EDITORIAL INFORMATION

This book is the first of its kind in the English language to deal with the delimitation issue in a systematic and scholarly way, both from a scientific and a legal perspective. It also deals with the right of innocent passage for spacecraft through foreign air space, which is related to the boundary problem.

(Extracted from the back cover).

GENERAL TABLE OF CONTENTS

-Contents.

-Acknowledgements.

-Preface.

-U.N. Space Treaties.

-Abbreviations.

-Chapter 1: Introduction.

-Chapter 2: The Various Air Layers.

-Chapter 3: The Atmosphere As a Boundary.

-Chapter 4: The Biological Theory.

-Chapter 5: The Theory About the Range of Terrestrial Gravitation or the Gravisphere Theory.

-Chapter 6: The Rotation Theory.

-Chapter 7: Indications in Telecommunication Law.

-Chapter 8: The Lowest Perigee of Orbiting Satellites.

-Chapter 9: The Aerodynamic Theory.

-Chapter 10: The Theory of a Three-Zone Atmosphere.

-Chapter 11: The Limitless Air Space Theory or the Theory of an Air Space Usque Ad Coelum.

-Chapter 12: The Functional Approach.

-Chapter 13: The Theory of a Uniform Legal Regime.

-Chapter 14: Effective Control.

-Chapter 15: State Security and State Interests.

-Chapter 16: Customary International Law.

-Chapter 17: Treaty Law.

-Chapter 18: Conclusion.

-Appendix I: The Bogotá Declaration of December 3rd, 1976.

-Appendix II: The I.T.U. Constitution and Convention of December 22nd, 1992 (Excerpts).

-Bibliography.

OUR REVIEW

Where does the air space of a nation begin and end when we refer to space and the orbits around the Earth? Even if it may appear to be incredible indeed, and after 40 years of launchings of manned and unmanned artificial satellites, the question is not clearly solved yet, at the very least in its legal aspects. The controversy of the delimitation of the frontier between the air space itself and outer space (a territory having free access and exempt from control on the part of a particular country) usually appears quite often in the legal and political arenas. This book, the fourth volume of the series Forum for Air and Space Law, helps us to understand the problem better and to check all the possible viewpoints.

Several are the theories that consider the already mentioned frontier air space/outer space, and all of them are described by the author, always in search for contact points among all of them that somehow contribute to reach certain conclusions for a common, global application. The economical, technological, scientific and even political and military potential of space, is so impressive, that the different nations participating in the space adventure must get to know as precisely as feasible all these issues, not only in order to protect their interests, but also to avoid legal international conflicts too difficult to solve. Goedhart develops here a well referrenced exposition of the current status of things and, in a divulgative manner, displays before our eyes all the studies carried out in this respect in the last decades. The result is a book that no doubt the international community specialized in the space laws will appreciate in its just measure, perhaps even as an important contribution for the eventual solution to this problem.