Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle or steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogge and today we're talking about space law.

It's a topic that's a bit off the beaten track for us, but it raises some fascinating governance

issues.

My guest is Dr. Rebecca Connolly.

Rebecca trained and practiced as a lawyer.

She is now a senior lecturer and leads the International Space Law Program at the University

of Sydney Law School. She's currently a visiting Fulbright at the U.S. Naval Academy,

and Rebecca also currently serves as the chair of the board of the Space Law Council of Australia and New Zealand.

Rebecca, thank you for joining me.

Thank you so much for having me.

Can you start for those of us who are unfamiliar with this field, which I think is probably most of our listeners,

by framing the core challenge of regulating space?

I think the first thing I need to mention is that we do

have international space law, because that's usually the first thing that I have to mention,

because a lot of people think it is the Wild West up there and that everyone can do whatever

they want, and that's actually not the case. We do have international space law, which was developed from sort of the 1960s through the 1970s. So we'll start from that point,

but then we'll move through and jump through to today when we're talking about kind of

global governance and some of the challenges we face. And the first challenge is simply relating

to the domain of space itself. It is a really unique and evolving

sort of environment, and that makes it really challenging for governance, particularly in relation

to technology, which is constantly evolving and improving. We have new sort of space exploration

...