In 1976, eight countries - Brazil, Colombia, Congo, Ecuador, Indonesia, Kenya, Uganda and Zaire - unilaterally declared that their territory extended infinitely up into outer space; this effectively claimed their sovereignty over what is known as “geostationary orbit” - an orbit enveloping the Earth’s equator, which is important for navigation satellites. This decision, referred to as the Bogotá Declaration, was never approved by any other country, yet the declaration presents a powerful case that brings to the surface the question of who outer space belongs to, and how politics and culture happen not just here on Earth, but also up above the clouds. In particular, it responds to a paradox between the reality of outer space geopolitics and lofty promises of the 1967 United Nation’s Outer Space Treaty, which stated that “exploration and use of outer space […] shall be the province of all mankind.” Whereas Article II of the treaty says that “[o]uter space […] is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means,” the practical reality of power relations in space in the early 1970s was that the realm was essentially occupied by the USA and USSR; this left other countries without much say in cosmic affairs, including satellite orbits. For this reason, the eight equatorial countries defined in the declaration the geostationary orbit as a limited natural resource that belongs to them. Based on this definition, the countries further claimed that the geostationary orbit is unfairly managed (or in fact occupied) by external actors. As the Bogotá Declaration reads, “under the name of a so-called non-national appropriation, what was actually developed was technological partition of the orbit, which is simply a national appropriation, and this must be denounced by the equatorial countries.”

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