The Grapple Hearing
A fluorescent-lit ESA disciplinary tribunal chamber in Darmstadt, Germany, where seventeen translators sit behind a curved oak bench and the air smells aggressively of institutional coffee.
The European Space Agency didn't just tow them home out of kindness — they filed an 'unauthorized grapple event' complaint, and now Double and Bust are facing a €2.3 million fine for unlicensed orbital salvage in protected ESA tracking corridors. Double's court-appointed space lawyer says they can countersue for the cost of the emergency tug under maritime admiralty law — an untested legal theory that has never been applied above the Kármán line — but only if they admit under oath that the Soyuz pilot was operating without a valid license, which would also void the insurance on the 31.4 BTC worth of platinum currently sitting in a bonded warehouse in Hamburg.
“We didn't commit a crime, we committed innovation. If we countersue, we don't just walk — we set legal precedent AND keep the platinum. Two birds, one very expensive stone.”
“His plan is to invent space admiralty law in a German courtroom using a lawyer we met forty minutes ago, while confessing that our pilot's only credential was quoting Tolkien during reentry.”
The court-appointed lawyer — who turned out to have written his doctoral thesis on exactly this hypothetical in 2011 and had been waiting thirteen years for someone insane enough to test it — convinced the tribunal that the 1910 Brussels Salvage Convention applies to any vessel 'in navigable space,' a phrase vague enough to include low Earth orbit. The tribunal dismissed the fine on a 9-8 translator vote, the Soyuz pilot's license issue was ruled outside their jurisdiction on a technicality, and the bonded platinum in Hamburg was released at 4:47 PM — seventeen minutes before a competing lien from the Russian Federal Space Agency would have frozen it.
I didn't get lucky, I got vindicated — there's a difference, and it's exactly €2.3 million.
We are now case law in a legal theory that didn't exist yesterday, which means every space lawyer on Earth will know our names, which means we can never do this again, which means — why are you already looking at orbital debris maps.