“Don’t tell me that man doesn’t belong out there. Man belongs wherever he wants to go—and he’ll do plenty well when he gets there.”

—Wernher von Braun

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On January 27^th, 1967, the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies — commonly known as the Outer Space Treaty, or OST — was signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson after being drafted in the UN. In remarks at the signing, the president indicated that without the treaty, nations might place weapons of mass destruction in space:

We have never succeeded in freeing our planet from the implements of war. But if we cannot yet achieve this goal here on earth, we can at least keep the virus from spreading.

We can keep the ugly and wasteful weapons of mass destruction from contaminating space. And that is exactly what this treaty does.

This treaty means that the moon and our sister planets will serve only the purposes of peace and not of war.

It means that orbiting man-made satellites will remain free of nuclear weapons.

While the goal of universal peace is laudable (never mind that we need nukes in space to destroy large, life-ending comets or asteroids), other provisions in a treaty ostensibly meant to promote the exploration and use of space have resulted in the exact opposite. Though we did manage six Moon landings, and have sent unmanned probes much farther, the treaty has generally encouraged our species to confine itself to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), and led to (let’s be honest) a fairly anemic rate of exploration throughout our solar system via those unmanned probes.