ABSTRACT
The launch of Sputnik I on 4 October 1957 took the attention of the world. In his non-fiction 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.1 Nearly fifty years later on 31 May 2007 fourteen space agencies announced the adoption of a mechanism through which their efforts may be co-ordinated in the future exploration and use of outer space.2 The developments of the ‘space age’ have massively altered the world. We have seen changes in telecommunications and broadcasting. Remote sensing has increased our knowledge of our world and exposed many problems. Our understanding of the universe has developed, to say nothing of our immediate neighbours, the Moon, the planets and other cosmic bodies. The Preamble of the ‘Space Millennium: Vienna Declaration on Space and Human Development’ adopted by the plenary meeting of the Third United Nations Conference on the Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, Vienna, 30 July 1999, inter alia recognises ‘that significant changes have occurred in the structure and content of world space activity, as reflected in the increasing number of participants in space activities at all levels and the growing contribution of the private sector to the promotion and implementation of space activities’.3
