US won’t sign EU space treaty

A senior State Department official said Thursday that the United States will not sign onto a European code of conduct treaty laying out rules in outer space.

Ellen Tauscher, the State Department’s undersecretary for arms control and international security, said the rules the EU has currently proposed were “too restrictive” for the United States to agree to.

“We’ve made very definitive that we were not going to go along with the European code of conduct. What we haven’t announced is what we’re going to do. We will be doing that soon,” Tauscher said a breakfast roundtable with reporters.

Republican senators sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last February with concerns about the implications of signing onto the multilateral agreement, particularly when it came to space defense systems and anti-satellite weapons.

The senators referred to China shooting down one of its satellites in space in 2007, which is what prompted an interest in establishing rules governing space.

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