October pie in the sky

Unless you actually lived in outer space, you couldn’t have missed the fact that October 4 was the 50th anniversary of Sputnik, the little hunk of metal that launched the space race and cranked the Cold War into deep-freeze. In fact, the Sputnik anniversary kicked off World Space Week, which continued through October 10.

But most media overlooked Space Week’s second bookend, the 40th anniversary of the United Nations Outer Space Treaty. While Sputnik came to symbolize the competition for dominance among superpowers, the Outer Space Treaty was downright utopian in its message. Its first article proclaims that the exploration of outer space is to be carried out for the benefit of “all countries, irrespective of their decree of economic or scientific development, and shall be the province of all mankind.”

Later, in the fourth article, the treaty deems that, “The moon and other celestial bodies shall be used … exclusively for peaceful purposes,” and it goes on to ban “nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction” in space. The treaty was ratified by the United States, the USSR and every other developed country in the world. While the treaty stands, the Moon, Mars and whole universe are off limits to war—all of infinite space, in fact, with the exception of one lonely little planet.