Cross-waiver of liability

The US Commercial Space Launch Act, at 51 U.S.C. § 50914, requires it for every FAA-licensed launch. Each participating party (the state or agency authorizing the launch, the launch provider, the satellite operator and its customers) waives any claim against the others for damage it or its property suffers in connection with the launch, regardless of fault. Each party therefore bears its own risk and that of its subcontractors. It covers that risk with first-party insurance instead of counting on recourse against a liable third party. Several national regulatory frameworks make the clause a condition for granting a launch license. Without it, every space incident would turn into prolonged litigation over how to split fault among multiple interdependent technical parties. Sorting that out would be especially hard in a business where the cause of a failure can stay disputed for months. For insurers, the analysis moves away from cross liability toward a stack of first-party damage covers, one per party. That simplifies the insurance structure of a launch campaign. The flip side is that each participant has to assess and insure its own risk properly: if it is under-insured, there is no recourse to fall back on.