Moon Law

Could an alien from outer space get a green card? Could they become a citizen? Just how does citizenship and immigration work?

Inspired by “The Tick”, we attempt to discover if anyone could (legally) prevent you from writing your name on The Moon, or otherwise advertising in space.

Kris gets mad about the proposed NASA budget, then discusses the five most common methods of detecting and studying exoplanets.

While today “Space Madness” is mostly just a media trope, it was something many people honestly feared before manned spaceflight was demonstrated to be safe. We talk about why it’s such a common trope as well as more generally what is required for an insanity defense.

With the March 31st deadline for the prize rapidly approaching, current and former Lunar X Prize teams have shared more information on their moonshots. The prize may go unclaimed, but the teams aren’t giving up.

Pirates and piracy have been a problem for nearly as long as humans have been putting valuable things on boats. We examine the history of how nations and the international community have attempted to police and outlaw piracy, and how these laws and customs might apply to the hijacking of a spacecraft.

Could a company move their headquarters to space to avoid complying with Earth laws? It may sound like a silly question, but it leads to a broader understanding of different types of company structures.

We discuss all that’s happened while we were on break: No News probably isn’t Good News for the Lunar X Prize, The SpaceX Falcon Heavy is finally here, The New York Times UFO story, and the Meltdown & Spectre attacks.

Cards Against Humanity have brought the legal concept of eminent domain into the limelight in a very, shall we say, unique way. Alan walks us through what a person could do to challenge the government’s use of this powerful weapon. Who would have thought there were rules for taking someone’s property?

Continuing where we left off last week with Multi-Messenger Astronomy: On August 17th, researchers at LIGO & VIRGO “heard” the last moments of a pair of neutron stars spiraling together and colliding. With a little luck, and a lot of help from observatories around the world they were able to locate and watch the resulting kilonova. What can we learn from that? A whole lot, it seems.