Corporate Manslaughter in Zero Gravity: Criminal Accountability for Death or Serious Injury on Private Space Stations

The advent of space-based commerce has created the potential for the intentional criminal design of space death.The Article examines the vacuum of the criminal law for death or serious injury aboard a space station in the private realm, against the backdrop of India's developing space governance.Using a doctrinal legal method, it considers international space law, Indian criminal law, corporate manslaughter in comparative perspective, and the most recent developments in the regulation of commercial orbital infrastructures.The Article concludes that the existing treaty framework would allocate to states responsibility, liability, and a right to exercise criminal jurisdiction and control, and a right of supervision, but would not provide a workable criminal framework for organisational criminal liability for permanent private space stations.Indian law may satisfy the need for criminal law for space stations in many cases of private space missions with the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, but will face challenges of attribution, causation, jurisdiction, and the provision and control of evidence where injury is the result of a dispersed failure of design, space station operations, remote control, and self-integrated safety layers.The Article defends the notion that India should clarify the criminal law for space safety, rather than waiting for a space safety failure to do so.