The falling Chinese space rocket is a policy failure

“Why is it possible for China, or any other space-faring nation, to launch massive rockets and let them fall to earth willy-nilly?
 The answer to that is policy failure: Despite regulations on space flight and conduct, the issue of rocket reentry is loosely and poorly regulated, so countries cut corners and take their chances that a falling rocket won’t hit anything major.”  


“In the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and Liability Convention of 1972 are guidelines for how to punish a country that lets one of its rockets cause damage on Earth. Basically, those rules say that the offending state can be held liable by the victim nation. So, in this case, if the Chinese rocket were to land in the middle of New York City (which, again, is extremely unlikely to happen), the Biden administration could ask China to pay for damages and demand other recourse.

In other words, this is a state-to-state issue. “If the rocket lands on my house, I can’t go and sue China,” Northumbria’s Newman told me. That’d be UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s job to call up Chinese President Xi Jinping.

But that’s really it. There’s nothing in international law to stop any nation from letting any of the 900 rockets currently in orbit from falling in an unplanned way. “This isn’t illegal,” Newman said about the current saga of the Chinese rocket. “There is no sort of regulation on an international level on reentry.””


https://www.vox.com/22424594/china-rocket-falling-space-law

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