[AR] Re: starship abort?
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2023 20:20:52 -0400 (EDT)
On Fri, 21 Apr 2023, whitney bayourat.com wrote:
Interesting, So when the United States secretly recovered the Soviet
submarine K-129. They did so breaking international law?
There are some extra rules that apply to government-owned stuff, and I
don't know all the ins and outs, but yeah, that was probably technically
against the rules. (That was one reason why the whole thing was so
thickly cloaked in secrecy.)
I wonder how that applies to spy balloons? Did the recovery of the
Chinese spy balloon break international law as well?
I would guess that impounding something that made an unauthorized trip
through your airspace would be legit, even if it was out in international
waters by the time it went down. Mind you, unless specific illegal acts
were committed and a court authorizes confiscating it in response, it
still *belongs* to its original owners, and they can insist on getting it
back eventually, perhaps on payment of fines! But it might come back in
crates, disassembled, with a lot of fingerprints on it -- need to do a
thorough Customs inspection, you know. :-) That's what happened to the
MiG-25 that Viktor Belenko landed in Japan in 1976.
The fact that SpaceX admittingly said the rocket may not survive and had
no plans in place for superheavy booster recovery. Would that be
construed as throwing it away? Jetsam?
Now *that* is an interesting question. I don't know if anyone has ever
addressed the issue of whether a deliberately expendable vehicle ends up
being implicitly legally abandoned, and if so, when. If it does, I would
expect that it happens only when its owners are finished with it -- which
in this case presumably wouldn't happen until after the accident
investigation is complete, at the very least.
(NASA certainly has taken the position that their stuff remains their
property nevertheless. Gus Grissom's Mercury capsule completed its
one-shot mission, but when it was salvaged some years ago, the guys who
did it had to negotiate an agreement with NASA first, even though NASA had
no further plans for it. Whether the courts would uphold this position
against a serious challenge, I don't know. On one hand, they have
sometimes slapped NASA's fingers on over-enthusiastic ownership claims.
On the other hand, as I understand it, they have historically been most
reluctant to declare things implicitly abandoned.)
Henry
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