be transported on a private entity,
you can imagine that there are a lot of legal considerations which have to go
into that.
Furthermore, it's not going to be just a national, U.S.
venture, but there will be a lot of international
corporation and participation involved. So ideally a legal regime should be
developed at the international level
at some level of harmonization or coherence in order to...
to prepare the world for the entry of private enterprise into human, manned
space flight in particular.
And at the University of Nebraska, we are very proud
to prepare our students in the context of our L.M. program, also for
these exciting new
legal developments.