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Anupam Ray, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of India to the Conference on Disarmament while speaking at the 9th Carnegie Global Tech Summit on the theme, 'Guardians of Galaxy: Space Security Norms and Partnerships', said that the Outer Space Treaty (OST) is a peculiar one.
Ray explained that today, after the civilian use of space emerged, the OST faces challenges in the regulatory domain. "The cost of space launch has come down by 90%. Satellites today are small satellites, and you have constellations," he said. "It creates a regulatory challenge that the OST is inadequate to tackle. Since the origins of the space stations, even the Indian one, are essentially military in nature. So, the OST is a peculiar treaty. When it came up in 1967, 14 of its provisions of its 17 articles are more or less drawn from the Antarctica Treaty. And rest of them have some WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) obligations," he added. He said that the regulatory conversation on space is an old one, but it was limited to military use of space only. Today, the OST has been inefficient in controlling space debris as the number of satellites in space has increased. "The regulatory conversation on space at the international level is an old one. At the current moment, the only regulatory framework is a cluster of treaties and understandings built around something called the outer space treaty, which was negotiated in 1967," he said. Ray added that in 1967, when the OST was conceived, there were about 400 objects in space, and today, that number has sharply risen to 30,000. "In 1967, there were 400 objects in space. This was about 7-8 years after Sputnik, and the entire use of space was for military purposes. Civilian use of space only came later. Today, we have 30,000 objects in space. Any number of space junk, lots of debris, the number of space launches is at an unprecedented high," he said. (ANI)
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