What if the first legal framework for outer space was written five centuries before the Space Age, and the structure of the gesture has never really changed?

In 1493, the papal bull Inter caetera drew a line across the known world, dividing it between Castile and Portugal. The Holy See held no territorial sovereignty over the lands it partitioned. The excluded powers — France, England, the Netherlands, and every indigenous civilization on the American continent — had no seat at the table. Enforcement depended entirely on voluntary compliance: when Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe in 1577–1580, the line at Tordesillas was already dead on impact. Yet the normative precedent held. The principle that newly accessed territories require some regulatory framework — however imperfect, however exclusionary — became an institutional expectation that survived the instrument's practical failure.

Chapter 11 of CLA traces that precedent through five centuries and argues that the Artemis Accords, signed by sixty-one countries as of January 2026, reproduce its four defining features with structural precision: authority asserted without territorial control, constitutive exclusion of relevant actors (China, Russia, and the ILRS coalition remain absent), no binding enforcement mechanism, and the creation of normative precedent through diplomatic accumulation rather than legal compulsion.

Three lines of analysis run through the chapter:

1. Recurring phases of frontier expansion — exploration, extraction, colonization — across European and non-European models alike, including Ming tributary networks and Arab Indian Ocean circuits that the Western legal genealogy of space law tends to overlook.
2. Colonial errors as design features, not implementation failures — extractivism without accountability, systematic exclusion of voice, institutional monoculture through transplantation — and the CLA's response to each: EVIDEN as algorithmically auditable redistribution, prospective representation for future communities, and the Validity by Critical Efficiency standard as a criterion that demands demonstrated performance rather than inherited legitimacy.
3. The variable that breaks the analogy — for the first time in the history of frontier governance, the regulated agents include autonomous systems whose objective functions may be non-transparent and whose decisions occur at latencies and speeds that foreclose real-time human correction. Algorithmic commons — the CLA's proposed extension of res communis to the epistemic infrastructure that enables autonomous decision-making — represent a genuinely new institutional category, not a rebranding of the Common Heritage of Mankind.

History maps the errors. The CLA's architecture is designed to avoid repeating them when the governed may not be human.

🔹 CLA — [official English expansion of acronym — pending registration]
Jesús Bernal Allende | Escuela del Deber-Optimizar y la Soberanía de la Evidencia
[Amazon EN link — pending] 🌐 https://deber-optimizar.mx/en/ 🔗 LinkedIn