Emergency Assistance and Rescue Obligations for Commercial and Private Spacefarers in the Context of the History, Present, and Future of Human Spaceflight

The twentieth century saw significant advances in aerospace technology on 17 December 1903, the first powered flight of the Kitty Hawk by the Wright Brothers; on 25 August 1919, the first regular scheduled international passenger air service, which was from London to Paris; on 30 April 1940, the first regular trans-Tasman air service between Auckland and Sydney; on 12 April 1961, the first launch of a person into outer space with Yuri Gagarin; on 20 July 1969, the first footsteps on the Moon left by the Apollo 11 mission; on 12 April 1981, the first of the regular service of the US space shuttle fleet with the launch of Columbia; and on 20 November 1998, the start of the construction of the International Space Station (ISS) with the launch of the Zarya control module. By the end of 2022, over 600 people have crossed the ‘Final Frontier’ into outer space, and the vast majority of these ‘spacefarers’ are professionals trained and employed by their respective government space agencies to be spacefarers. However, the twenty-first century saw the dawn of private space tourism that began with the launch of Dennis Tito to the ISS on 28 April 2001 and culminated in the so-called ‘billionaire space race’ in July 2021, as commercial ventures raced to conduct regular space flights for ‘amateur’ private spacefarers and paying commercial passengers.