

Here's a tricky question for you Law and Order lovers: Say an astronaut goes crazy and kills another inside the new European Columbus module, due to be delivered to the International Space Station next month. Is there a trial? Where, and under whose laws?

In fact, there is a reasonably well developed, if not yet well-tested body of space law, stemming from the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, and roughly based on maritime law. But there's a catch, which legal types attending a recent European legal conference have been hashing out.

The law of space is fairly simple: Anything that happens in a vehicle registered to a particular country takes place under that country's laws. Smoke a joint in the space shuttle, and you're risking prosecution under U.S. federal marijuana laws.

But what about the space station, which is being assembled by modules owned by different countries? At the recent conference, organized by the European Science Foundation, the ESA, and the European Space Policy Institute, lawyers rejected the idea that U.S. law should simply apply throughout.

Instead, the old rules of territoriality should be maintained, so that each country's laws should apply in each of their individual modules. Which, fine, but what about the European module, which doesn't have just a single nationality? No problem if, say, an astronaut wanted to manufacture a television, the European Union has plenty of rules for that. But a European-wide criminal law doesn't exist.

For now, the conference lawyers argued, each astronaut in the European section should be treated as falling under the laws of his or her home state, for criminal purposes. But just to make things complicated, if an astronaut invents something in the European module, it will be patented in Germany or Italy, since they're the main contributors to

Columbus.

Complicated? You better believe it; but it's probably better to have some rules than no rules at all. Just wait 'till we start setting up bases on the

Moon. A UN Moon Agreement, passed in 1979, lays out rules for how states should act when exploring the Moon, but it's been ratified by only 13 states – none of which have the spacegoing ability to get there.

Stay tuned, the lawyers have landed.

Columbus launch puts space law to the test [European Science Foundation]

(Image: The ESA's Columbus module is readied for use at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Credit: NASA)