As space continues to attract substantial public and private investment and has become ever more active, the third edition of this book has been updated to cover recent developments. This includes the legal bases of UN Resolution 76/3, the Space3030 Agenda, which envisages ‘space as a driver of sustainable development’ and sets out an extensive programme for the future. The work also takes account of adaptations and augmentations to basic space treaties. It examines the increasing commercialisation of space in areas such as space tourism and space mining, for which four states have already adopted relevant legislation. The impact of new technologies such as satellite constellations and micro-satellites are also scrutinised. At a time when space tourism is available to those who can afford it and when the moon will shortly be revisited with a prospect of permanent bases, this third edition provides a firm base for the next generation of space lawyers. As with previous editions, the work draws from governmental, international organisational and other authoritative sources as well as the relevant literature in the field. The book will be an essential and comprehensive resource for students, academics and researchers as well as space agencies, governments and space-active companies. It will also be of value to technical operatives and managers who need to know the legal context within which they work.

Compelling account of how ideas of alien life have evolved for general readers, amateur astronomers and undergraduate students studying astrobiology.

“We are a much-lectured people,” wrote Robert Spence Watson in 1897. Beginning at mid-century, cities and towns across England used the popular lecture for purposes ranging from serious education to effervescent entertainment and from regional pride to imperial belonging. Over time, the popular lecture became the quintessential embodiment of Victorian knowledge-based culture, which itself ranged from the production of new knowledge in the most elite of learned societies to the consumption of established knowledge in middle-class clubs and the hundreds of humble mechanics' institutions initially founded to provide scientific instruction to workers. What did the “average” Victorian talk and think about? How did the knowledge-based culture of lecture and debate enable men and women to demonstrate both civic engagement and cultural competence? How does this knowledge-based culture and its changing expression give us ways to look at Victorian citizenship long before the extension of the franchise? With engaging and accessible prose Anne Rodrick draws from a variety of primary sources to provide fascinating answers to these pertinent questions. Based on the analysis of several thousand lectures and debates delivered over more than 50 years, this book digs deeply into what those individuals below the most elite levels thought, heard, debated, and claimed as a badge of cultural competence. By the turn of the 20th century, the popular lecture was competing for attention with new institutions of leisure and of higher education, and the discourse surrounding its place in contemporary England helps illuminate important debates over access to and deployment of knowledge and culture.

This book provides the first thematic survey and analysis of nineteenth-century writing that imagined outcomes that history might have produced. Narratives of possible worlds and scenarios—referred to here as “alternate histories”—proliferated during the nineteenth century and clustered around pressing themes and emergent disciplines of knowledge. This study examines accounts of undefeated Napoleons after Waterloo, alternative genealogies of western civilization from antiquity to the (nineteenth-century) present day, the imagination of variant histories on other worlds, lost-world fictions that “discovered” improved relations between men and women, and the use of alternate history in America to reconceive the relationship between the New World and the Old. The “untimely” imagination of other histories interrogated the impact of new techniques of knowledge on the nature of history itself. This book sheds light on the history of speculative thought, and the relationship between literature and the history of ideas in the nineteenth century.