ABSTRACT
The launch of Sputnik I on 1957 took the attention of the world. In his nonfiction book Danse Macabre (1981) the horror writer Stephen King tells how the screening of a film in a small-town New England cinema was interrupted. The cinema manager told the audience what had happened, and the screening was abandoned. People went out in a fruitless attempt to try to see the satellite. Satellites route email, data and other communications to fixed and mobile instruments, and provide multi-channel TV direct to homes and hotels. Global positioning systems allow us to know exactly where aircraft, ships and motor vehicles are, and help navigation. Space law is a modern field of regulation, but, although its birth-date might be thought to be 1957 with that launch of Sputnik I, its origins lay much further back. Once Sputnik had shown access to space to be practicable, earlier suggestions, discussions and speculations had to be converted into actual rules and practices.
