U.S. space law is codified in several laws beginning with the 1958 National Aeronautics and Space Act (NASA Act), signed into law on July 29, 1958. The NASA Act created NASA to conduct a U.S. civilian space program, with military space activities assigned to the Department of Defense (DOD). The Act has been amended several times over the decades. The current version is posted on the NASA history office website. Five international treaties and five declarations and legal principles were developed through the U.N., which maintains an Office of Outer Space Affairs (OOSA) in Vienna, Austria. OOSA administers the U.N. Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. COPUOUS is primarily concerned with non-military space activities.
The U.N. Conference on Disarmament is the venue for most international discussions about the militarization or weaponization of space and whether a treaty should be negotiated to ban weapons from outer space that are not already banned by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty... the latter of which bans nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, but not other space weapons. The synopsis of the treaties presented below is extracted from April 2004 testimony to the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee by Marcia S. Smith (the editor of SpacePolicyOnLine.com) on potential international cooperation in the President George W. Bush space exploration initiative.
It has been updated to show the number of ratifications and signatures as of January 1, 2008, the latest information on the OOSA website (additional countries have signed or ratified the agreements since then, however). OOSA maintains a searchable database of countries that have signed and/or ratified the agreements. The U.S. is a signatory to the first four of the following treaties. It is not a signatory to the fifth, the Moon Agreement, nor are any of the other major spacefaring countries (France and India signed the Moon Agreement, but have not ratified it).
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