A világűr az új Vadnyugat? Bartóki-Gönczy Balázs, Inforádió, Aréna

A műsor támogatója a HOLD – Nem csak vagyont, kockázatot is kezelünk, 1994 óta. www.hold.hu

Kié az űr, kié a Hold, kié lesz a Mars? „Függőlegesen”, vagyis a világűr felé meddig tart egy állam joghatósága? Meddig tart egy ország saját légtere és honnantól vannak „nemzetközi vizek” a világűrben? A világűr jogi kérdéseinek megválaszolásához földi példákhoz nyúlnak? Lehet ma a Holdon nemzetközi jogilag elfogadható módon területet foglalni? Hamarabb lesz bányászat a Holdon, mint jogszabály arról, hogy lehet-e bányászat a Holdon? Jogilag hol válik el a világűrben végzett tudományos kutatás a hódítástól, illetve annak előkészítésétől? Jogilag lehet bűncselekményt elkövetni a világűrben? A világűr még a Vadnyugat? Hogyan keletkezik az űrszemét, mennyi van belőle és mihez lehet vele kezdeni? Van jogi norma az űrben bekövetkező balesetek kezelésére? Felelősségre vonható egy ország, ha a Föld légkörébe visszatérő, de teljesen meg nem semmisülő űreszköze kárt okoz? Az államok által pénzelt magáncégek esetében a társaság vagy az amerikai kormány viseli a jogi felelősséget? Az űrturizmusnak vannak már jogszabályai? Milyen fegyverrendszerek vannak jelenleg az űrben? Mit tanulnak a világhatalmak az orosz-ukrán háborúból a műholdak és az űr katonai használatáról? Egy ilyen hipotetikus konfliktust az űrben jogi szempontból ugyanúgy területi alapon kell értékelni, mintha a Földön történne? A világűrből remekül lehet hírszerző tevékenységet folytatni. Ezt szabályozza valami? Kik a meghatározó szereplők az emberiség második űrversenyében és mi a tét? A világűr már nem csak a nagy és gazdag államok játéktere? Európa és Magyarország milyen pozícióban van ebben a versenyben? Mik a közeljövő legnagyobb kihívásai az űrjog és az űrpolitika területén?

Bartóki-Gönczy Balázs, a Nemzeti Közszolgálati Egyetem tudományos dékánhelyettese, a Világűrjog és Politika Kutatóintézet vezetője az InfoRádió Aréna című műsorában 2024. 03. 08-án. Beszélgetőtárs: Herczeg Zsolt. Podcast.

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Inforádió. Magyarország hírrádiója. A hírrádió.

Arena – One of Hungary’s most quoted radio programmes. Balázs Bartóki-Gönczy, Deputy Dean of Science at the National University of Public Service, Head of the Institute for Space Law and Policy Research, is waiting for you in the studio. – The show is sponsored by HOLD. We make the decision in your investments. Hold.hu.

You can help us by subscribing to our channel! – Welcome to Inforádió listeners, I am Zsolt Herczeg. The guest of the Arena is Balázs Bartóki-Gönczy, Deputy Dean of Science at the National University of Public Service, Head of the Institute for Space Law and Policy Research. The conversation is being recorded.

The show was recorded at 2pm on Friday afternoon. Have a nice day! Thank you very much for accepting our invitation. – Have a nice day! – The cosmos is bustling with thousands of satellites in orbit, spacecraft landing on the Moon,

The new hopeful destination is Mars, and in less than a year there will be Hungarians in space again. So it is worth talking about, for example, what legislation is or is not in place up there. To begin with, how far vertically, i.e. towards outer space, does a state’s jurisdiction extend?

I could ask in a less legalistic way: how long does a country own the airspace above it, for example, or the airspace above that? – He really pointed out that this is one of the issues that is not clarified in the international

Conventions that were adopted under the auspices of the UN from the 1960s to the 1980s. This is an unclear question from the point of view of international law, and it is relevant, because airspace belongs to the territory of the state, the sovereignty of the state extends

To it, but outer space is everyone’s territory, which everyone is free to use and explore, but no one can appropriate. So there is relevance, but no solution. There are theories. You often hear the Carmel line in everyday speech, that it is the limit of space and that it is 100 kilometres.

This is not necessarily true, as the Carmine line is the point where the buoyancy of air is no longer enough to keep an object in flight, but the object can stay in flight once it reaches the first

Orbital velocity and thus orbits the Earth, but this can be anywhere between 80 and 110 kilometres, depending on the latitude and the object. So there is no consensus. There are a few countries, Kazakhstan for example, where it’s a law that it’s 100 kilometres. Is there any point in bothering with this?

I think it is, because that space, which is somewhere between the atmosphere and outer space, we are starting to use it more and more. Space tourism, sub-orbital flights, other activities that make it difficult to decide which law will apply, the air law or the space law.

– But who should make these laws for space? Who makes it, who enforces it and how can those who do not comply be held to account? – This is the big question that always arises in international law.

Basically, if we look at the legal regulation of human activity, because when we talk about space law, that’s what we’re talking about, we’re talking about a $460 billion market with 10,000 satellites in orbit around the Earth. Obviously, this is a very serious market and there are legal aspects to it.

From ground stations to satellites in space. The legislation is multi-layered, with a set of five international legal conventions at its core. The preparations for this began when the first space race was launched, at the end of which the Sputnik satellite was launched, or we can consider the Americans landed on the Moon.

In these conventions, much was laid down, but much was left open. On the one hand, they didn’t think about a lot of things, such as the fact that private companies would dominate space after the millennium, and on the other hand, they couldn’t regulate everything because they couldn’t agree on where space would start.

In addition to these conventions, because this is a market and we need rules, rules have also appeared in national laws. There are 30 or 40 countries in the world where they have, and I quote, “national space laws”,

Where they regulate how an activity can be started, who supervises it, what the rules are on return, on release, and a very complex legal system. And then there are specific intergovernmental agreements, such as the International Space Station, on the operation of the International Space Station, how you can go up there,

What you can do there, what jurisdiction you have, so we’re talking about a fairly complex legal system. – Should such cases be settled in international courts? They may not have been yet, but they certainly will be. If we fly so much and send so many

Things up there, sooner or later something will go wrong. – That’s right. It’s not a question of so many satellites – there are 10,000 satellites up there now – but 130 million pieces of space debris larger than a millimetre, some fragment of a man-made object, orbiting at 28-30 thousand kilometres per hour.

The question is not whether there will be accidents, but when there will be serious accidents. On the one hand, this leads to a regulatory constraint that, like air traffic management, a space traffic management can and should be imagined. This has already been proposed by the European Union.

– When space law issues need to be regulated, do you naturally turn to earthly examples? For example, who owns the Arctic, where there is no land underneath, how long does each country’s jurisdiction extend below the surface of the sea? How to obtain the right to exploit the seabed under international waters?

There are plenty of international law grey areas here on Earth, but do they help to define and settle space law issues in the cosmos? – That’s right, so the analogy is absolutely correct, for example the legal status of the high seas is the same as the legal status of outer space.

These questions arise because, for example, when it comes to extracting the treasures of the Moon’s honeybee, whether it’s because we’re using the ice or the tritium that we find there to bring it back to the land, whether it’s possible to acquire property with it, whether it’s already against the prohibition of expropriation.

Deep sea mining also has an international legal regime, and the fact that it doesn’t work can still be a guideline, for example for the Moon. – The Norwegians are about to start deep-sea mining, and there may be rules, but there is plenty of debate and plenty to decide. So the question arises

– he has partly answered it – who owns space, everyone does, but no one can own it – who owns the Moon, who will own Mars. So what does the law say about this? I ask this question because here on Earth there is an answer.

The answer was in history: he who conquers and cultivates – no matter what an international treaty says. This is what will happen in space, on the Moon, on Mars, that there are international conventions, but like in the Wild West, whoever goes first, knocks down the border posts and has

A gun to shoot whoever challenges it, then it’s his? – What I can say to that is that I hope not, because of course international law is only as good as the states will abide by it. Basically, the existing world order is now being challenged by some countries and, let’s say,

By some countries that are doing things that are contrary to international law, but in the case of the Moon, we hope that this will not be the case. A new competition has been launched, the United States wants to go back there and stay there under the Artemis programme.

The Russians have an agreement with the Chinese (signed in 2021) to return to the Moon, this time with a manned mission, and they want to set up a base. Now the rule is that no one can own it, but everyone can use it.

I trust that there will be a greater interest in maintaining this status quo than in escalating it, or we could equally address the question of how orbits are used, whether there is an attempt to expropriate them by trying to put tens of thousands of satellites into orbit, or whether the long arms race

That is now underway in space could escalate into an armed conflict. We hope not, because international law does not allow it, but we have seen states fail to comply with international law. – There is more peace in space for the time being, with the recent news that the United States of America and

Russia, which are not on very good terms here on Earth, to put it mildly, are cooperating without any problems on the International Space Station and are also starting new projects. But speaking of the Moon, there are lots of plans for what could be done there.

Is it possible today to occupy land on the Moon in a way that is acceptable under international law without expropriation? – As long as it’s used, as long as it’s not intended to claim this area as its own, access is free to all areas.

And it was precisely from this point of view that the initiative of the United States – we call it the Artemis agreement – was interesting, in which they claim to be fully compliant with the Outer Space Treaty, which is the charter of space activities in international law.

However, they believe that ownership of resources can be acquired, and private market companies can also acquire ownership. They say it is not expropriation, but free use. – Mining on the Moon? Is that what we are talking about? – That’s right, and the treasures mined from there can later be owned

By private market companies, with values above that. Although this is the Artemis agreement, which is not an international legal treaty, but can be joined and bilateral agreements are made with NASA. 36 countries have joined the agreement so far. He says that resources can be used locally for mission purposes.

It doesn’t say what commercial exploitation would be about, and it introduces another interesting term, that they could set up safe zones on the Moon, obviously around the bases there. We can also approach this from the point of view of what this is, if not expropriation,

Since a security zone obviously has to be protected, and if I protect something, then how is the right of free passage enforced, but we can also have a good faith interpretation, which the Americans represent or say in relation to their own proposal, that the purpose of this is simply to inform each other

Where they are carrying out activities, and thus avoid disturbing each other, avoid damaging each other. – But if the Chinese, for example, are doing anything on the far, dark, unknown side of the moon, and they’re the only ones who have the proven ability to do it, they can say anything they want to

Do, and any country can say anything they want to do, if they can get to that point on the moon and do something. It’s quite expensive to check this, I mean. – That’s right. Well, there are few restrictions on what you can’t do.

You can use the Moon freely, you can only use the Moon for peaceful purposes. So military personnel, we are not yet at the point where there is a permanent human presence on the Moon, but when we talk about legislation, we should not look at what is there now, but what is planned.

Especially when it’s all based on a commercial market logic, because one of the attributes of the new space age is that everything is based on a commercial basis. And in this logic, the role of law is to create legal certainty in advance, because, for example,

Market companies will not invest in technology in the United States that will later allow extraction there unless they see a return on their investment. It’s no coincidence that Donald Trump 2020. on 4 April, he issued an executive order, but Obama passed a law in ’15 saying that you can mine on the Moon,

You can own the assets you mine on the Moon, because that’s what they’re trying to encourage companies to do, but obviously you need international consensus. A working group has been set up at the UN to deal with this.

I have no illusions that there will be a consensus in the end, because geopolitical conflicts are a stigma on everything, but they are trying to do this to reassure US companies that they will get a return on their investment.

– So is there any hope that there will be internationally agreed legislation by all the major players on whether there can be a mine on the Moon sooner than there will be a mine on the Moon? That would be the right order, wouldn’t it, to have legislation first and then open a mine.

– I think it will happen when they have a greater interest in agreeing than in going in opposite directions. I’ll give you an example that I think will lead to a consensus sooner: the regulation of the circulation of space assets, or, say, a ban on the use of kinetic weapons in space.

What is it about? Now there are ten thousand satellites. According to the applications to the UN coordination agency, the ITU, the International Telecommunications Union, there will be hundreds of thousands of satellites in the next decade or two, simply because they want to create networks in low Earth orbits, typically communication internet

Networks, and it will therefore become inevitable that these satellites will move in a coordinated way because they will collide. – Do we need to create a code of conduct in the cosmos? – That’s right, that’s how it’s done in aviation.

Now, the fact that this is the case obviously overrides the fact that there are conflicts between China, the United States, Russia and the other states, because their own space assets are at risk if they don’t make such rules.

So that’s why I say that I think that in the area of space traffic control, such an agreement will be reached sooner, because it’s in everybody’s interest. Kinetic weapons, weapons that hit and cause damage, that disintegrate, say, a satellite in space,

It should also be in everyone’s interest not to use such weapons, because the space debris that is created in such a situation can disintegrate such a satellite into tens of thousands of pieces.Several states have already tested rockets launched from Earth, which they use to shoot their own devices.

This is not a violation of a right in the strict sense, because they are shooting up their own equipment, but the terrible cloud of debris that then orbits the Earth for months, even years, threatens not only the enemy’s satellites, but their own equipment as well.

But in terms of mining, if they don’t develop and get there at the same time technologically, whoever is behind will not have an interest in giving the other the opportunity to mine on the Moon according to mutually agreed rules. By the way, the Moon Agreement was adopted in ’79

– the last binding international agreement. But it was revealing that the Moon Agreement, which prohibited the acquisition of ownership of these assets until states adopted a detailed international regime guaranteeing, for example, the interests of developing states to avoid such a Wild West colonisation of what is effectively the Moon,

Was ratified by only 18 states. More than 110 states have signed the Outer Space Treaty. None of these 18 states were space powers. It was simply no longer in their interest to sign it. So I am sceptical that the resources will be settled at the international legal level.

– Moreover, he talks about commercial, civilian space assets and technologies, but there is always a grey shadow of suspicion hanging over the fact that these are also military. Already in 2003, the data and assistance of satellites registered as commercial, civilian satellites were used for air strikes in Iraq.

How can we distinguish between what is commercial, civil or even scientific in a space programme and where military and military? – Well, it’s easy to say retrospectively, because of what it was used for, but otherwise it’s almost impossible to say.

They’re not even transparent, on the one hand, and on the other hand, these devices that are up there, almost all of them are so-called dual-use products, which means that – take a satellite that’s monitoring the earth

– it can look at where you need to fertilize because it can see where in the earth you’re missing phosphorus, but that camera can also see where there’s enemy troop movement. As early as 1981, there is mention in the UN of the possibility of an arms race in space, with very serious dangers.

Now, whether there is one, we can absolutely talk about it, because there are increasing geopolitical conflicts and there is an awful lot of rapidly developing capabilities. Four types of weapons have been identified in space. There are kinetic weapons, I’ve already mentioned that. These are mainly missiles launched from the ground, from an aircraft.

First tested by the United States in ’85, followed by China in 2007. This led to a huge diplomatic crisis at the time, then India, then the US again, and in ’21 the Russians test-fire their own weapons, their own satellites.

Cyber warfare in space is an increasing risk, as these systems are IT systems, vulnerable. To give an example, 2022. 26 January, when Russia launches its attack on Ukraine. First, a cyber-attack to cripple the Viasat K satellite family, blocking the Ukrainians’ access to

The Internet, and wind turbines in Germany, because everything was connected to this system. There are the electronic weapons that are in space. These are usually jamming systems, for example to blind a satellite. It has been used by the Iranians against US broadcasting satellites in the past, and there are new energy weapons.

You may have heard recently in the US House of Representatives that the chairman of the intelligence committee, Turner, raised the idea that the Russians are developing a very serious space weapon and that there should be a declassification and sharing of details.

Afterwards, the White House cooled the tempers and said that there was no need to fear it yet, it was under development, but there was talk in the press that they might want to put a nuclear weapon in space.

The assumptions tend to point to the fact that the weapon may not have a nuclear payload, but may be nuclear powered, which is not a problem from that point of view, but there is an energy weapon, an energy weapon that can destroy hundreds of satellites at once.

And why it’s important, why it’s dangerous, is that, one of the reasons I mentioned is that it’s a very big market and there’s a lot of exposure that we don’t even think about. The everyday person doesn’t think about how many applications on their mobile phone are connected to satellites.

A serious attack on satellite systems, if not globally, then regionally, could cause the loss of huge communication networks. If you attack a navigation satellite system, you have GPS in the US, Galileo in Europe, Glonass for the Russians, Baidu for China.

It not only causes global freight transport to collapse, and think of the impact on global trade if a ship capsizes in the Suez Canal, but it causes much more serious problems, but I would go even further, because these systems provide the time stamp on bank transfers.

If such a satellite system is abolished, if it is destroyed, the financial markets could practically collapse, or at least the entire financial market could be thrown into chaos, until they can replace this time stamp with another system.

So there is a risk of that, and there is also a risk that if kinetic weapons are used, that space debris will be created, which is what we have now. So there are now 36 thousand pieces of space debris larger than 10 centimetres orbiting the Earth.

They put the number of pieces between 1 and 10 centimetres at one million. Now imagine a metal object the size of a tennis ball hitting something at 28,000 kilometres per hour, that’s a lot of energy, and 130 million is more than a millimetre.

There has been a situation, called Kessler syndrome, where a vicious circle is set in motion and a particular orbit is basically seeded. Collisions with more and more people with active equipment and tracks become unusable. This not only poses an economic risk, but could have a virtually

Unforeseeable impact on the economy as a whole. The other is the so-called “spillover”, that an armed conflict in space, even on Earth, could cause an escalation. And we haven’t even mentioned that what’s new in this Russian-Ukrainian war is that commercial actors are

Also becoming more active in the space segment of the armed conflict. There is Starlink, to say no more. This is the satellite network of Elon Musk’s SpaceX company. It is planned to consist of 42 thousand satellites. By the end of this decade, they have licences for 11,000 satellites.

Half of the devices now active in space are Elon Musk’s, they are communication satellites and they have provided the Ukrainians with internet access. And it’s a terribly worrying, questioning phenomenon that Elon Musk, according to his own memoirs at least, decided himself to shut down this satellite system over Crimea so

That it could not be used to launch a Ukrainian counter-attack. This raises a number of questions in terms of international law and military strategy. – It raises many questions because it is unregulated, isn’t it? So if he has the switch in his hand

And he can turn it off, then the problem is both with the rules and, if there are rules, the problem is with their enforceability. – As a rule, the fourth article of the Outer Space Treaty states that weapons may be placed in orbit around the Earth, except nuclear weapons of mass destruction.

And the Moon can only be used for peaceful purposes. Now, there were two interpretations: one was that it was only defensive, and the other was that it was not offensive. Whether it was non-military or offensive, the Russians said no military activity, the Americans said it could be military, just not offensive.

But now we see that states are devoting enormous resources to this. In 2023, $60 billion was spent on military development. More than 100 military satellites have gone up that are officially known to be in space. There have been doctrine changes in many armies.

Since 2018, NATO has treated outer space as an operational area. The fourth space policy directive establishes the Space Force in the United States. So important was the subject that it was separated from the Air Force and a separate force was not created. France will spend €4.2 billion on the space industry in 2022,

A huge proportion of which will go on developing defence capabilities. So the French have recognised what Europe should also recognise, that space is part of strategic autonomy. So we simply can’t afford not to have capabilities, including defensive capabilities, because if we don’t create those capabilities, we become vulnerable in an ever-changing world.

– At the time of the first space race, there were great empires, typically two great empires facing each other. The Soviet Union and the United States. Now in the second big space race, how many poles, how many players and what is at stake?

In this new space race, which is not just a buzzword, if you want to put it in a sound bite, one of the bases of this is really that it has become multipolar. It’s not two great powers competing against each other, but many states.

Obviously, the dominant player in the race is still the United States, which has spent some $66 billion on space exploration at the public level. In a market of $460 billion, $100 billion is public investment, and that brings me to the other states, but the role of the private market is inescapable.

A couple of years ago, public spending was outstripped by private market investment, venture capital funds, start-ups, because data from satellites can generate huge revenues. This is a new market, an emerging market. The impact of the GDP multiplier is put at five times, so it seems like a

Good investment, but it’s obviously a terribly risky industry. This is a feature of the new space race. The other is that more states are involved. By the way, they came in the 1960s and 1970s, Britain, France, China, Japan, but today the biggest challenger to the United States in space is China.

It is extremely active, has serious defensive and offensive capabilities, and China is the only state that currently has an independent space station in space. This is the third version of the Heavenly Palace. Neither does the United States.

It’s the United States that’s building the Artemis programme to go back to the Moon, and they’re building a new space station that will be in cislunar orbit, orbiting the Moon, the Gateway project, which involves the European Space Agency and Japan.

The Russians may try something with the Chinese, but it is no coincidence that Russia, which has been hit hard by the series of sanctions imposed after the annexation of Crimea, does not have access to the high technology that it has been importing.

They are very sensitive to the sanctions imposed, because they have a reliable rocket, the Soyuz, for example, which was launched from the headquarters of the European Space Agency, when it was not from Russia, and they have lost all their customers.

China, Russia, the United States, Iran, Korea, Japan, the Arab states, Saudi Arabia are extremely active, the Arabs have even put probes into orbit around Mars, so this is leading towards a multipolar world, but you can see the big trends that are also visible in global politics, so America has an

Alliance system, the Artemis agreement is a good reflection of this, and China has its international lunar exploration station alliance, which is gathering allies. And then in this world Europe would have to define itself somehow, which at the moment doesn’t seem to

Be going well, that Europe is able to pick up the pace, and unfortunately Europe has had some great successes. In Europe, you have the European Union with its member states, you have the European Space Agency, which is an independent international organisation with 22 member states,

The United Kingdom is a member, so there is not a complete overlap. Hungary is a member of both. In a rough idea, the ESA, the European Space Agency, produces for the European Union the satellites it needs. The European Union has an Earth Observation satellite system, Copernicus, which is a success,

Consisting of 6 Sentinels and 24 additional satellites. Europe has its own navigation system, which is a major step towards autonomous capabilities. And it had a good rocket, the Arien 5, but now Europe’s space policy is drifting into a very serious crisis, simply because in order for it to be sustainable and

Not to fall behind the great powers, we need independent access to space. It has three components, we need a rocket, we need a spacecraft to carry a payload and a human being as an autonomous capability and we need a space station. Now at least we were right about the rocket.

We had two rockets, a big family of rockets, the Ariane 5, which carried the big loads, and the Vega rocket, which carried the smaller loads. The Ariane 6 rocket was due to be completed in 2020. And the European Union has managed, the Space Agency has managed to stop the Ariane 5 launches,

So they haven’t produced enough rockets, so they don’t have enough in stock to bring one out if they need one, but it was planned that this would be the last one. They were sure that there would be an overlap between the two, but Ariane 6 was never built.

– Why is it not ready? Coronavirus outbreak? – No, technological problems. I’ll come back to it, because the French have given a good excuse, which is worth thinking about, because it indicates a structural problem in the operation of the European Space Agency,

And it’s difficult to find a solution to it, but I don’t think it can be explained away by that alone. It’s not ready, we’re at the point where we don’t have a missile. There was an alternative source for the European Space Agency at its headquarters in French Guiana

– Soyuz rockets also launched satellites on a commercial basis. With the outbreak of the war, the Russians withdrew, we banned them, they withdrew, they disappeared completely. There is no such ability. Who is now launching the European satellites? SpaceX – from the United States.

The United States is an ally, of course, but it is autonomous in terms of Europe, so that we are taking a very sensitive asset out into another area. – To a competitor. – To a competitor. And the Vega-C rocket exploded during launch in December ’22,

And they have not been able to fix the fault since. There is simply no European rocket. Meanwhile, even if it is built, SpaceX already has a competitive advantage because SpaceX, for example, has developed reusable rockets that can be recycled.

So even if these European missiles are built, it is questionable how competitive they will be. Why? Because having a re-entry rocket means that the first stage comes back, it can be used again, so the cost per kilogram of payload launched will be much lower than when the whole rocket is virtually destroyed.

So this is a huge problem. The other problem is that we don’t have a spaceship. A spacecraft can be capable of carrying cargo and it can be capable of carrying people. Back in the US, a programme was launched to do this.

In the United States, too, things were shaken up when the space shuttle programme was stopped. There were years when Russians took US astronauts up – at a loss of prestige. But they launched a programme in 2005, lasted until ’12, spent 750 million euros, developed a market-based solution. We don’t have that.

Just last October, ESA announced in Seville that it would spend €75 million to develop plans. They recognise the need to involve market players and are trying to find solutions from the private financial sector. So that’s a decade minimum.

And we can still have a cargo spacecraft, we’ll have to get the funding in ’25, which will take the cargo to the Gateway orbiting the Moon, but it’s still rubbish, we’ll have to go to someone else and we won’t have the capability.

And then there is the space station. This is not really mentioned yet. Because, of course, we’re participating alongside the Americans in the construction of the Gateway space station, we’re adding a module to it, but it’s not going to be our space station in principle.

Moreover, it orbits the Moon, and the pharmaceutical industry and a lot of companies are very interested in experiments that can be carried out in quasi-zero gravity in Earth orbit, where there will be no European space station. Meanwhile, the US is giving hundreds of millions of dollars to companies

In the market to start building orbiting stations. Axiom Space, which will take the Hungarian astronaut up, Northrop Grumman, Starlab, Orbital Reef, there are a lot of companies that are making films with Tom Hanks for tourism, for scientific research, I don’t know, so that’s the industry that’s being built up in orbit,

And Europe doesn’t seem to have a plan at the moment. If we look at the figures, we see that the European Union accounts for 25% of world GDP, but only 15% of the $100 billion that Europe spends.

If you look at it, as a percentage of GDP, the US spends 0.25 percent of GDP on space. It doesn’t seem like much, especially when you consider that at the time of the Apollo space programme it was over 4% for a couple of years, and the EU only 0.07%.

So we also spend proportionately less, which will be much less in absolute terms. France is the only one that is perhaps setting an example, they spent €4.2 billion in 2022, precisely because they recognised that this is part of the autonomy strategy. So you have to spend money on this.

Taking the US example, SpacX, for example, received $4.2 billion from NASA. So that’s what allowed Elon Musk to experiment with this re-entry rocket, the Falcon Heavy and the lighter weight rocket, to create the Starlink family of satellites, $556 million spent on commercial

Space stations, $140 million given to Axiom to make a space module for the International Space Station, which allows it to spin off that experience to create its own space station, and Europe doesn’t have one. And the problem is what we risk by not acting now.

One is that we are losing a good part of our autonomy. Everything that is connected to space, and more and more of it is. Since there will now be a market logic in space, it is now intergovernmental agreements that

Allow someone to go up into space. There will be market logic if private market companies are there. There will be a barrier to market entry for European companies to do experiments there, for example, because there will be no European platform to do it on.

Moreover, the backlog may accelerate, it will become increasingly difficult to catch up, and of course the value chains will become fragile, because certain components cannot be made anywhere else but abroad, and this will make us vulnerable. And there are negative examples, there’s the semiconductor market

– the United States had a 25% market share 10-20 years ago, and now we see how far behind it is, and you could give a few more examples, but the point is that something should be done to ensure that Europe doesn’t fall behind completely.

– Obviously, from what you said, what should be done is that more money should be spent on this, but you’ve said before how much of a role private companies, even Elon Musk’s company, which I mentioned earlier, have to play in this.

In fact, to overcome the competitive disadvantage of the European space industry, we would need a European Elon Musk, a tech billionaire of similar stature, with similar conditions, who, in alliance with a state or a confederation of states, with the European Union, could make the European Union,

Europe competitive in the space race, so that we have rockets, we have spacecraft, we have space stations? – I wouldn’t focus on Elon Musk, there are many positive and negative things to say about Elon Musk. – I thought of it as a symbol. – That’s right.

I think the point here was that Elon Musk was able to do this because he got a $4.2 billion contract from NASA. So it wasn’t actually his own investment, it wasn’t an American Széchenyi, he did a lot obviously,

But he got $4.2 billion, which he then invested well, so they got that capital investment from public money, which then made it possible. So I think that there should be more emphasis in the European Union on strengthening defence capabilities

And strengthening the private sector in this area, so that it’s not just public investment. I would add, for example, that experience shows that it is not necessarily a good thing if the defence capability is in the hands of, for example, private market companies.

So you have to pay attention to that, because it may not be lucky. – After all, states are at the mercy of a private company. – That’s right. I’ve just come from a conference, the issue of sovereignty as a concept was a legal one, and how sovereignty

Is being transformed, and the example of the big US tech companies who have the negotiating power and the strength of states was given, so yes, these have to be taken into account when the state is thinking about strengthening its capacity.

– How does Hungary participate in this competition, how do you see our position in this? – It’s often said, and in fact it may seem logical at first reading, that this is none of our business. This is the game of the big boys.

But in fact, if you think about it, just to give you a simple example, how many tens of thousands of parts make up a spaceship, a satellite – hundreds and hundreds of thousands of parts. These are not just made by Airbus in Europe or Thales, but there is an awfully big supply chain.

In a country where heavy industry is not a feature of the economy, it is precisely a knowledge-based economy that is important, and space, for example, is one of them. And if we are clever and do it well, we can get into these value chains. There are Hungarian companies that provide a good example.

The Space Panorama has just been published, where there are 50 Hungarian companies that are making a living from the market and even have contracts with the European Space Agency, and there are one or two clear success stories, who are even able to produce satellites. So we absolutely have a place, a role.

Obviously we will not be manufacturing the Ariane 6 rocket one by one, and there will be no rocket launches from Hungary, but we can be part of this value chain, and we must also identify those areas which are vital for Hungarian strategy and autonomy, and which can be created as an independent capability.

In Europe, too, it is a question of what is the capability that Europe needs to acquire, otherwise it will become vulnerable to the capabilities of the United States. Earth observation, navigation, the new ability to know what’s in space: space weather, meteorites and space debris, for example.

The United States still has challenges, to give you an example, they know exactly what’s in space, but they don’t have a view of the other satellites. So the space surveillance is not very strong yet, which is why they have difficulties, for example, in terms of what weapons the Russians have.

So there is still room for improvement, but Europe needs to improve it too. This is obviously a European competence. In Hungary we have to define what is the capability that we can do, that we have to own nationally, and what is the capability that we can possibly acquire, buy, etc.

– What is the capability that must be nationally owned in any case? – There may be more than one, it’s not for me to decide, but I think that’s certainly the case for defensive capabilities. So the Poles also have an autonomous capability, with earth observation satellites.

These or communication skills are something that could be justified. – Let’s dissect a little more the problem you have mentioned several times: space debris. Let’s sort it out a little bit, as we should in reality, how exactly is it generated and how

Much is there and, most importantly, what can be done with it? Many times he said how much there is, but as a layman you think that they should collect it, clean it up. – Yes. It is worth separating space debris and space debris.

The space debris, this dust, small rocks, etc., shooting stars that we admire, that burn up in the atmosphere, hundreds of tons a day enter the atmosphere anyway. Every few million years, a major one, which is called, say, a planet killer, but may be incompatible with human life.

And then there’s space junk, which is man-made objects out in space that we can’t practically control. You can’t just pick it up. They are out there orbiting the Earth. Sooner or later, because the atmosphere doesn’t end at a certain point, friction causes them to slow

Down, the further away they are the slower they go, the heavier they are the slower they slow down, and therefore they lose orbital velocity and will return to the atmosphere and burn up. But it could be hundreds of years, depending on many aspects. We can’t just go up there and take it down.

There are two ways. One is to pick up the bigger pieces. That’s what start-up companies and programmes are now for, to take elements that really cause a big problem, a rocket element for example, up, collect it, pull it back into the atmosphere, or take the satellite to a graveyard where it won’t interfere.

More importantly, as well as health promotion, it is no longer so good to cure the disease, it is much better to prevent it. And this is where the role of law comes into play, in terms of how, even in national law,

We can enforce and prescribe aspects of official control functions and licensing that prevent a satellite from falling apart, say in the first round, so we have to go through a quality control process to reduce the chances of this happening.

Either we oblige the satellite operator, if there were a Hungarian satellite, or other countries do, that at the end of its life cycle the satellite must have enough fuel left in it to be able to steer itself into a cemetery or back into the atmosphere and not stay there,

Burn up or cause damage to the cemetery – these are legal requirements. Firms would not have an incentive to do so on their own. – After all, these are extra costs for them, but does or should the “polluter pays” principle apply in space?

Whoever owns the satellite should do something with it at their own expense? – Yes, that would be a good direction anyway. At the moment there are no rules and, for example, in the case of space debris, it is often not clear who is

Responsible for space debris, because if two satellites collide, those elements collide with another space device, and they end up saying it is not my responsibility. There is a convention, by the way, on liability for damage caused by space objects, who is liable for what.

Anyway, this could be interesting, because when a satellite crashes, it has happened before, for example, a Soviet satellite crashed in Canada, and it had a nuclear engine, so it left a nice footprint to clean up. In such cases, the responsibility is objective.

In such cases, whether or not the state was responsible, it is liable. In space, only if he was at fault, so really only if it was his fault. – However, if I am right, it is very difficult, bordering on impossible, to determine who is at fault in many cases.

– Absolutely. It is very difficult. And that’s where the other problems of enforcement of international law come in, it hasn’t even been applied yet. When this convention is in practice, however, it must be addressed because the threat is growing. When the Soviets crashed in Canada, the two governments came to an

Agreement and they paid some millions of dollars and that was it. – But if one has crashed, more will crash, so it’s probably not individual agreements that are needed, but comprehensive legislation, right? – That’s right.

– Apart from the question of space debris, it is perhaps also interesting to note that if what you say is going to happen, and I have no reason to doubt that there may be ten thousand satellites now, and in the foreseeable future, in our lifetime, there will be a

Hundred thousand, how will it be possible to travel there at all? Launching missiles, my goodness! to launch a manned spacecraft if it’s going to be this messy? – Well, that’s the idea, to avoid a mess. So that some kind of traffic rule system has to be…

Right now, there is currently only one private treaty in the world that lays down any rule: who has to swerve when space assets meet. It’s a contract between NASA and SpacX, where they regulate each other, that they have to notify each

Other of launches and so on, and that if they’re on a collision course, SpaceX has to take evasive action immediately, never NASA, that’s the agreement between them, but obviously this has to be taken to an international level, an international organisation has to be set up to coordinate this.

It is not just space travel that needs to be regulated. Think of the launch, which goes through the airspace, and while a satellite is coming up, it goes through the orbit of a bunch of satellites, the return, which has to be coordinated with air

Transport, because in the event of such a return, this object could fall into the ocean, endangering aircraft at 11 000 kilometres. So they all need to be coordinated. It’s like when the Wright brothers started flying, and nobody thought that ICAO would be created and then there would be flight regulation, air traffic control.

Today, no one would sit still on a Wizz Air plane when the pilot says the sky is clear, I think we can go, because that’s not how it works anymore, and that’s what we have to achieve in space.

– Moreover, sooner or later, space may become crowded not only with rubbish, but also with people. Space tourism. Should we expect that it will be so easy and relatively cheap that a lot of people will be tourists in space, with all the legal consequences?

– I am much more sceptical about this segment of the market. I think manned spaceflight will remain a researcher’s professional job. Very wealthy people can experience weightlessness for a few seconds with suborbital flights, but personally I don’t believe in human colonies in my lifetime, we are not designed for that.

So there’s a lot of things that are not compatible from a space life point of view, gravity, heart function, lots of things. Now, in the next decades, people will be there for longer periods of time, radiobiology, so there are a lot of problems to solve.

To go to Mars, we need a rocket that takes seven months to get there, if we launch in a window of time that opens every three months for two years. Think about who you’d like to be stuck with for seven months in a tiny spaceship, so these are

Psychological, radiobiological, physical and other solutions for now. We are still a long way from human colonies. – But not the fact that in practice, if I understand everything we have been talking about, we should be adopting strategic international legislation within five to ten years, otherwise we will be in trouble.

– More would be very important from the point of view of international law. Law is nothing more than a set of rules to avoid conflict. So that we don’t tip the table on each other, so that the children play like that. If there are rules, we try to abide by them,

But if there are none, then it’s a wolf law. International law could and should play an important role in this. And as Europeans, I wish that we do not fall behind in this, because it will become increasingly difficult later on.

– By the way, wouldn’t you like to be a space tourist, if you’re so keen? – No! I’ve seen a rocket like that and I can’t imagine myself sitting on it, so I’m fine here on Earth. – We also talked about Earth and space. The Arena was heard on InfoRadio.

Our guest was Balázs Gönczy Bartóki, Deputy Dean of Science at the National University of Public Service, Head of the Institute for Space Law and Policy Research. Thank you very much for coming. – Thank you. – Dear listeners, you can listen to the Arena on infostart.hu and watch it on YouTube.

I encourage you to subscribe to our channel. The programme was prepared with the help of Márton Módos, Ágnes Széchy, László Illisz and Zsolt Szilágyi. I am Zsolt Herczeg. Thank you for listening to us. – The show is sponsored by HOLD. We have been managing not only wealth but also risk since 1994.