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The sanctuary of the old Eastside Christian Church, once a place of worship for Baptists, is now something of an altar to outer space. Muted light filtering through 92-year-old stained glass windows gives an eerie glow to the artwork hanging around the room: depictions of astronauts golfing on the moon, rays of sunlight reaching into blackness, wild horses stampeding on a distant planet.
“I put in relevant artwork,” explains Declan O’Donnell, a Denver attorney who has turned the old church in the Cheesman Park neighborhood into the command control center for two futuristic organizations. “I can’t say it’s real expensive, but it’s relevant.”
O’Donnell wants to go where no lawyer has gone before: into space, where he hopes to create a “nation” that will make laws governing private ventures beyond Earth. It may sound like something out of The Jetsons, but space law is an actual legal specialty. One of his clients, O’Donnell says, is building a rocket plane and is seeking licensing to get it into space. Another wants to gather moon rocks for jewelry-making.
O’Donnell says his income from the more earthbound realm of tax and securities law allows him to donate freely to his two organizations: He’s president of both the World-Space Bar Association, a group of space lawyers, and United Societies in Space Inc. (USIS), a Colorado non-profit corporation dedicated, according to its mission statement, “to the proposition that space beyond the Earth is to be settled, populated and enjoyed as the interplanetary commons of the human species.”
In order to do that, O’Donnell’s organization wants to create “Metanation,” an absentee government based on Earth but with a legislative reach to the stars. O’Donnell says USIS has even reserved Mile High Stadium for three days in the summer of the year 2000 to host a “constitutional convention” to create the new country.
The plan is that delegates, each of whom will represent several large segments of Earth’s population, will gather to ratify the Metanation Constitution and a “Declaration of Interdependence between earthkind and spacekind.” O’Donnell acknowledges that the gathering might be a small one–most of the convention action, he says, will take place on the Internet.
The treaty to be adopted at the constitutional convention reads like a Star Trek script: for instance, it calls for a Space Development Project to “create an offworld estate for humanity with a design capacity for at least one billion people in twelve or more settlements in orbits and on the Moon with a scheduled transport system for carrying goods and people, which system may include facilities on Earth.”
The budget for this project, according to the treaty, “shall not exceed one quadrillion space dollars”–currency that conceivably would be issued by Metanation in its role as a sovereign government.
Sending a billion people into orbit with “space dollars” may sound spacy in more ways than one. But USIS members insist that Metanation is not science fiction. “It’s not a joke,” says Andrew Quiat, a Littleton attorney and legal counsel to USIS. People have feared or ridiculed every major “paradigm shift,” invention or discovery, Quiat says, citing as an example that some people once believed their blood would boil if they rode on trains.
“Metanation is a serious proposal,” he says. “Some people, when they first hear all of this, want to dismiss it as a bunch of looney tunes. It absolutely is not.”
Instead, says Quiat, Metanation would be a perfectly legal entity created through the trusteeship provision of the United Nations charter. Trustees would be representatives of the spacefaring countries of the world.
“The entity would have jurisdiction over the venue known as outer space,” Quiat says, including control over celestial bodies such as the moon and Mars until they’re colonized and become their own sovereign nations. The space nation, for example, could set standards for construction on the moon based on scientific formulas about pressure and soil shifting.
O’Donnell’s group isn’t the first entity to tackle the space-law question. In fact, space is already governed by five international treaties, the most important of which is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, signed by 101 nations, including the United States.
However, Quiat says the existing treaties, for the most part developed during the Cold War, prevent the development of private enterprise in space. Metanation would resolve issues relating to infrastructure, commerce and colonization that are not addressed by the existing pacts, he says.
“We’re basically years into the space age with no new law of general applicability,” says O’Donnell. “Our premise is that that’s not adequate. We intend to fill in the blanks between lofty treaties and lowly mission rules for individual astronauts.”
O’Donnell says he hears objections that Metanation is premature, but he and Quiat answer that objection by saying all space law is premature. “It’s always been premature for these people,” Quiat says of USIS’s detractors, “and they’re best to stay home and watch TV. It’s very brave souls who go to new places and do new things.”
If planning isn’t done now, O’Donnell says, space could be like the Wild West, where settlers often were without police protection or planning. “They just said, ‘Pack your own pistol and go for it,'” he says. Canadian authorities, on the other hand, didn’t let settlers into the Northwest Territories until mounted police went in, made maps, zoned and regulated, says O’Donnell, who promotes the Canadian model as more suitable for the settling of the final frontier.
“Nobody else is doing this,” O’Donnell says. “There’s a void–not only out there, but here. Nobody’s working on this.”
Actually, NASA does have its own scenario for outer space development: According to O’Donnell, the federal space agency predicts camps on the moon by 2016, camps on Mars by 2035 and regular space commerce by 2050. Alan Ladwig, associate administrator of NASA’s Office of Policy and Plans, says NASA hasn’t gone quite that far. But he says NASA’s goals for 2003 to 2025 do include building an international space station and conducting international missions to other planets and bodies in the solar system.
And while NASA officials aren’t exactly on board the USIS spaceship, they’re not dismissing it, either. Ladwig says he’s familiar with USIS. Although NASA doesn’t endorse organizations, Ladwig says the space agency tries to share information with USIS and keeps tabs on the group’s activities. In fact, Ladwig spoke at a USIS conference last year.
It’s never a good idea to be too judgmental about people like O’Donnell, Ladwig adds. “Somebody you think is nuts today,” he says, “might end up being a prophet tomorrow.”
However, Ladwig says it’s not likely that people will be living and working on other planets within the next twenty years. “I don’t see that happening until you get an economic launch system,” Ladwig says. Right now, he says, it costs up to $10,000 a pound just to put something in orbit.
O’Donnell will need plenty of economic boosters to get Metanation off the ground. So far, though, USIS’s fundraising activities have been limited to selling $200-a-year “founderships” in Metanation. In return, founders get a “space stone”–a large gray rock hand-painted by O’Donnell with bright designs.
Potential “space stone” investors might wonder if those yearly payments will advance the development of space or simply end up in the black hole of somebody’s pocket. But O’Donnell insists he’s not running a space scam. “If it’s a scam, then I’m the scamee,” says the attorney, who contends that he contributed $913,000 to USIS during the last fiscal year.
“They’ve never asked me for money,” adds Skip Smith, a Colorado Springs space lawyer who is a USIS “observer” and has a doctorate in space law from McGill University in Canada. “I don’t think there’s any scam to it at all.”
That doesn’t mean Smith agrees that Metanation is necessary for the development of private enterprise in space. Communications satellites are proof of that, says Smith, who agrees with O’Donnell that there is a legal vacuum in space but says Metanation is not the answer. Instead, he says, current laws should be supplemented to create a legal regime that promotes commercial development by assuring investors that their claims will be protected.
“Metanation is an interesting concept, but not something we need in my lifetime,” says Smith. He says he hopes that one day millions of people will be living in outer space, but that this scenario, and the need for Metanation, are “a long way off.”
Despite its detractors, USIS forges ahead. The third of its ten “Countdown Conferences” was held in Denver earlier this month.
“There is no manual on how to start your own nation,” notes O’Donnell. “Our motto is ‘Just do it.’ If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, someone can try again later.
