What Nepal’s first rocket teaches us

Nepal has no legislative framework for launch licensing, payload liability, or orbital slot registration.

Some 100 kilometres above Kathmandu, a boundary drawn by Hungarian-American physicist Theodore von Karman separates national airspace from outer space. For most of Nepal’s modern history, that line has also marked the outer limit of our strategic imagination. We are a country of mountains and rivers. The assumption that follows is that we are therefore not a country of aerospace ambition.