Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article by Samantha Potter J.D. ’25, an officer in the U.S. Air Force, are entirely her own and not endorsed by, or reflective of, the position of the U.S. federal government.
As the new space race of countries and corporations taking to the cosmos accelerates, students in the Stanford Space Law Society (SSLS) are at the forefront of addressing legal and policy challenges central to responsible and ethical governance of the “final frontier.”
Established by a group of law students last year, SSLS seeks to foster a collaborative interdisciplinary dialogue and increase awareness within the Stanford community of space law and policy through programming and initiatives aimed to illuminate some of the most pressing outer space-related issues.
“One of the most exciting but equally challenging aspects of navigating outer space law is there are not a lot of laws. There is also not a lot of practice yet because outer space is a really novel field,” said Samantha Potter J.D. ’25, Knight-Hennessy Scholar and founder and president of SSLS. The field of international space law was formally established in 1967 with the implementation of the multilateral Outer Space Treaty.
“We have this really interesting tension of how do we regulate activity that hasn’t even happened yet, and how do we conceive of laws that have likely just been relegated to science fiction until this point,” Potter said.
SSLS organizes a variety of lectures, discussions and space policy reading groups along with a Careers in Space speaker series where students can connect with industry professionals and government experts to gain insight into the aerospace sector and explore potential career paths. Additionally, SSLS publishes a space journal and an online periodical series, and plans to design a seminar course at the law school focused on space law.
“The space industry is actually picking up really fast. But even at Stanford, there’s a tendency that when people think about space, it is really far away and maybe not relevant,” said Cody Cheng J.D. ’27, financial officer of SSLS. “That gap in thinking that [space exploration] is really far away is one of the biggest challenges, for us, for society, and for space law.”
SSLS has partnered with the Stanford Student Space Initiative (SSI), one of the largest student organizations on campus, to invigorate the conversation of space governance on campus.
“We’re in a really, really exciting era of space commercialization and development. If we don’t have space policy in the back of our mind, we could make space so full of debris that we can’t even go up there anymore,” said Michelle Park ’26, former co-president of SSI, who hopes to pursue a career in astrophysics research.
Many former SSI members have entered aerospace engineering jobs at companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin.
“If students are more conscious about what it means to develop a space policy, then they should bring those same ideas to this greater environment where they’re actually working on the things that will go into space,” Park said. “In general, we’re trying to raise awareness and put that into students’ minds so that they are more globally conscious after they leave Stanford.”
Over the past year, SSLS has hosted guest speakers including Distinguished Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution Dan Berkenstock M.S. ’06, Ph.D. ’24, members of the general counsel team of the space startup Vast and representatives from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Recent panel discussions covered the role of arbitration in international space law and careers in space law with the federal government.
Lauren Romagnoli J.D. ’25 said that the SSLS’s event on federal government careers in space law was “really insightful.” “This is a career field that I haven’t seen much information about through other events or classes at the law school, so I enjoyed hearing from the two panelists speaking from different perspectives as space law practitioners,” Romagnoli said.
SSLS and SSI have also worked in partnership to conduct research and surveys on the status of space law in different countries for the Center for Space Governance, a nonprofit think tank founded by Gustavs Zilgalvis MIP ’25. The two organizations have provided this research to the Latvian government to inform the development of its national space policy and hope to work with the U.S. federal government to provide research on space policy issues.
“Every nation has their own plans for sending spacecraft or doing some research on the moon … It sounds very fictional right now. We are making progress. But eventually we need to find answers to these questions, because these are very prominent issues,” said Ruchira Naik LLM ’25.
Space law is a particularly critical domain given the importance of a safe and stable outer space environment to fields ranging from banking to telecommunications to satellite navigation, according to Potter. Additionally, from a national security standpoint, space law is “integral if not essential” to most military operations, she said.
“Outer space is becoming increasingly contested, congested and competitive. We have a lot of actors trying to get into space, and it’s a limited resource,” Potter said. “We think outer space is infinite, and in some ways it is, but the usable amount of outer space is actually pretty finite. Certain orbits are better for certain things. Everyone wants those limited resources.”
To address pressing challenges — including particularly the accumulation of space debris that could potentially block satellite access to certain orbits — interdisciplinary collaboration will be necessary among engineers, lawyers and policymakers, according to members of SSLS and SSI.
“Precisely because these problems are cross-cutting, we need this cross-departmental thinking and conversation,” Cheng said. “Stanford is a great place to do it, because we have a lot of talent in all of these areas.”