Dr Alexander Simmonds

But the Dundee University academic and author of The Space Legislation of the United Kingdom did not always have this specialism in mind. His route there ran through a Doncaster solicitor’s office, a pizza round, a DHL warehouse and a joint law programme with China.

Dr Simmonds was born in Coventry and grew up in Doncaster in a single-parent family. “I’m not from a traditional middle-class background, so to speak,” he says. He was good at writing, had no fear of public speaking and was “fairly useless with numbers”, so law seemed a natural choice. He studied at the University of Sheffield from 2002 to 2005, then spent a year in a Doncaster solicitor’s office on coal-mining claims.

The plan was to practise at the English bar. He took the bar course at Nottingham Law School in 2007-08 and was called to the Bar of England and Wales, but pupillage never materialised. After around three pupillage interviews he suffered redundancy and spent a couple of years delivering pizzas and working in a warehouse. At DHL he represented colleagues in disciplinary hearings. “It was interesting having been called to the bar, then seeing these things on the shop floor in a warehouse where I was basically the only person who was legally qualified,” he says. The experience fed his interest in employment law.

He moved into further education at Lincoln College, then spent just over two years at Coventry University as course director of a joint Sino-UK commercial law programme, travelling to China and teaching Chinese students online. In 2019 he began a PhD at Coventry on procedural fairness in workplace disciplinary hearings. Lockdown helped. “I was quite grateful to get a lot of time during Covid to be able to work on it,” he says. He obtained his doctorate in 2024.

The Dundee post came in 2022 and fulfilled a long-held ambition to live and work in Scotland. He had wanted to live north of the border since a road trip with a friend at 18 that took them through the Highlands to Kyle of Lochalsh. He took over employment law from Professor Alice Belcher, who retired the year he arrived.

Space law was not taught when he took his LLB. His real interest in space dates from childhood, from the moon landings and above all from The Right Stuff, the 1983 film about the Mercury Seven astronauts, which he “happened just to catch on television one day”. “I was like, wow, I’m hooked on this,” he says. But he was already studying law. “I thought, well, I’m doing law. That’s never going to come up again.”

It came up some 20 years later at Coventry, when he searched Westlaw for what was happening in law and space. The Space Industry Act 2018 had just been passed, and he wrote an article on it for the Coventry Law Journal. A closer look at section 17, on informed consent and commercial spaceflight, reached Professor Frans von der Dunk, a leading name in the field whose own book Dr Simmonds had bought for his research, and who invited him to write for his series. Dr Simmonds was in the middle of his PhD. “I didn’t quite feel like taking any more work on, but it wasn’t an opportunity I could really turn down,” he recalls.

The book covers the 2018 Act, the regulations made under it and the official guidance, and looks at how comparable high-risk industries, such as nuclear, have been regulated. Dr Simmonds knows of no decision turning on the Act itself, so it also tries to predict how the framework will work, setting UK law against what other countries are doing.

He now teaches an honours space law module at Dundee, in its fourth year. It began in 2023-24 with eight students, when it was uncertain whether it would run at all, and now has more than 30. “I’ve got nearly as many students for space law as I’ve got for my employment law module, which I find mind-blowing,” he remarks. A PhD student is joining him next year.

His research has a second strand, which began while he was watching Ridley Scott’s Alien during lockdown and thinking about communications latency. “Cross-examination is an unbroken sequence of question and answer,” he says, and it cannot work across large distances. He turned the idea into a paper for the Mars track of the International Space Development Conference in Texas, where Dr Pascal Lee – a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center – encouraged him to pursue it.

He is now writing a draft which he hopes to see published in the International Journal of Human Rights on how communications latency could affect human rights in space. A person far from Earth would have no immediate access to legal counsel and would receive evidence by video link, which bears on the right to a fair hearing under Article 6 and on the principle that a defendant should be present at a criminal trial. Next he wants to examine the United States Celestial Time Standardization Act, a proposal to establish a time zone on the moon. He asks the fascinating question whether that would itself be a form of appropriation, which the Outer Space Treaty bars, and what happens if China and Russia refuse to accept it. The bill refers to celestial bodies generally, so a Martian time zone would be possible. “If it comes in at midnight on Earth, UK time, does it necessarily come in at midnight on Mars?” he asks.

On the wider space framework, Dr Simmonds says the 1967 Outer Space Treaty was a product of the Cold War and is best seen as an arms control measure. Its bans are narrow, covering nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction in orbit, and nothing in law defines a space weapon. Its greater value is as a route for general law into space. “It acts as a portal for international law to get into outer space. No matter what you’re doing up there, you’re still bound by international law as it exists on Earth,” he says, including the rules on the use of force. Space resources are, in his view, the issue most discussed for future regulation. The treaty bars national appropriation but is silent on private appropriation, and countries aligned with the Artemis Accords argue that this leaves companies free to extract and sell what they find. Even the boundary between airspace and outer space remains undefined. “We can’t even agree on where space actually begins,” he says.

For someone who assumed as a student that space and law would never meet, it has become the centre of his career.