It’ll soon get crowded on the lunar surface. Will the laws of space be able to keep pace?

It is time to ponder the future legal, political, economic implications of the window of opportunity that India is helping to open up.

chandrayaan 2, chandrayaan 2 lander found, india chandrayaan 2 mission, isro — India’s lander may have failed, but that is only a setback in the perceptions game. (Illustration by C R Sasikumar)

The US Air Force Brigadier General, Homer A Boushey, an aeronautical engineer, a friend of rocketry pioneer, Robert Goddard, commanded the USAF’s first jet fighter group and retired as deputy director of air force research and development. Despite such an illustrious career, he is chiefly remembered as a real-life Dr Strangelove. He owes this unsavoury and undeserved reputation to his speech at a Washington aero club in 1958. The venue wasn’t exactly strategically significant, but US News and World Report published an extract including a sentence that lingered in public memory for decades: “He who controls the moon controls the earth.”