ABSTRACT
Watching the evening news on October 10, 1957, Americans were shocked to learn that the Soviet Union had launched a space satellite named Sputnik. The United Nations played a major role in the development of space law. In 1958, the United Nations General Assembly established the Ad Hoc Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), which prepared an extensive report and became a standing body to monitor space activities. Under the committee’s sponsorship, five space treaties were concluded between 1967 and 1979. The most extensive of these was the treaty of 1967. The dawn of the Space Age has produced quite an assortment of multilateral treaties dealing with human activities in this newly-conquered arena. Ethical and legal problems are faced, and solved, by and within the authoritative and effective decision-making processes of the territorial communities. The chapter talks about the conquest of outer space as the last frontier the human race is overcoming.
