International Space Station Operations Depend on Treaties From the 1990s

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NASA will launch two crewed missions in February, but not simultaneously as once planned. The missions represent the cutting edge of human spaceflight—except for one problem. The legal framework governing ISS operations is now nearly three decades old, when mobile phones had antennas and Russia seemed like a reliable partner.

That framework—an international agreement and supporting country-to-country contracts—now governs the most complex scientific project humans have ever built. It determines who has jurisdiction when something goes wrong. Who owns the intellectual property from experiments. How to resolve disputes between nations that are, back on Earth, engaged in proxy warfare.

How the ISS Legal Framework Works

The international agreement solved a genuinely difficult problem: how do you apply national law in a place where no single country can claim to own or control the space station?

The solution was elegant. Each country retains jurisdiction over the modules it registers and the people who are its nationals. The United States registered certain segments. Japan contributed the Kibo laboratory. Europe contributed the Columbus module as ESA’s major hardware contribution to the partnership. Canada provided the robotic arm.

This created a system where each country exercises legal authority within its registered elements without claiming ownership of outer space itself. The treaty also established that you get to use the facility based on what you contribute—hardware, operating resources, crew time. Provide more, access more. Detailed agreements between NASA and each partner filled in the technical details.

Here’s what they didn’t plan for: what happens when one of those partners invades another country and threatens to bring the facility down or let it crash into your territory?

Russia’s Critical Role and the Withdrawal Problem

Russia manages the propulsion control systems. Without regular reboosts from Russian Progress spacecraft to counteract air resistance pulling it down, the ISS would gradually descend and eventually burn up falling back to Earth. The facility weighs 925,000 pounds. Where it lands matters.

Yet despite extraordinary political strain, the ISS partnership has continued operating. Russian cosmonauts kept launching. American astronauts kept training in Russia. The traditional arrangement where astronauts and cosmonauts flew on each other’s spacecraft persisted through 2025—NASA astronauts occasionally flew on Russian Soyuz spacecraft while Russian cosmonauts flew on SpaceX Dragons.

But Russia has announced plans to construct its own orbital facility beginning around 2027. The Russian Orbital Service Station would operate independently, signaling a shift from cooperation to competition.

The agreement contains no way for a country to leave the partnership. No process for handling what happens when a country leaves. No clear answer to whether the facility can continue operating if Russia leaves and takes its propulsion modules with it. Russia has indicated it intends to operate the ISS only through 2028, but the treaty provides no formal mechanism for one partner to cease participation without breaking the treaty.

Commercial Spaceflight and Jurisdictional Gaps

The agreement assumed transportation and ISS operations would remain exclusively governmental activities. Commercial spaceflight beyond launch services was science fiction.

Then NASA created a program to hire private companies to transport astronauts in 2014, contracting with SpaceX and Boeing to transport astronauts to the ISS. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon operates under a government contract but is fundamentally a commercial spacecraft with commercial crews and commercial infrastructure.

This creates an ambiguity the agreement never addressed: when a SpaceX spacecraft docks with the ISS, which nation’s jurisdiction applies to commercial astronauts aboard a commercial spacecraft?

The agreement handles this through provisions stating that private entities must operate under authorization and supervision by their nation’s government. SpaceX must follow NASA’s rules, which follow ISS partnership rules.

But the legal structure predates modern commercial spaceflight by two decades. It lacks specific provisions addressing who’s responsible if something goes wrong with commercial crews, who owns discoveries and inventions made during commercial research, or commercial involvement in the strict legal regime established decades ago. NASA has developed separate contractual relationships with commercial partners to address these gaps. But these contracts exist outside the binding treaty structure that governs the ISS itself. They’re temporary fixes, not permanent solutions.

Crimes in Orbit and Artificial Intelligence

The agreement says how to handle crimes in orbit when someone breaks the rules and hurts another country’s people or damages another country’s hardware. The nationality of the alleged perpetrator generally determines which nation exercises jurisdiction, though other countries can step in if the first country doesn’t prosecute.

But the agreement doesn’t address what happens when the misconduct involves artificial intelligence systems making decisions about ISS operations. Who has jurisdiction over an AI that malfunctions and damages equipment? The treaty was written when AI meant science fiction, not operational reality.

Intellectual Property and Mars Missions

The agreement says each country owns discoveries made in its section. ESA retains intellectual property rights to discoveries made in the Columbus module. NASA controls rights to results from American segments. Roscosmos maintains control over Russian segment discoveries.

When research involves collaboration across modules—which is common in microgravity science—procedures exist for labeling who owns the discoveries and creating agreements between agencies and their research partners.

This works fine for the ISS, where researchers primarily work in modules registered to their own nation. It becomes problematic for future Mars missions, where multiple nations will contribute crews and equipment to a mission that cannot practically be divided into national “modules.”

A unified Mars spacecraft or planetary base cannot operate under the ISS model of dividing control by country. Mars missions would require crews from different countries working together in shared living areas, making the system of dividing control by country difficult to apply.

Legal experts have identified a fundamental conflict between patent law—which only protects inventions within specific countries—and principles that say no country can claim to own outer space. The ISS agreement attempted to resolve this by treating each country’s section like its own territory. That solution works for a static, segmented facility. It doesn’t work for integrated, shared scientific work on the Moon or Mars, where invention occurs across shared platforms and responsibility cannot be easily assigned to single nations.

The Artemis Accords and Competing Lunar Programs

Recognizing that the ISS legal structure might not adequately address the challenges of expanded exploration, NASA and the State Department developed the Artemis Accords.

These accords represent a fundamentally different approach, letting countries claim specific areas on the moon to work in, the right to mine or harvest materials from orbit, and peaceful use commitments. They avoid dividing the moon into national sections like the space station does, instead relying on looser agreements and commitments by countries that sign to respect each other’s work.

But some major spacefaring nations have not signed. China and Russia have countered with their own International Lunar Research Station proposal, establishing competing claims about which nations can extract resources, how safety zones should operate, and what principles should govern future exploration.

Existing treaties lack the specificity to resolve these modern disputes. The ISS legal structure applies only to its specific partnership.

Decommissioning and the End-of-Life Problem

As the ISS approaches its planned end-of-life date around 2030, fundamental questions arise about whether the rules cover what happens when the facility shuts down.

NASA has planned to bring the facility down safely to ensure debris falls into a remote area of the Pacific Ocean called Point Nemo, where old spacecraft are sent. This operation will require precise coordination between all partners.

But the treaty provides no clear process for how to decide when to bring the facility down, determining which partner bears costs, or resolving disagreements if a partner nation wishes to continue operations while others wish to decommission.

If Russia withdraws, the United States and other Western partners would face the question of whether the ISS can continue operating without Russian propulsion modules and without Russian consent to maintain orbital altitude. This represents a workaround not covered by the original treaty rather than a planned contingency.

Commercial Platforms Replacing Government Facilities

As NASA plans for ISS decommissioning, the agency is simultaneously working to transition research to private platforms through its program to transition research to private facilities. Axiom Space, Blue Origin, Starlab Space, and other companies are developing commercial platforms that will replace government-operated research facilities.

These commercial platforms will operate in the same legal structure as SpaceX Crew Dragon—under government oversight and authorization, but fundamentally private ventures. NASA has awarded contracts to multiple commercial providers, acknowledging that space stations in low Earth orbit will be run by private companies rather than governmental.

But the precedent of each country controlling its own part seems poorly adapted to a world where private companies operate internationally and compete for national government contracts. A commercial facility might have investors and customers from multiple countries, research conducted by corporate entities rather than government scientists, and companies wanting to make money complicates agreements developed for government-to-government cooperation. The ISS legal structure, with its clear national registration and jurisdictional boundaries, provided certainty that commercial law hasn’t figured out yet.

The Fundamental Gaps in Current Legal Structures

How should outer space be governed when multiple nations pursue contradictory lunar development strategies? When some nations assert the right to mine or harvest materials while others claim such extraction violates the principle that no one can own outer space? When China and Russia develop alternative facilities specifically to bypass exclusion from Western-led programs? When commercial companies operate platforms that span multiple national jurisdictions and attract customers from non-aligned nations?

The ISS treaty barely addresses these concerns. It was designed for a specific moment in history—the hopeful 1990s after the Cold War ended, when the leading powers had concluded that cooperation served mutual interests and when only wealthy developed countries could afford to participate. It assumed America would stay ahead technologically and Russia would cooperate with the West. Those assumptions turned out to be temporary, not permanent.

Legal experts increasingly recognize that the current structure—the 1967 Outer Space Treaty supplemented by the ISS agreements and now the Artemis Accords—is separate agreements that don’t always work together. The 1967 treaty established universal principles but can’t be enforced and doesn’t cover specific situations. The ISS legal structure works for its specific partnership but provides limited guidance for new activities or new partners. The Artemis Accords attempt to create new rules for lunar exploration but lack some major spacefaring nations, meaning not all countries follow them.

No legal structure adequately addresses commercial spaceflight’s integration into government programs, AI decision-making in orbital systems, or the tension between sharing space versus competing for control of it.

What Comes Next

The Crew-12 mission this February will demonstrate the continuing capability of the ISS legal structure to coordinate multinational spaceflight operations. The astronauts and cosmonauts aboard will conduct research valuable for future Mars missions under jurisdictional procedures and operational protocols established nearly three decades prior.

Yet their mission also highlights an uncomfortable reality: the rules they follow were written when outer space seemed unlimited, competition among spacefaring nations was limited, and everyone thought all powers would work together forever.

NASA’s plans for ISS decommissioning in 2030 or shortly thereafter, combined with Russia’s stated intention to withdraw around 2028, suggest that the partnership structure may stop working approximately when the facility itself stops working.

What comes next—whether successor agreements, separate programs run by different countries or regions, or new cooperative arrangements among smaller groups of countries—remains uncertain but will likely reflect how the world is rather than how people hoped it would be.

As more countries and companies gain access to orbit, the assumptions underlying the ISS partnership—that wealthy democracies would dominate spaceflight and that cooperation would naturally prevail over competition—look increasingly outdated. The legal vacuum left by aging treaties and incomplete accords creates risks not just for astronauts and cosmonauts, but for the future of human activity beyond Earth.

Whether the international community can develop new legal structures that accommodate both cooperation and competition, both governmental and commercial actors, both established powers and emerging spacefaring nations, will determine whether the next chapter of human spaceflight builds on the ISS legacy or breaks from it entirely.

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