Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

Space, as you may have heard, is the final frontier.

But frontiers are tricky places. Frontiers are celebrated in stories as places where there is a bit of lawlessness,

a bit of jockeying for a position, not necessarily clear on what the rules are all the time.

So do we want space to be like that? Both thinking about space right now, there's a lot going on in space.

There's a lot of satellites out there doing weather and communications and so forth.

And there's also the future of space. So we might send more human beings into space, both space stations, but also the moon, Mars, and beyond.

So today's guest is Timi Ebay Aganaba, who is a space lawyer.

She's actually much more than that. Timi Ebay has worked in government, in law practice, in consulting, and now as an academic at Arizona State University.

She's originally from Nigeria and has also worked in the UK, France, Canada, before finally coming to the USA.

And she's an expert in exactly these questions of space governance as well as space law.

Governance, if we think of working together, right? There are both strict rules that are encoded in laws, but then there are also norms and expectations that we have.

And space in some sense, we might want to be sort of a common resource to all of us, a common good, as the economists would say, but of course other people want to claim little bits of it for themselves.

So how do we balance these things? This is a question for corporations as well as for nations and non-government organizations and so forth.

And it is a frontier. It very much is. The rules are not settled. There are space treaties. The United Nations has tried to set up some basic rules, but the rules are in flux. We're not sure where it's going.

And this is a good time to think about these things with burgeoning private exploration of space.

Timi Ebay, one of her previous jobs was executive director of the World Space Week Association. And World Space Week is October 4 to 10 every year. So we're releasing this podcast at the beginning of a new World Space Week to celebrate exactly that. So with that, let's go.

Timi Ebay, Aganabah, welcome to the Blindscape Podcast.

It is my honor and pleasure to be here. We're very happy to have you here. Space, the final frontier, et cetera, is a very exciting topic that we don't we don't actually it's ironically more down to earth than many of the topics that we talk about here on the podcast. I mean, you're involved with law and things like that. But you in the talk I heard you give you drew a distinction between space law and space governance. What what is the difference there?

Yeah, that's a really interesting interesting question because I mean, I did my PhD in in space law. My first job was as a lawyer, then I during space agency.

So over the course of my 15 year career, you see a lot about space law and I will go that as to what it is. But over the past 5 years or so, we're starting to shift on language to space governance because law has a defined meaning kind of like it's instruments.

Right, that a binding that people agree to that if you if you breach them, there's some kind of accountability, et cetera. But governance is everything else that deals with how people operate and why they do what they do.

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