Art Dula speaking at the Space Investment Summit in Manhattan today called for Congress to reform the Outer Space Treaty to cap the unlimited liability that signatory countries have for their nationals' space accidents. "They don't have this for oil tankers or airplanes."

[Update by Rand Simberg]

One of the reasons they don't have it for airplanes is the Warsaw Convention. Did he propose extending that to space?

[Update by Sam Dinkin]

He proposed getting an act of Congress passed to unilaterally limit the US federal government liability.

Glad to see you're at the conference, Sam. Hope you can continue to cover it for those of us unable to attend.

He proposed getting an act of Congress passed to unilaterally limit the US federal government liability.

I'm not a lawyer, and Art supposedly is, but that seems to me to be in violation of the OST. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I would think that it would be better to renegotiate it.

>> He proposed getting an act of Congress passed to unilaterally limit the
>> US federal government liability.

> I'm not a lawyer, and Art supposedly is, but that seems to me to be in violation of the OST.

According to the OST, "Each State Party... is internationally liable for damage to another State Party to the Treaty or to its natural or juridical persons by such object or its component parts on the Earth, in air space or in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies."

It does not state anything about the limit of that liability. As a non-lawyer, I would assume that means unlimited liability. A lawyer who's familar with precedents might have another view, however.

I agree that negotiating a Warsaw Convention for spaceflight to succeed the OST would be the multi-lateral way to go about this. But there are many unilateral actions available to the US from withdrawing to the treaty to passing a new law to not abide the treaty's unlimited liability provision. I will leave it to the lawyers to tell us what that would require since it was approved unanimously by the Senate. The House alone could simply not fund the unlimited liability provision leaving us in violation in the event of an international accident, but not much legal consequence (of course there would be international condemnation).

As far as limiting liability, would Russia's FU to Kazakhstan over the failed Proton launch be a precedent?

I don't think so. It might give us a (tiny) figleaf, though, if we wanted to unilaterally limit it.