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1 Robert Dickson Crane, Planning for Space Legal Policy 1 (1961)

handle is hein.space/planslp0001 and id is 1 raw text is: PLANNING FOR SPACE LEGAL POLICY

1. Motivation for Space Legal Policy
During recent years space law and strategic planning have
been developed largely independently of each other. The result is
that many policy planners regard law and strategy for space not only
as unrelated, but even as mutually exclusive.
T his law-strategy dichotomy was first clearly indicated in
1958 by the Hon. James G. Fulton (R. -Pa.), who asserted: The
law of space must advance equally with or prior to the strategy of
space.  1 / The conflict of law and strategy for -space was under-
lined in April, 1959, by the House Committee on Science and Astro-
nautics in its report entitled, U.S. Policy on the Control and Use
of Outer Space.  In this report the Committee opposed the orienta-
tion of our space policy toward national security and stated that it
is the task of law and international organization to prevent such a
disaster. 
The basic premise inherent in both of these statements seems
to be the idea that national security can be achieved only by the use or
threat of military force to deny control of outer space to other powers.
T he basic thesis of this paper is that law is gaining increasing
value as an instrument to deny control of outer space to any single
power, and that the potential advantage of a law-oriented space policy
should be integrated into military contingency planning. The various
private o rganizations and government agencies engaged in military
and general strategic planning should study the function of space law
as an instrument of national policy and should include initiative in
developing space law as a factor in any realistic formulation of the
strategic equation.
T he thesis that political and military strategists should include
the potential of law as a factor in their considerations has the necessary
corollary that space legal scholars should begin to think of their legal
1 / Hon. James G. Fulton, A Definitive Study of the Concept and
Scientific Strategy of Outer Space; The Challenge to All Nations
to Support a Just System of Space Law,  Proceedings of the
First Colloquium on the Law of Outer Space, Amsterdam, 1958.

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