Space Liability Convention of 1972

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 3

Pieces of space junk from the Chinese Long March rocket crashed down to Earth lighting up the night sky with its fiery re-entry over the Pacific and Indian ocean.

Uncontrolled Re-entry

• When a rocket is launched, its discarded booster stages re-enter the atmosphere soon after lift-off. Then, they harmlessly fall into the ocean as a standard practice.
• However, in this case, a large part of the rocket went into orbit along with the section of the under-construction space station that it was carrying.
• While in orbit, this vehicle kept rubbing against the air at the top of the atmosphere and the resulting friction caused it to start losing altitude.
• This resulted in the Long March 5B rocket’s uncontrolled re-entry back to the Earth inevitable.
• Gigantic remnants from China’s Long March 5B rockets’ core stage are known to make such fiery, out-of-control descents back to earth.
• But China’s 5B series does not use a second engine and pushes right into orbit.

Crashes Happened Earlier

• In March 2021, a SpaceX rocket stage made an uncontrolled landing on a farm in the US. But this happened due to a malfunction in the engine tasked to bring it down and not by choice.

Space Liability Convention of 1972 

• The Space Liability Convention of 1972 defines responsibility in case a space object causes harm.
• The treaty says that a launching State shall be absolutely liable to pay compensation for damage caused by its space objects on the surface of the earth or to aircraft, and liable for damage due to its faults in space.
• The Convention also provides for procedures for the settlement of claims for damages.
• However, there is no law against space junk crashing back to earth.
• In April this year, suspected debris from a Chinese rocket was found in two Maharashtra villages.
• In 1979, re-entry of NASA’s 76-ton Skylab had scattered debris over uninhabited parts of Australia, and the space agency was fined $400 for littering by a local government.
• The only settlement using the Liability Convention was between the erstwhile Soviet Union and Canada over debris of Soviet Cosmos 954 falling in a barren region.
• Canada was paid CAD 3 million in accordance with international law for cleaning up the mess