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Last week, NASA reported that it awarded contracts to three companies to build spaceships capable of landing humans on the moon: Blue Origin (owned by Jeff Bezos); Dynetics (a subsidiary of Leidos); and SpaceX (owned by Elon Musk). Supposedly, the current plan is, in 2024, to take astronauts to the Orion spacecraft, built by Lockheed Martin, into lunar orbit, where it would unite and dock with the lander, which would take them to the surface of the moon. . But Congress has yet to sign.
Meanwhile, SpaceX is also reportedly on target to bring astronauts to the International Space System next month, on May 27, 2020, on test flight Demo-2. If so, this will be the first human orbital space flight to be launched from US soil since NASA’s space shuttle fleet retired in 2011. Although, SpaceX conducted an unmanned mission, Demo-1, to the ISS in Last March.
Back here on Earth, we at Rothwell Figg ask ourselves: what about the data that is generated and processed in outer space? My partner Marty Zoltick and I wrote a chapter about this in the 2019 Data Protection publication of the International Comparative Legal Guide (ICLG), which you read here. Our conclusion was that existing legal frameworks (including privacy laws and outer space treaties) do not sufficiently address which laws apply to personal data in airspace and outer space, and as such, a new international treaty or a set of rules and / or regulatory standards is necessary to fill this gap
We continue to evaluate this exciting theme that continues to unfold.
