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The Duke Center on Risk seeks a Master's in Applied Ethics & Policy graduate student assistant in 2025-26 to help research, write, and organize activities on space risks and regulatory policies. The Duke Center on Risk is a university-wide, multidisciplinary research and policy center, based in the Duke Science & Society Initiative. It conducts research, events, education, and policy outreach on a wide array of risks to health, safety, environment, and security, from local to national to global/planetary scales. The Duke Center on Risk is currently engaged in research on space risks and regulatory policies, such as regarding: space debris in Earth orbit; property rights to space resources; liability for harms due to space activities; military conflicts in space; space-based climate engineering; asteroid collisions; space weather; interplanetary microbial contamination; settlements on and potential terraforming of other planets; and related topics. This research addresses scientific, engineering, social, economic, and public policy aspects of multiple risks, and it addresses policymaking institutions at both the national level (e.g. US law and multiple federal agencies such as NASA, State Department, DOT/FAA, DOC, DOD, CDC, OSTP, and others), and relations among spacefaring national governments (e.g. the US, EU, Japan, China, Russia, India, UAE, and others) and with non-governmental actors and the commercial space industry (e.g. SpaceX, Blue Origin, Intuitive Machines, and more). At the Duke Center on Risk, among other activities, we teach courses such as Space Law / Laws of Mars (Duke Law course 557) in Fall 2025, and we are participating in the new Duke Space Initiative being launched in fall 2025 (launch event on September 8, 4:00-6:30 pm in Penn Pavilion). |