Das Weltraum-Recht.

The first book on the legal aspects of spaceflight to present space law as an independent area of law. Subtitled Ein Problem der Raumfahrt, it is the work of Dr. jur. Vladimír Mandl, a lawyer in Pilsen, and is dedicated to his father. Mandl coins the term Weltraumrecht (p. 3), preferring it to “Raumrecht” and to the French “droit éthéré,” and argues that it will become a discipline of its own, separate from air and maritime law.

Part One, “The Present” (pp. 1–19), asks what existing law would say about a rocket launch and finds that no statute fits. A craft counts as a spaceship by its evident purpose, not by what it can do; in a multistage rocket only the core is the spaceship, and the spent stages are treated like ballast (p. 5). He weighs property rights over the airspace above a landowner’s plot, liability without fault (a rocket motor being a machine, with Fritz von Opel’s rocket cars as the example), explosives and fire regulations, and the 1919 Paris air convention, and concludes that air law cannot simply be applied by analogy.

Part Two, “The Future” (pp. 20–48), sketches the law a real space programme would need: government licensing of launch sites and flight dates, a state commissioner at takeoff, compulsory liability insurance, public funding, longer patent terms, a “space council” and a “cosmic weather service,” and rules for a crew missing for years. It also holds that state sovereignty ends where the air ends, leaving outer space free to all (pp. 31–33); that claims by occupation or “spheres of interest” are unworkable; that a spaceship takes its owner’s nationality; and that space would be of little use as a battlefield (p. 34). The closing chapters turn to economic and cultural effects and speculate that emigrants beyond Earth would form stateless communities, forcing a rethinking of the very concept of state and law.

Along the way Mandl cites the Breslau Verein für Raumschiffahrt, the Vienna Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft für Höhenforschung, the journal Die Rakete, Goddard’s propellant estimates, Hohmann’s powder tower, von Pirquet’s Moon-rocket cost of 3.5 million marks (from Ley’s Die Möglichkeit der Weltraumfahrt), Valier’s Raketenfahrt, and Oberth; works by Ley, Valier, Oberth, and Hohmann are also in this collection. Printed by the Mannheimer Vereinsdruckerei; 48 pages of text.