What is Public International Law

The International Space Station is certainly one of the most astounding achievements of humankind in space. Especially from a legal point of view, the creation of the Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) and its sub-instruments specifically for the ISS was a major success: the IGA was the first grand-scale multi-national legally binding space-related treaty drafted, ratified, and implemented by the major space faring nations since the drafting of the five UN Space Treaties roughly 20 years before. And still today, the legal framework of the ISS is a stand-alone legal system which can serve as model for other missions, as it refines and develops in an innovative way the rules laid out in the five UN Space Treaties and at the same time manages to coordinate and organize management, utilization, and financing between all the partners. This chapter intends to shed light on the complex legal system governing the ISS and to point out the novelties of the IGA-Structure in comparison with the conventional body of international space law.