MULTILATERALISM ON THE FINAL FRONTIER: SPACE LAW AND POLICY IN AN ERA OF EXPANSION.

• Author: Swiney, Gabriel

Gabriel Swiney is a Senior Policy Advisor in NASA's Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy (OTPS). He has also served as an Attorney Adviser at the U.S. Department of State and was one of the primary authors and negotiators of the Artemis Accords, a political commitment that expands upon the provisions of the Outer Space Treaty as part of the U.S. government's mission to return humans to the moon by 2025. The Journal spoke with Gabriel to discuss the everyday workings of space policy, the development of the legal and multilateral frameworks governing humanity's ongoing push into outer space, and the prospects for a more crowded yet more capable space-faring civilization in the medium- to long-term.

Journal of International Affairs (JIA): Outer space is one of these emerging domains where there seems to be a lot of movement: new technology, new actors, new processes. But to start, take us through how you got involved in this particular area. It is generally understood how astronauts are recruited and trained, yet on the policy or legal side, how does one break through?

Gabriel Swiney (GS): I come from an international law background. I went to law school, but I've always had a personal interest in space. I should say that it's always been--many little kids go through the space phase sometime around when they do the dinosaur phase, and I guess I never totally got out of it. I went to Space Camp a few times as a kid. But as I grew up and went to college, majored in political science, and then went to law school, I thought that I wouldn't be able to do those kinds of things in my real career. In my professional life, I got really interested in international work when I was getting my JD. I ended up getting an additional law degree at Oxford, what they call a BCL, but it's what every other school calls the LLM. When I was doing that, I really got to focus on international studies exclusively And then after that, I got a job at the State Department in the office of the Legal Advisor, which for those who do international law is a very desirable place to be. It provides legal guidance to the State Department on everything: foreign affairs, international law, sort of everything they do. We call it "L." The letter L. And that place is really unique, not only because the quality of who they get, but because we have a rotational system, and so every two to five years you rotate between portfolios.

During my time at L, I started out doing international claims and investment disputes, which is a traditional way to start. But I ended up volunteering to go to Baghdad for a year, was the deputy, and then the chief civilian lawyer, in Iraq for the U.S. government for a year there during the war. Then I came back and did about four years working on United Nations issues. So a lot of Washington but handling things, like I was the lawyer covering the UN. I was an author at the intervention in Libya in 2011, on a bunch of sanctions programs largely focused on African States and got a taste of the multilateral world doing that. Then, I transitioned to a new portfolio, to East Africa for a long time, where I helped negotiate an end to the civil war in South Sudan, successfully negotiate a peace agreement. But that peace of agreement fell apart. I did also help negotiate the lifting of U.S. sanctions on Sudan. A couple of years after that the Sudanese government fell.

I was involved in a bunch of that kind of stuff, and as all of those things were finishing up, they happened to be finishing up at a particular time. My colleague, who had the space portfolio, rotated, and so I thought, Well, this is a good transition time for me, and maybe I can call in all my favors, which I did. I called in every favor from every boss I'd ever had, reminded them of the fact that I've been going to war zones for a number of years, putting my life at risk, and said, well didn't quite say, "You owe me," but I implied that, and managed to convince them to let me have a space portfolio. That just so happened to coincide with the beginning of the Trump Administration, which, as you know, setting everything else, did have a major focus on space. And I was a civil servant, working for lots of administrations.

It was just really good timing from a space perspective. There was a lot of money and attention at a very high level, the senior-most levels of the government. So I did International Space Law for the State Department for about 4 years. I was really enjoying that. I discovered that it really let me bring together a lot of the things that I had learned throughout my career. It's obviously highly multilateral, but I also had bilateral experience from some of my treaty negotiating in the past. So I got to do that in terms of space cooperation agreements with other countries, and I really found that I enjoyed also having to learn the science and engineering. Not so much. I'm not a technical person, but I had to learn a little bit, so that I could be conversant and then talk about it. And that was really gratifying and a fun way to use different parts of my brain.

Then, about a year ago, I had the chance to go in a detail to NASA. I'd been working, of course, very closely with NASA the whole time of the State Department. They asked me to go over on a detail in a newly-formed office at NASA called the Office of Technology, Policy and Strategy. So this is an office that advises NASA senior leadership on any issues they want to talk about in technology, policy, and strategy. I went on a detail which is where I am right now. I'm working as a senior policy adviser at NASA, working on lunar operations. But I also do a lot of work, of course, on things that are related, or at least tangentially related, to international legal work: norms of behavior, that kind of stuff, now from an operator's perspective at NASA instead of just a foreign affairs perspective like it was at State.

So it's a long answer. That's how I got there. I got really lucky. It's the place I want to be. The space community is where I want to be for the rest of my career. It's incredibly dynamic, and the timing has been really good for me. There's just a huge amount going on, so there's a lot of policy and legal issues that need answers.

JIA: On the policy and legal side, the non-technical side, would you say that others had a similar experience to yourself, coming in parallel or laterally into the space community, as opposed to having a more defined trajectory that leads to this kind of work?

GS: A lot of scientists and engineers have their own path: they get PhDs or some degree and they go right into it. But the reality is that the space law and policy world is very, very small. The U.S. is the dominant actor, but even in the United States there really aren't that many people that do space law and policy. Yet, there are a few schools that teach this kind of thing. But there's just not a lot of jobs out there yet, although there are more all the time. So there's not much of a pipeline, and not much turnover, which is something that hopefully is changing. It's difficult for students who want to go into this. But I think at this point you mostly get people laddering in like I did, which is cool because you bring a different set of expertise. You bring a broader set of expertise, which I think the Space community can really benefit from, instead of just people who have been doing space all the time.

JIA: You brought a specific expertise based on your past experience. Yet when you assumed the space portfolio at "L," what were some of the ways in which you had to catch up? What was some of the research or learning on the technical side, and how did you fill in those gaps?

GS: You start with a big picture and then zoom down. One of the things that international law deals with generally oftentimes, is how to deal with shared resources or resources that don't belong to one nation. Whether it's the high seas or airspace or outer space, how do you deal with that? How does the international community deal with that? That's a major issue in space right now. Everything from orbital congestion to the use of space resources raises questions like that. How the community deal with resources like that? They're sort of located beyond national jurisdiction.

I came in with some general international law experience about that. But I realized very quickly that you can't just treat space as one thing, you need to understand the different resources we're talking about? So I had to teach myself about things like orbits: what are the differences between low earth orbit and geostationary orbit and geosynchronous orbit? And then what are the differences between different locations on the moon or different resources you might want to extract? To make policy about those things, you have to understand what's important, what the goals might be in the future for different operators. So I've had to do a lot of technical learning. Sometimes it involves me watching YouTube videos. Sometimes it involves a lot of Wikipedia or reading academic articles. I have some technical books around that I consult. But yes, basic stuff like making sure I can talk about orbits in a generally intelligent way. It was something I had to teach myself.

JIA: When you arrived, was there much in the way of institutional knowledge or onsite resources? Or did you find it yourself?

GS: In the State Department, at L, there's not a lot of back-up and overlap in portfolios. I had my predecessor, but he was moving on to another portfolio. I could ask him questions and of course I had his files, electronic and paper. But the reality is, and this is for every portfolio in the State Department: if you're a lawyer, the second you take over that portfolio, it's your responsibility. So you start getting a fire hose of questions from policymakers out there in the world, and diplomats. It's a lot of learning on the job. There's not a handbook on how...