In the beginning there was only one.
It looked like an aluminum beach ball with four car antennas sticking out. Stuffed with radio transmitters, history’s first human-made satellite emitted a spectral beeping signal from its solitary orbit for just three weeks before its batteries died. That was enough to terrify the world.
The Soviet Union’s 1957 surprise launch of Sputnik was, famously, the jump scare that startled the United States into a space race. But in a lesser-known series of events, Sputnik’s appearance also frightened many of Earth’s non-superpowers into taking decisive action. Facing the real possibility—just 12 years after Hiroshima—that Moscow and Washington were about to turn the commanding heights of space into rival platforms for mass annihilation, a group of diplomats at the United Nations began looking for a way to preemptively contain the two rivals. As NASA and the Soviet Space Agency jockeyed to outdo each other’s rockets, a UN committee slogged for 10 years to come up with a treaty that could successfully balance the interests of Russia, the US, and the rest of the world, before it was too late.
The result of their negotiations was called the Outer Space Treaty, and in 1967, 20 nations, including the US and the USSR, quickly ratified it. Among other provisions, the agreement gave all signatories free rein to operate in space “for peaceful purposes,” while barring them from claiming any of the cosmos as sovereign territory. To defuse a zero-sum contest between two superpowers, the treaty enshrined an aspirationally universal, somewhat legally vague idea: that space is “the province of all mankind”—a global commons, like the high seas.
Now flash forward almost 60 years, to today. The area of outer space closest to us, low Earth orbit, is as crowded as it once was lonely. The number of active satellites circling the planet stands at about 9,000 and rising, having increased by roughly 30 percent in just the past year. As satellite communications and remote sensing technologies have become essential to modern life, the roster of countries with a toehold in orbit has burgeoned: Nigeria, Tonga, and Laos all have their own satellites, and Algeria, Indonesia, and Singapore rank among the nations that have allocated an estimated $100 million or more for their own space programs—to name just a few of the 75-odd states with a presence in space. Signatories to the Outer Space Treaty now exceed 100. In some ways, the aspirational “province of all mankind” dream is becoming a reality.
But in others, orbital inequality is more exaggerated than ever. Given their wealth and America’s Cold War head start, US companies and agencies still own the overwhelming majority of active satellites. In fact, while low Earth orbit is still legally “the province of all mankind,” it is, by the numbers, increasingly the province of one man: Elon Musk.
A single American company—SpaceX, through its Starlink subsidiary—owns and operates more than half of the active satellites orbiting the planet today. In 2021, the director general of the European Space Agency, Josef Aschbacher, argued that Musk is effectively “making the rules” in space, squeezing rivals out of radio frequency allocation and open lanes in low Earth orbit. According to a growing contingent of advocates, academics, and officials around the world, this narrow dominance of orbit resembles something all too familiar: a colonial land grab. According to some scholars, it may even amount to a violation of the Outer Space Treaty itself.
Which is just one reason why some players in the global south are gearing up for the orbital future not just by scrambling to launch satellites, but by building up skills in outer space law—the evolving area of international jurisprudence that introduced the “province of all mankind” concept in the first place.
Though the Outer Space Treaty is still the cornerstone of space law, other international agreements have built up around it over the years—and more still are desperately needed to regulate today’s realities in space. “This is an area of rulemaking where they’re just setting up the rules for the future, so you need to have a perspective now,” explains Timiebi Aganaba, a British-Canadian-Nigerian professor at Arizona State University who has been instrumental in driving African interest in space law. “If the system gets built without you—if you come in later—people will start quoting laws to you.”
In 2011, Aganaba helped organize the first teams of African law students to enter something called the Manfred Lachs Space Law Moot Court Competition. The global tournament, named after an architect of the Outer Space Treaty, uses fictional court cases to train young lawyers how to think through the plausible conflicts that could soon arise beyond the atmosphere—and it is far and away the most important professional conduit into the field of space law. Students who make it to the final round of the competition argue their cases before actual judges from the International Court of Justice—the world’s highest forum for legal disputes between countries. And since 2011, teams from Africa have become a force in the competition. In 2018, South Africa’s University of Pretoria won the international championship.
The Lachs moot court is, for now, the only place in the world where anyone can hear international jurists rule on disputes in space. But with every batch of 50 Starlink satellites launched by SpaceX, and with every new nation and commercial actor staking a claim in orbit, real legal brawls over space seem increasingly inevitable—with stakes that could get very high, very quickly.
Just consider that alongside the thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit, there are more than a million pieces of debris hurtling around at 17,500 miles an hour. At that speed, a simple collision between satellites or pieces of space junk—which is a real risk in a crowded orbit—could trigger something known as the Kessler syndrome, a cascading event where shards of plastic and metal ricochet through the objects in low Earth orbit until they form an ellipse of trash around the planet like the ice and rock in the rings of Saturn. If that ever happens, it could make activity in orbit nearly impossible: a tragedy of the commons on a planetary scale.
So for people like Aganaba, there’s a new kind of race underway: to cultivate a generation of space lawyers from the global south who will be equipped to help balance the interests of emerging space-faring nations, incumbent giants, and the rest of the world—before disaster strikes. It’s also simply a canny strategic emphasis: Compared to the race to put satellites into orbit, the race to become an international voice in space law is pretty wide open. “Everyone is behind on this topic,” says Aganaba. “African students are no more behind than anyone else.”
Three years ago, Namatai Katsande had never heard of space law. Nor had she given much thought to space itself, or rockets, or satellites. “Because we live on Earth,” says the recent law graduate, “you quite literally never think about it.”
Katsande, a poised but occasionally rambunctious young woman, grew up in the relatively affluent Glen Lorne neighborhood on the outskirts of east Harare, Zimbabwe. When she was 10, a cousin who was attending a nearby law school came to stay with her family. They started watching true-crime documentaries together, which made Katsande want to become a police officer. Her parents nudged her to follow in her cousin’s footsteps instead.
Katsande eventually enrolled in law school at Midlands State University, so named because its main campus sits almost in the geographic dead center of Zimbabwe. She spent three years studying typical law school stuff, like contracts and constitutional law and criminal procedure. Then one day in her fourth year of law school, the case of Candidia v. Xenovia landed in her WhatsApp inbox—a make-believe scenario that was to be the basis of the 2022 Lachs Moot Court Competition.
The message was from Ntandoyenkosi Moyo, a Midlands law professor in charge of selecting and coaching teams to represent the college in moot court competitions. Taking part in a “moot” is meant to give students practice writing briefs and making oral arguments, and experience in less settled areas of law. As she scrolled, Katsande felt like she was reading science fiction. “The year is 2032,” the official case documents began, and two small nations’ activities in space have brought them to the point of geopolitical crisis.
The gist of the moot case was this: After gaining its independence in 2010, the country of Candidia found a foothold in the burgeoning space economy of the 2020s. Though not very wealthy or technologically advanced, Candidia realized that it could profit by serving as a “flag of convenience” for satellite operators. Much the way the colors of Liberia, Panama, and the Marshall Islands fly over nearly half the world’s merchant ships, Candidia started enticing satellite operators to register under its flag by charging them low fees and taxes and requiring very little disclosure of information. At the same time, Candidia started building and acquiring satellites of its own.
Xenovia, an island nation located just 180 miles from Candidia, had come to occupy a different position in the space industry. “While Xenovia’s population is small, it is very wealthy and well educated,” the case documents said, “and it has attracted many scientists and engineers with training in space-related activities.” Because of those skills and its position near the equator, Xenovia became an internationally important launch site and set up a thriving space industry.
The trouble all began when a private satellite company headquartered in Candidia defaulted on some payments to its Xenovian creditors. The lender gave the Candidian company 90 days to make good on its debts. When no payment came, the creditor dispatched what was essentially a repo robot—an autonomous vehicle that could maneuver itself to repair or reposition satellites. Candidian officials had long objected to the vehicle and called it a “potential military weapon to disable or remove satellites from orbit.” Now the vehicle’s robotic arm was reaching out to grab a Candidian satellite for the sake of calling in an outstanding debt.
Disaster ensued. The grappling arm ruptured a fuel line, triggering an explosion that destroyed both spacecraft. Debris then made its way through orbit and struck a Candidian military plane, killing nine people aboard the aircraft. Given all those facts, a fictitious court would now have to decide which fictitious country was liable for the disaster, and law students would argue the case.
Katsande decided to try out for the team and joined forces with a third-year law student named Panashe Mujegu in getting ready. The two knew each other from a previous moot competition, and over WhatsApp calls they practiced arguing with each other on behalf of Candidia or Xenovia. (In a moot competition, you must be prepared to argue either side.)
Only four other Midlands students showed up for tryouts. Coach Moyo and a panel of university lecturers gave the six contenders a shot at arguing the case one at a time. Katsande pleaded on behalf of Candidia, and Mujegu argued Xenovia’s side. In the end, the judges chose the two of them, plus a quiet student named Eunah Ndou, to represent Midlands in the competition.
Once the team was assembled, the three women spent the next few months meeting over WhatsApp and learning everything they could about space law, sharing and discussing international treaties, going over case law, and trading news stories about space debris. The Outer Space Treaty, they came to understand, demands that each spacefaring nation track and take responsibility for the activity of all the spacecraft registered under its flag. That’s why the national governments of Xenovia and Candidia were on the hook for ultimate liability in this case, even though all the satellites involved were owned by private corporations. The treaty also restricted nations to exploring space “for peaceful purposes,” and Candidia had accused Xenovia of deploying a military technology.
To get ready for the first, regional round of the international competition, the three women got together for a weeklong boot camp on campus, sleeping in the same room in the dorms, eating in the cafeteria, practicing arguing both sides of the case. They were like a sports team in training, except that they spent most of their time in a faculty conference room devoid of art or decoration.
“Boot camp was revealing for the three of us,” says Ndou. “We became very good friends.” Katsande, who liked to sleep with the lights on, was a natural leader and speaker who came to draft the group’s written arguments. Mujegu was a bit rough around the edges (her words), but had a keen mind for legal technicalities. And Ndou was sensitive, hardworking, difficult to provoke, and fluent on the podium. “She’s brilliant,” Katsande says.
After boot camp, the Midlands team members had a few days before they would officially compete against teams from Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda. (Among their opponents would be a team from the University of Pretoria, the school that had won the entire Manfred Lachs competition in 2018.) The winner of the regional round would go on to represent Africa against the world’s other regional champs in Paris. At home, Ndou practiced her oral arguments in the bathroom mirror, loud enough to draw her siblings’ ire. But on the whole, the teammates felt nonchalant: None of them expected to win.
Then, during a particular rebuttal in the middle of the regional round—which took place by videoconference, the Midlands team gathered in front of a webcam in that same colorless faculty boardroom—Katsande realized something: They were winning. Representing Xenovia, Katsande argued that her client had the authority to repossess Candidia’s satellite without consulting its owners, citing an obscure piece of space law that says an object can be repossessed by a creditor without the need to seek consent. (It’s true: Just check the Protocol to the Convention on International Interests in Mobile Equipment on Matters Specific to Space Assets.)
After that, sure enough, Midlands won. “It was actually pretty shocking,” says Katsande, who was named best oralist in the regional round. “Every single thing that we know we had to learn from scratch.” Back at home, the siblings who had chastised Ndou for practicing too loudly in the bathroom mirror apologized.
Suddenly the three women were the subject of news stories around Zimbabwe and on the website Space in Africa. In the weeks following the regional round, the team was invited to visit the headquarters of the Zimbabwe National Geospatial and Space Agency—whose existence was a surprise to them—a squat U-shaped building at the University of Zimbabwe in Harare, where their nation’s experts were eager to help them discuss technical issues relating to Candidia v. Xenovia. They also learned how their country’s soon-to-be-launched first satellite, ZimSat-1, would collect information about crop health, mineral deposits, and human migration.
Before heading off to Paris, the Midlands team had to secure visas at the French embassy in Harare—and get past one more hurdle: go up against Latin America’s regional champion, the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, in a preliminary online match that would narrow five regional champions down to a final four. The Midlands team competed against Chile directly from the offices of the Zimbabwean national space agency—and came away victorious yet again. They were now in the final four, bound for France and the semifinals.
Right away, the team started preparing for the 21-hour trip to Paris, rushing to get their hair and nails done. For the flight itself, they wore matching blue tracksuits provided by a sponsor. As their plane lifted off from Harare, Mujegu tightly gripped her armrests and kept them there. “I was awake the whole flight, scared for my life, scared to die every single second,” she says.
An exhausted Katsande, meanwhile, second-guessed some of their choices. For the upcoming semifinal in Paris, where they’d be facing off against a team from the Netherlands, Midlands had chosen to represent Candidia—the scrappier, less advanced, “flag of convenience” nation that had lost nine lives to the satellite disaster. But she ruminated on whether the better choice would have been to defend Xenovia.
Katsande had yet to encounter an opponent who used her winning argument: that according to space protocol, the Xenovian creditor had a right to repossess Candidia’s satellite without warning or consultation. As she dropped off to sleep, she worried whether her side could stand up to that point.
As the women made their way over Africa, the International Astronautical Congress was gearing up on the ground in Paris. In one wing of the city’s main convention center—amid appearances by heads of state, dancing Star Wars Mandalorians, and talks about future missions to the moon and Mars—dozens of wholly nonfictional space officials from around the world gathered in a wood-paneled conference room. Their object: to hash out the mounting problem of managing traffic and avoiding collisions in space. (“The current state of the art is not good,” summarized one expert. The UN maintains a registry of objects in orbit, but the list was never designed for space traffic management. Plus it’s largely ignored, out of date, and lacking in key information, such as whether a satellite has liability insurance—which is, in fact, a thing.)
Other than some private initiatives that encourage businesses to keep orbits clean, there are in fact no comprehensive systems or authorities to govern space traffic. No international body is specifically responsible for it. Nor is there even much consensus on how many satellites it will take to set off the Kessler syndrome, or to make low Earth orbit too dangerous for human spaceflight or satellite operations.
Musk claims that Earth’s orbits can handle “tens of billions of satellites.” His company’s solution to managing space traffic is, perhaps not surprisingly, a technological one. Starlink satellites all have an automated collision-avoidance system designed to make them maneuver around other objects. Data recently released by the US Federal Communications Commission shows that Starlink satellites had to maneuver 25,000 times in the first six months of 2023 to avoid potentially running into other objects. And for the past three years, SpaceX has been in conversation with the FCC about launching tens of thousands of additional satellites. According to astronautics professors at the University of Southampton, Starlink satellites may need to undertake more than a million changes in position every six months by the end of the decade to avoid colliding with debris.
And of course, Starlink is only one contestant (with an enormous head start) in a new space race. Amazon’s Project Kuiper has been approved to launch a constellation of some 3,236 satellites before the decade is out. And then there are the not-so-usual suspects: In late 2021, the central African nation of Rwanda—perhaps giving off faint echoes of Candidia—unveiled a plan to register some 330,000 satellites, in a proposal made in partnership with the French satellite company E-Space. Many in the industry characterized the plan as extreme, doubting Rwanda’s capacity to monitor so many spacecraft. But Danielle Wood, a leading anti-colonial space intellectual, simply sees an African people seizing what’s entitled to them under space law through a commercial partnership. “They don’t want to be the last ones to get access to space, so they’re staking a claim,” says the MIT professor and director of the Space Enabled Research Group at the MIT Media Lab. “All countries have the right to benefit from space activity.”
Darren McKnight, a senior researcher at LeoLabs, a company that tracks space debris and collision events, disagrees with Musk’s estimate of how many satellites space can handle. We could probably increase the number of satellites in low Earth orbit to somewhere between 40,000 and 90,000, McKnight says, if everyone acted responsibly. But tens of thousands of satellites are currently slated to be run by operators who “have not currently shown the sophistication nor the willingness to show their work and share their work.”
In other words, it’s a bit of a scrum. Somewhere between a few thousand and a few billion satellites, disaster may strike. If it does, the matter will—presumably—come before the International Criminal Court.
With her left hand behind her back and her right hand carrying notes, Katsande paced back and forth, reciting arguments she had memorized. She spoke in a voice just above a whisper, quiet enough to hear the hiss of air circulation in the small convention center room and the indiscernible murmurs of her opponent preparing in the room next door. It was the day of the semifinal, and the Midlands team had been in Paris for just 12 hours. Nearby, her teammate Ndou had her head down in notes. Above them, a screen showed an Eiffel Tower surrounded by stars, a spaceship, and a satellite.
Interrupting Katsande’s recitation, Mujegu took her by the hand, looked past the acrid French roast coffee provided by the event’s organizers, and said she was thinking about going off to buy a more palatable cup. After coffee and croissants, the trio returned to pacing, study, and recitation, occasionally huddling to discuss a matter in detail. Less than a football field away, the French prime minister was speaking before the world’s space community.
A few minutes later, the Midlands students headed into a conference room where tables had been set up for the two opposing teams and a panel of three judges, along with seats for a packed audience of about 25 people. Though the opposing team, from Leiden University, had simply traveled the five hours from Holland to Paris, their contingent of supporters was far smaller than the number of people from southern Africa who had come to cheer on Midlands. So many showed up, in fact, that the organizers had to procure additional seating. In the audience were some of the engineers who built ZimSat-1, along with Lulekwa Makapela, who coordinated the first space law competitions in Africa, and Phetole Sekhula, a South African space lawyer who participated in the very first Lachs Moot Court Competition 30 years ago as a student at Georgetown University. In the last moments before the competition started, Katsande received a message of encouragement from Ruvimbo Samanga, the coach of the South African team that had won the world championship the year before.
As judges from Brazil, Finland, and the US took their seats, Mujegu rustled through papers and shook with anticipation. When the Dutch team entered the room, Katsande was momentarily taken aback: One of them, a woman, was wearing a red dress and open-toed heels. In Zimbabwe, it would be utterly taboo to show one’s feet or wear bright colors in court.
Katsande spoke first. On behalf of Candidia, Midlands argued that Xenovia was liable for all the loss of life and damages in the disaster because it had violated several articles of the Outer Space Treaty, infringing on Candidia’s sovereign rights to control its registered object in space. Midlands also argued that Xenovia’s repo robot—the autonomous satellite with the grappling arm—was effectively a military technology, which violated the Outer Space Treaty.
Representing Xenovia, the Leiden team took full responsibility for the explosion but said their client repossessed Candidia’s satellite in full accordance with the Outer Space Treaty. Having given notice to the Candidian company that it was late on payments, they argued, the Xenovian creditor had satisfied the treaty’s requirement for “appropriate international consultations.”
Katsande felt as if she was hearing a rough version of her own winning argument thrown back at her. After about 15 minutes of deliberation, the panel of three judges had their decision: They found in favor of Xenovia, which meant that Leiden had won. Katsande felt the European team had been given more time to speak. But what she also thought was, “We picked the wrong side.”
Once the competition was over for the Midlands team, Coach Moyo took the group to McDonald’s. Then the students went to a presentation about ZimSat-1. The coach, who had been drawing frequent basketball analogies throughout the trip, remembered a quote from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: “You can’t win unless you learn how to lose.”
Even so, the team had come incredibly far since the days when they were nonchalant about the competition and indifferent to space. “We really wanted to win,” Katsande told me. “I don’t think you understand how much we wanted to win.”
At 3 pm on September 20, the Midlands team filed into the Maison des Océans, a building commissioned over a century ago to house ocean preservation organizations, to watch the final round of the 2022 Manfred Lachs competition. They found their places in a 500-person amphitheater with sea-blue seats, surrounded by depictions of whale hunting. Once again arguing the case of Xenovia, the Leiden team went on to win the world championship.
Also there that day was Edythe Weeks, an adjunct professor at Washington University in St. Louis who believes that, as a Black woman, she was called by God to study and teach space law. She remembers attending space law gatherings in the early 2000s when virtually everyone there was a European man.
Around the same time, Weeks wrote a PhD dissertation that explored the origins of the Outer Space Treaty’s “province of mankind” clause—how it served as a somewhat hazy, conveniently ill-defined substitute for legal language that might have placed more explicit limits and obligations on its signatories. Space law has a beautiful set of origins and aspirations, Weeks says, but there are ways monied interests could exploit that vagueness to crowd low Earth orbit.
Above all, though, Weeks’ work in space law has taught her that people cannot appreciate something—let alone begin to fight for it—if they don’t know it belongs to them.
The Midlands students had, if nothing else, heard that message loud and clear. To be African, Mujegu says, is to be touched by colonialism—but it’s also to be a rightful inheritor of space. When she started law school, Mujegu wanted to enter ordinary private practice after graduation. But if she were given the chance to practice space law, she “would take that opportunity and run with it,” she says.
Mujegu’s chance probably won’t come right away. There are still barely any jobs in space law on the continent, as many African space agencies are just getting off the ground. But off the ground, in the relatively near future, is exactly where they’re going. “It’s a whole new world that I didn’t know existed,” Mujegu says. “When I discovered it, I felt like, Why aren’t more people talking about this? I want to be a part of this for the rest of my life.”
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