ABSTRACT
When Sputnik was launched in 1957 international law entertained a brief dream of a new form of commons, a nonstatist, interplanetary law for outer space. By the time the US landed on the moon in 1968, however, international law projected an improbable nationalized imaginary onto the open skies. Since that time, sovereignty relations in outer space increasingly reflect transnational property interests. The question “Who owns outer space?” betrays one of Western law’s most powerful rhetorical moves. The question has been asked of global domains of biodiversity, the high seas, the radio frequency spectrum, and the Internet. Each time we note the attendant cultural logic remapping space in terms of a propertied inside and a notyet-property outside. Empty space has figured prominently in the epistemological imaginary of the arguments and counter arguments of these globally common domains and the same is true in the creation of the law of outer space.
