Cosmic Counsel

When Michelle Hanlon was 20 years into her career as an M&A attorney, her 11-year-old son came to her with a question: Could he, one day, legally mine asteroids in space? He had grand ambitions, and he had just read the book Who Owns the Moon? Extraterrestrial Aspects of Land and Mineral Resource Ownership, by Virgiliu Pop. Like any mom (and good lawyer), Hanlon, who had grown up on Star Trek but had never heard of space law, set out trying to figure out the answer for her son. What she didn’t know was that an 11-year-old’s curiosity would result in a career change for the seasoned lawyer.

Today, Hanlon is assistant professor of practice and executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss), where she plays a pivotal role figuring out issues ranging from whether her son can one day legally mine an asteroid to creating a governing framework for the extraction and utilization of space resources and ultimately the development of human communities in space. Space law is a niche but growing specialty, drawing on practice areas such as manufacturing, telecommunications, government regulation, international trade, environmental law, energy, and more.

In this story, we speak to two space lawyers navigating the terrain during a pivotal time: Hanlon, who saw opportunity in the unanswered questions across the field and teaches future lawyers how to confront them, and Paul Weber, general counsel of Blue Origin, who is endlessly inspired by the space technology company’s vision of possibility. As the number of commercial space organizations grows and technology rapidly advances, lawyers are going to become increasingly necessary not only to interpret existing outer space laws but also to address gaps in legislation that affect space activities and our relationship with the unknown.

The academic

Nine years after Hanlon’s son asked her about the laws of ownership and commercial activity in space, she decided to go back to school to become a space lawyer. As her youngest child entered college, Hanlon moved to Montreal and began an LL.M. in space law at McGill University, one of the oldest space law programs in the world. During the program, she studied under Ram Jakhu, a world-renowned expert in space law, and gained a foundation in established law—the Outer Space Treaty—as well as what questions were still up for debate. “I went into the space law program thinking I wanted to give back, and the way I can give back is to help evolve the law the way it needs to be,” she says.

After graduating with her LL.M. in space law, Hanlon founded a nonprofit, For All Moonkind, with the mission of safeguarding cultural heritage in space, starting with the six crewed lunar landing sites. After a year of working on the nonprofit, she got the job running Ole Miss’s Center for Air and Space Law. What she brought to space law academia was a mindset honed from years as a cross-border M&A attorney specializing in technology transactions. “As an international business lawyer, it’s your job to get the deal done,” she says. This background proved critical in this time of transformation. “I’ve entered the profession of space law at a time when there’s a transition from theorizing to actually addressing problems and providing solutions,” she says.

“The Outer Space Treaty is a Magna Carta. It has principles and guidelines, it offers a framework, but it was largely a disarmament treaty,” Hanlon says. The last large international agreement regulating space—the moon agreement—entered into force in 1979. “That’s the last binding instrument that we’ve had about space,” Hanlon says. “And so it is our job today to fill in the gaps.” As an academic and diplomat, Hanlon would love to see a convention that broke down what it means to confront and explore space with “due regard,” a description that is mentioned in the Outer Space Treaty but not fully defined. Hanlon confronts this gap in the research through scholarship, teaching, and advocacy.

At Ole Miss, Hanlon has been instrumental in building a program that can produce graduates ready to enter space law practice. When she joined in 2018, there were two or three LL.M. students. Now, they have between 35 and 45. When she first arrived, they had only basic course offerings. Today, there are courses like AstraPolitica, which explores the geopolitics of space activities; AstroLaw and Ethics, Export Controls, Procurement Law, and many more. They’ve moved from the foundations to “let’s get into the nitty-gritty and start solving problems,” as she puts it. Indeed, Ole Miss now offers more courses in space law than any other program in the United States.

For Hanlon, this pivotal time in space law also means she “can never use the same syllabus from year to year,” she says. She is constantly thinking about what world she’s preparing her students for. “If you want to become a professor of space law, then McGill is still a very good choice for you. If you want to go to into cybersecurity, then you should go to Nebraska. But if you want to go out there and actually be a practicing space lawyer, that’s what we are really focused on producing here at Ole Miss,” she says. There are still only a handful of programs in the country that do this type of work, meaning some of the work that the Center for Air and Space Law does is outreach—bringing space law to other countries and to high school students.

I’ve entered the profession of space law at a time when there’s a transition from theorizing to actually addressing problems and providing solutions.

Michele Hanlon, assistant professor of practice and executive director, Center for Air and Space Law, University of Mississippi

Hanlon makes the case that every lawyer is going to need to learn something about space law soon. A 2022 Harvard Business Review article titled “Your Company Needs a Space Strategy. Now” makes the case that even sectors like pharmaceuticals and consumer goods should be thinking about space. Recalling one article by fellow space lawyers Steven Freeland and Donna Lawler, Hanlon paraphrases: “Ten years from now, if you are a lawyer that doesn’t know space law, then you are going to be at a risk of malpractice because that is how important space is to our lives.” Hanlon knows that companies might not be thinking that way yet. She says: “If you go into commercial space right now and say, What are you looking for in a lawyer?, they’re going to tell you, ‘I’m looking for somebody who can do contracts and knows admin law and U.S. regulations and export controls.’” What Ole Miss is trying to do is “add that space sensibility,” she says. Hanlon explains:

I have had conversations with space lawyers at law firms who say space lawyers don’t need an LL.M. because space needs people who know about all the other parts of the law. I think that’s shortsighted. When we look at what’s happening in space law, we’re making it every day and we’re creating norms every day. It’s important to understand the framework that we’re working in and how far we can push within that framework. If you are an admin lawyer or a contracts lawyer who doesn’t know the ins and outs of the Outer Space Treaty, you might put something in the contract that is a violation of the law or you might be too timid to push a little bit on that law. The lawyers we train are the ones who are going to be able to go to the FAA and say, “Look, this is how we think the regulation should look. And don’t worry: it is in compliance with the Outer Space Treaty,” or “We have this gray area and this is how we should fill it.”

At the Center for Air and Space Law, in addition to thinking concertedly about space law training, the Center also makes it a point to bring in engineers and technologists to talk to their students. “If you don’t know how a rocket works, how are you going to figure out how to regulate it?” she says.

While teaching and running the Center, Hanlon still makes time for her nonprofit, For All Moonkind, where she has been instrumental in gaining national and international legal recognition of the importance of human heritage in space, including through the development of the One Small Step Act in the U.S. In her capacity with the nonprofit, Hanlon also regularly contributes to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. Amid all of this, Hanlon is also editor-in-chief of the Journal of Space Law while also providing consulting services. All of these activities keep her busy but are exhilarating and necessary in a world where space law requires a multipronged approach.

Thirty years ago, Hanlon would not have envisioned this would be the work she’d be doing. Once she realized math was not her thing, she stopped dreaming of being an astronaut. But she’s found an important way to contribute to this critical time in outer space exploration and commercialization. “When future historians look back on this era, they will identify it as the beginning of our space-faring civilization,” she says.

The general counsel

As a lawyer, Paul Weber always wanted to work on something tangible. After eight years as a legislative director to a congressman, he joined Allison Engine Company and gained his first exposure to aerospace. Allison was acquired by Rolls-Royce (the aerospace company, not the car manufacturer), where Weber continued his legal career. “That allowed me to essentially, as my children were young, point up in the sky and say, in some small way, ‘Dad was involved with that aircraft flying between the continents,’” he recalls.

Weber grew up in the industry, learning space law as he went. He first studied space law at a symposium in law school where he learned the foundation—“treaties from the 1960s and congressional acts in the early ’80s”—but the environment, today, is changing fast. He says:

[Today] you’ve just seen recently almost a hockey stick expansion of activity in terms of both new entrants, new business models, new technologies, and also the government looking at how are they going to regulate this rapid expansion. And so there’s been an understanding that it’s not a static area of law. In many areas we are making law for the first time because it’s the first instance that something like that has happened.

Weber stayed at Rolls-Royce for 20 years, eventually ascending to chief counsel of defense aerospace. In 2018 he moved on from a company with origins dating back more than 100 years to an aerospace company founded at the turn of the current century—Blue Origin—as their general counsel. Blue Origin aims to realize “the vision of millions of people living and working in space for the benefit of Earth,” according to their website.

When Weber joined Blue Origin six years ago, the legal and compliance department was composed of fewer than 10 people. Today, they number over 50. There’s no single space law expert on the team—though they do have a group focused on regulatory compliance, which includes many space law issues. Instead his team’s mandate is broad and has grown to touch more and more aspects of the business over time. “I guess, like for many in-house general counsel of large manufacturing companies, you deal with the routine stuff: the leasing of facilities and employment agreements and the like. But I’m doing it surrounded by really cool equipment and motivated by a really exciting mission,” Weber says.

There was no book of templates on the shelf. …We couldn’t go to any of the commercial services and say, ‘Let’s just pull down an astronaut template?’

Paul Weber, general counsel, Blue Origin

Indeed, Weber notes that space law is “woven into” much of what they do, often operating in the background even when they are working on more routine legal problems. His team oversees aspects like “customer contracts, supply chain contracts, export control provisions, intellectual property, risk insurance, and the like,” he says. “When you’re leasing a building, you don’t have a lot of unique space law aspects to it. But other times you do need to bring together a lot of interdisciplinary acts to solve a new question,” he explains. For instance, Weber’s team was instrumental in aiding the company in flying humans to space on New Shepard, a new reusable, autonomous rocket system. In addition to flying Jeff Bezos and his brother Mark, they also flew Wally Funk, “one of the original Mercury 13, a woman selected in the Kennedy administration to train as an astronaut [who] was a certified pilot [and] unfortunately never got to fly into space until she had a chance to fly with us at the time, [becoming] the oldest person to fly in space,” Weber says. In helping support the mission, Weber’s team had a very routine task: obtain agreements with each person going on the flight. But they were operating in a very nonroutine market. “There was no book of templates on the shelf. …We couldn’t go to any of the commercial services and say, ‘Let’s just pull down an astronaut template,’” Weber explains. It was a whole team effort looking at “the various provisions” from every angle, he says. In the end, they “crafted both an astronaut and crew agreement, both of which are defined terms in the regulations, to allow us to then contract and fly them into space.”

Each day, Weber’s team is confronted with legal questions that expand the scope of what lawyers decades ago might not have envisioned. Right now, they are preparing for their heavy orbital rocket launch, New Glenn, as well as working on a NASA contract that will allow for sustaining lunar development, confronting questions like, “What are we going to do with requirements from FAA, FCC, NOAA, and the like? And then not only what are the space law provisions, but then how do we flow them down to suppliers? How do we use that to structure the agreements we’re trying to put in place?”

How do Weber’s team train to be space lawyers? Some of it is traditional—through continuing legal education—but a lot of it is trying to think expansively and be forward-thinking. “[We’re] looking forward and saying, ‘OK, once we get a permanent presence in the moon … what do we need to be thinking about now? … so that we can set the precedent so that we’re not only solving today’s problem, but we’re building a precedent that’s sustainable and consistent with the regulations and treaties, but also allows us then to scale as we expect we will rapidly be scaling,” he says.

Weber sometimes gets “goose bumps” thinking about the mission he’s helping move forward. “Our vision is millions of people living and working in space to benefit the Earth,” he says. How to accomplish that? The answer is interdisciplinary: it involves engineers, but it also involves lawyers.

As Weber looks forward to the types of lawyers they’ll need as the space industry evolves, he notes that “a narrow focus on space law is not as beneficial as a broader focus that includes space law.” He explains, “There’s a need for companies like mine to have people who are broadly able to offer a variety of legal services that any in-house legal team needs, you know, employment law, IP law, transactional law, and we need those bases of experience. But then if you’re able to couple it with a knowledge of space law and policy and a passion for what we’re doing, then you’re the right fit for us.”

A field ripe for exploration and expansion

Hanlon’s and Weber’s stories demonstrate that space law is an evolving field with substantial opportunities for newcomers. Today, an increasing number of law firms advertise a space law practice group, including AmLaw 100 firms like Akin Gump and Milbank. Businesses are developing “space strategies,” even those whose products seemingly don’t touch space. For new lawyers breaking into the field, there’s ample room to explore.