The grant of sovereignty was exclusive, made only to Spain and Portugal, and it required them to subjugate the “savages” in the lands they discovered by taking along Church missionaries. Unfortunately, the legal framework so established was based on national dominance, not multilateral international cooperation. Spain and Portugal formalized the arrangement with a binding international agreement, the Treaty of Tordesillas, whose purpose was to ensure peaceful cooperation between their nations, primarily by establishing a line of demarcation that separated their areas of activity. After the Church granted that authority, Spain was able to create one of the greatest empires in history. Even then, the most powerful nation in Europe, with the largest army and most advanced technology, realized that it could not unilaterally establish property rights or any other kind of sovereignty without the approval of an international authority. This is the first lesson that the current governments of the world can learn from the Age of Exploration & Empire that began five centuries ago. The Outer Space Treaty was an intentional effort to avoid the mistakes of the Age of Exploration & Empire. If the Church would establish a legal framework that granted them sovereignty, then those nations would be bound to recognize it. So, they turned to the only international authority in Europe at that time, the Catholic Church, which held sway over governments from Portugal to Poland, from the Arctic to the Mediterranean. But they had a problem: they wanted to establish sovereign property rights in the lands they had discovered, but they weren’t sure they could do so under their own authority. Along with Portugal, Spain had just used its advanced sailing and navigation technology to reach “new worlds,” areas of the Earth that had not been previously discovered by Europeans. In the spring of 1493, the King and Queen of Spain sent an envoy to the Pope in Rome. “Space is a warfighting domain… It is not enough to have an American presence in space we must have American dominance in space.”
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