> Who is the appropriate State Party if, e.g. SpaceX decides to start launching off of Of Course I Still Love You out in the ocean, in international waters?

A tangible way to explore this is to ask "What if a craft, launched by SpaceX from international waters, fell on country X?"

If X is Canada, the resolution process seems straightforward. American and Canadian courts and law enforcement are sufficiently cross-linked to allow the latter to pursue SpaceX's assets and personnel.

But what if X is Iran, or Venezuela or North Korea? We would have to consider diplomatic and geopolitical factors. That looks much more like the anarchic environment of international relations rather than a sovereign-corporate dispute.

SpaceX is still an American company and they'd be launching from an American registered ship. I think an argument could certainly be made that the US would remain the appropriate state party to regulate such a launch but finding ways to legislate that within its jurisdiction could be amusing.

Seems like the Sea Launch project, which had multinational partners and started rockets from a floating platform outside of all 200 mile zones, is the closest thing you can look at for comparison (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Launch). Here it seems everybody just sort-of agreed that the rules are not entirely clear and that the US as the closest nation invested in the project should do the oversight. I found this old article that mentions some of it, but isn't terribly detailed when it comes to regulations either: https://web.archive.org/web/20120730201527/http://isanet.cci...

ITAR makes that illegal.

An interesting notion - it would be an interesting case to see if exporting rocket components to "not a country" would violate ITAR. That hasn't stopped Iran from getting launching satellites into orbit though, and misses that e.g. ULA buys their rocket engines from Russia where ITAR obviously isn't a problem.

It seems like it would be very difficult to export to "not a country." Every dry rock in the world is claimed by some nation, and ships and platforms on the open ocean are flagged and/or operated by citizens of some existing nation. Many U.S. laws apply to U.S. citizens no matter where they are in the world.

If by interesting you mean certain Federal prison time, sure I guess that would be interesting.