Who owns the Moon, and could a nuclear weapon be orbiting above your house right now? This episode explores the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, the cornerstone of international space law, and the Cold War panic that produced it. It explains how intercontinental ballistic missiles collapsed the warning time for an attack from hours to minutes, how Sputnik's beep in October 1957 doubled as a demonstration that the R-7 could deliver a warhead anywhere, and why early negotiations collapsed over inspection demands and overseas missile bases before the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty and the Antarctic Treaty provided a workable model.

The conversation walks through the treaty's key provisions: space as the province of all mankind, the ban on sovereign claims that makes the Apollo 11 flag purely symbolic, astronauts as envoys of mankind, and Article 4's  ...