No portion of the rocket was lost accidentally. They set out that day
planning to dump the entire thing in the ocean and recover none of it,
and they succeeded at it.
The law is what is enforced by the courts (which is also why there is
basically no such thing as space law, despite a lot of hot air on the
idea). Hundreds or thousands of pieces of rocket debris have been
recovered from US launches. Fisherman in Port Canaveral often have a
dim view of the space industry because they keep fishing rocket trash
out of the ocean. If it was the law that private rocket debris had to
be returned, it should be trivial to find case law proving that.
On Fri, Apr 21, 2023 at 10:42 PM Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, 21 Apr 2023, Ben Brockert wrote:
Citation needed.
"Salvage Law for Outer Space", Wayne N. White Jr., Proceedings of Space 92
(Engineering, Construction, and Operations in Space III, ASCE 1992; vol.
2, p. 2412).
This is a debris-generating attempted space launch, not a cargo ship
lightening their load. And even if it was, the finder of jetsam
“is not required to return them to their rightful owner except...
Correct. A ship lightening its load is *abandoning* the stuff it throws
overboard. That's jetsam. The rules for it are, more or less, "finders
keepers". But that's not what we're talking about here.
Stuff lost *accidentally* is flotsam, not jetsam. It's not abandoned
unless the owner explicitly says so. (You don't get to *infer* that it's
been abandoned except in some fairly extreme situations.) This is a very
different case that follows entirely different rules. It *doesn't* become
yours just because you found it, any more than your wallet becomes legally
mine if it accidentally falls out of your pocket and I pick it up. (Not
even if it happened because your pocket suffered a catastrophic structural
failure!)
There *is* a bit of a lingering question mark because it was a space
launch. Maritime law doesn't automatically read over to space. But any
result of that uncertainty probably goes the other way, further
strengthening the case for continued ownership by the original owner.
"Ownership of objects launched into outer space, including objects landed
or constructed on a celestial body, and of their component parts, is not
affected by their presence in outer space or on a celestial body or by
their return to the Earth." -- Outer Space Treaty.
Henry