The 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing is behind us, but talk of further moon exploration goes on. In July, India launched an unmanned mission to explore the moon's south pole, which would make it the fourth nation to land a lunar spacecraft in what has become an increasingly competitive space race.

As sovereign nations, private companies and international organizations all race back to the moon, the potential for space accidents will only grow. This month, for example, news broke that when a privately funded Israeli lunar probe crashed in April, it dumped human DNA samples and thousands of tiny living creatures called tardigrades on the surface of the moon. These dehydrated micro-animals can survive in temperatures much colder than those on the moon. Could this crash one day have consequences for the permanent moon base projects currently on the drawing board?

Other future scenarios are not hard to imagine: what if a group of astronauts carrying a deadly disease arrive at an occupied base, infecting and killing the current inhabitants, all because their nation's space agency failed to adequately test for the presence of the disease?

If our terrestrial experience is any guide, sorting out the legal issues embedded in crises such as these will be a mess.

First among these is liability. Liability has been universally defined throughout history as a legally enforceable obligation, but recent events have shown that this definition can be warped and bent like light at the edge of the cosmos, particularly where there is no jurisdiction to referee disputes, or where the party responsible is a sovereign or international organization.

Events in Haiti over the past decade provide a sobering example. When the UN landed in Haiti in the wake of the devastating 2010 earthquake, its peacekeepers introduced a Nepalese strain of cholera into that nation's streams and rivers, killing more than 10,000 people and sickening a million more. It would be hard to find a tortious act so egregious and devastating as this—nor an act that so cried out for legal redress. The UN admitted responsibility for the disaster and Secretary General Ban Ki-moon apologized to the people of Haiti on behalf of the UN in December 2016. Yet no victim has ever been compensated for the damage.

Unfortunately, in the international community's treatment of claims in Haiti, you can find a template for the manner in which these disputes will be handled in other areas where the ability to hold a party to the meaning of their words in an enforceable forum is at issue—including on the moon and beyond.

In the wake of the Haiti disaster, for example, the claims of victims presented to the UN were turned away as "not receivable," despite the overwhelming conviction of international legal scholars that this was pretext, unsupportable under any reading of the law. Lawsuits were brought in the United States, but the UN responded by claiming immunity, despite its acceptance of responsibility.

More than this, these claims of immunity came despite the fact that the UN had previously agreed to assume liability for damages caused by peacekeepers in exactly these sorts of situations. These express agreements to be liable came in reports of the Secretary General in the 1990s that were then adopted by the General Assembly and therefore binding on the UN as law.

Crystal clear, you would think, but nearly a decade later, there has been no resolution, no compensation paid to the victims. The United Nations (through the U.S. government, which serves, for all practical purposes, as the UN's lawyer in these cases) has argued in U.S. courts that the UN's assumption of liability was limited to their internal Standing Claims Commissions or other internal "nonjudicial" forums. But there is a problem with this: The Standing Claims Commissions don't exist and never have. Not once has a Standing Claims Commission ever been created in the history of the United Nations. So if the definition of the term "liability" is an enforceable, binding obligation in law and justice, this makes no sense: You can't be bound in a forum that doesn't exist. Again, that seems like a logical and obvious argument, yet—with no direct enforcement regime in place—the UN simply ignored the claims of the Haitian victims. There is little doubt that they did so not on the basis of legal principle, but simply because the financial cost is too high.

The last U.S. lawsuit looking to hold the UN accountable for the damages it inflicted on Haiti is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court (I serve as lead counsel). If the Supreme Court agrees to take the case, perhaps it will explain exactly how an international body can assume a liability, yet claim that it is enforceable nowhere. Thus, a decision to hear the case might provide much-needed clarity to issues remarkably similar to those that will be faced as public and private parties rush back to the moon for exploration and profit.

The parallels cannot be ignored. The principles of who is liable for damages caused in outer space are outlined in a series of international treaties developed since the 1960s under the auspices of … you guessed it, the United Nations. By all accounts, these treaties are amorphous in language, contradictory in scope, and virtually unenforceable in practice. As in Haiti, where the realpolitik of the price tag caused the UN to turn its back on its prior agreements to assume liability, so too in space will extrajudicial factors override established legal principles. Political considerations, public opinion and money will trump the rule of law—and even the very meaning of common legal terms like liability. And in this way, the law of outer space will resemble more Wild West than Final Frontier, at least until these elemental issues are resolved.

James F. Haggerty, president and CEO of PRCG | Haggerty LLC, is an attorney and lead counsel in the case, Laventure v. United Nations, currently before the U.S. Supreme Court, which seeks to hold the United Nations liable for introducing a deadly cholera plague in Haiti.