Matson, Robert wrote: > > > Please, good people, there's no cause for an international > incident. Why is everyone so sensitive all of a sudden? > Ralph was simply offering an example in the interest of > understanding who builds what, who owns what, and who's > responsible for what. No one is suggesting that ArianeSpace > or ESA or anyone else is more likely to drop space debris > in someone's backyard than the U.S., Chinese or Russians. It is noteworthy that there exists a Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Object prepared under the auspices of U.N.O., which was signed and/or ratified by many countries, including e.g. Russian Federation, U.S.A, China, France and other "space powers". The liability is derived from the ownership of a space object, causing the damage. Therefore the question about ownership (also for non-functional objects as launcher stages) is in this sense very important. The text of the Convention can be found at URL: http://www.oosa.unvienna.org/SpaceLaw/liability.htm Full list of countries adhering to that (and other) Convention can be found on that site also (in pdf format). http://www.oosa.unvienna.org/repidx.html#statrep -- Mgr. Antonin Vitek, CSc. Office: Main Library, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic Home: Kytin 127, CZ-25210 Mnisek p. B., Czech Republic Coord.: 14.2194 deg E, 49.8488 deg N, 442 m ASL My satellite home page: http://www.lib.cas.cz/www/space.40/index.html ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Feb 02 2001 - 12:31:53 PST