Law, College of
Date of this Version
2005
Abstract
From time to time, especially among space lawyers, discussion flares up on the wisdom of treating air law and space law as similar branches of law, and on the justification for teaching and doing research on both at the same venues and in the same contexts. Whatever the merits of keeping a keen eye on the particularities of the two legal fields, however, one should never loose sight of the fact that space law is intricately linked to issues not only of space policy, but also of economics and technology, and that the worlds of aviation and the space industry from this perspective are, indeed, very much intertwined. There are still as of yet very few space operations which have not somehow developed from aviation—many astronauts started their career as pilots, much space technology has been developed from aviation technology, and most space industries have developed from an originally (more) aviation-oriented background. For those space politicians and space lawyers who are still not convinced of this, the new publication by Philippe Malaval and Christophe Bénaroya, Aerospace Marketing Management (a translation of the original French version which appeared in 2001) may be something of an eye-opener. It shows that even in terms of marketing (and largely for the same reasons) the space industry (in the widest sense of the word) still has a lot to learn from the experiences of the aviation industry (whereas the opposite would probably be true only to a much smaller extent). On the basis of a very methodological approach, no doubt derived from management sciences—for the humble lawyer there are indeed a lot of new lessons to be learned in this respect!—the authors dissect the various aspects of making sure a particular company can maximise its chances of long-term profitable business activities in the areas of aviation and the space industry.
Comments
Published in Space Policy (2004) 20: 65-66. Copyright 2004, Elsevier. Used by permission.