In Space, You Are Acting on Behalf of the State, Not Just Your Company

There's one rule in space law that works differently from every other field, and most founders learn it late.

Article 6 of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty provides that states are internationally responsible for national space activities. That doesn't change if the activity is carried out by a private company. The article also says these activities require authorisation by, and continuing supervision of, the relevant state.

An example makes this easier to see. A software company that makes a mistake is answerable to its client. A space company that makes a mistake makes the state answerable to another state. The difference isn't one of scale — it's a difference in kind.

How the liability chain is built

The 1972 Liability Convention makes this concrete. A launching state is absolutely liable for damage caused by its space object on the surface of the Earth or to an aircraft in flight — no fault has to be shown.

That has a direct commercial consequence. The state will want to pass this potential liability on to the private operator. That's why authorisation documents typically contain recourse provisions, mandatory insurance and security requirements. If you don't know the size of these line items before entering contract negotiations, you don't know the actual cost of the project either.

Registration follows from the same logic. The 1975 Registration Convention requires objects launched into space to be recorded. Registration establishes which state's jurisdiction and control an object falls under — which is where the answer to "which law applies" begins.

The authorisation map in Türkiye

The Turkish Space Agency was established by Presidential Decree in 2018 and is responsible for preparing the national space programme and coordinating activities.

But space activity isn't confined to a single agency. Frequency and orbital-slot use is a separate regime, governed by International Telecommunication Union rules; domestically, the Information and Communication Technologies Authority is the competent body. Where export controls are involved, other authorities come into play.

Before starting a project, that map needs to be drawn: which permit, from which authority, in what order, and how long it takes. That timeline runs independently of the technical development schedule, and it's usually longer. What delays a project is often not the software — it's the permit.

The data itself is a separate issue

The most common practical problem I see on space projects isn't technical. It's about the data.

Rights over mission data need to be settled in the launch and operations agreements. A gap left in the contract is very hard to fix afterwards, because by then the counterparty already has access to that data, and restricting it retroactively doesn't work in practice.

Earth-observation data raises a separate question. As resolution improves, the likelihood that data qualifies as personal data increases. Imagery that can resolve a vehicle's licence plate is not subject to the same regime as city-scale imagery. When designing a system, the resolution threshold at which a different processing regime kicks in needs to be defined, and built in as a control point in the data pipeline.

The third issue is integrity. It needs to be possible to show the provenance, timestamp and unaltered state of telemetry data. That's the one thing that will carry evidentiary weight in a post-incident review. If there's a possibility the record was produced after the fact, the record itself is worthless as a defence.

The resource-extraction question

Article 2 of the Treaty bans national appropriation. Whether extracting resources from celestial bodies sits against that ban is not settled.

Some states have enacted domestic legislation recognising ownership over extracted resources. How well those laws sit alongside the Treaty is contested, and no settled international practice has yet formed. The honest thing to tell a venture working in this space is this: the legal ground here hasn't settled, and that uncertainty belongs in the investment case as a genuine risk line item. Any view presented as settled is, as things stand, giving incomplete information.

What to bring to the table

Wherever I see the technical team and the legal team working separately on a space project, I see the same problem. Decisions made while writing ground-segment software directly affect the liability regime, and that link is usually noticed only after the contract is signed.

Three things need to be settled before the first negotiation: which authority the authorisation comes from and on what terms; how liability and insurance burden are split between the parties; and who owns, and who can access, the mission data. Technical planning done before these three are resolved usually has to be redone.