Not for profit website/blog on astronomy, space and my writing
A space startup based in The Netherlands – www.satsearch.co is attempting to establish a single digital global marketplace for space components, products and services. Ultimately,
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The
One of the earliest characteristics of human civilisation (large populations living together in organised cities) was the creation of rules or laws that everyone who lived there agreed to abide by.
The 50th anniversary of first humans to visit the Moon is celebrated later this year. In 1968 it was pretty much just two countries and a few space missions per year. Today, over 70 countries have something in the way of a space programme and along with a blossoming private space sector, space is likely to become very busy in the next decade or so. This surge of space activity will determine how the laws in space will apply and begin to set the scene for human civilisation beyond Earth. On earth, most nations follow international laws most of the time.
International rules for operating in space were defined by the UN in five treaties established between 1967 – 1984.
How will these laws fair in space? For example, will all governments
These are some of the questions I discuss with Bayar Goswami, a Doctoral student at the Institute of Air and Space Law, McGill University (IASL) in Canada. A TedX speaker, Bayar has an interest in space as well as law and I started by asking him what came first.
The distinction between terms, such as signed, ratified and accessioned, is described here. A status of which nations have signed which treaty is maintained by the UN here. A summary of the five treaties is available here.
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If you follow this podcast, you will notice a very long pause since the previous episode. I have been busy writing my second book, the Indian Space Programme which is now finally complete. So I am now back to my familiar but irregular podcasting mode.
The growth in the space sector now widely estimated to be worth annually over 300 billion USD globally. It is primarily being driven by the commercial sector. The bulk of the expenditure is in satellite television, communication services, Earth observation and businesses enabled by global navigation. In the past, it was technological development driven by the national space programmes that triggered the development of low-cost consumer products. Today it’s the other way round. Sophisticated manufacturing methods and high public demand for digital products have produced low-cost consumer devices which without too much modification can be qualified for use in space. This is particularly true in the sudden growth of the small satellite market.
In this episode, I speak with Dr Rajan Bedi the founder and CEO of Spacechips, a UK based company offering CEO of Spacechips Ltd, which provides industrial R&D and space electronics design consultancy and training services to manufacturers of satellites and spacecraft around the world. I was intrigued by Rajan’s 2017 blog post entitled “Using and selecting COTS components for space application”. In this episode, I want to understand to what extent spacecraft manufacturers can buy components for spacecraft from the high street.
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Dr Mylswamy Annadurai is the program director for the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) launched in 2013 by the Indian Space Research Organisation. He served as the program director for the 2008 Chandrayaan-I mission to the Moon and is continuing that role for the Chandrayaan-2 currently in development.
This interview was recorded in his office at the ISRO’s Satellite Centre in Bangalore on 26th March 2014 after MOM had been launched but before it had arrived at Mars.
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