Legal insider - outer space law

Do you remember this nursery rhyme? Do you remember your curiosity as a child while being driven in a car at night during your family outings, while looking out of the window into the night sky and wonder what are those bright things twinkling up in the sky and asking, why is it that the moon is following me everywhere?!'. I believe many of you can recall those magical moments, right? Those stars and moon that you see are classified as a part of the celestial bodies and they are located in the outer space (United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, 2019). Although the definition of celestial bodies' are seldom disputed, the discussion over the delimitation of outer space have attracted many views and opinions over the years (Dempsey, 2017). Nevertheless, it has been recently proposed that the outer space starts at 80km above sea level (McDowell, 2018) The reason why it is important for us to know exactly where the outer space began because there is a special branch of law that governs outer space. It is known as outer space law. Outer space law is a branch of international law and is based on the premise that 'conduct is presumed to be lawful in the absence of prohibitions, whereby permitted and unpermitted conducts are conditioned by both formal international law and customary law· (Christol, 1982). Space law consists of multilateral law and is complemented by the large volume of space law resulting from many bilateral treaties entered by space-faring nations (Reynolds and Merges, 2019).