Crime on Mars: the first murder will have no police
A crime on Mars would have a judge on paper, but no police. Antarctica and the Space Station have already rehearsed the problem. A police officer explains why.
LA CIENCIA DEL BUCLE
Jose M. Aldasoro
10/9/20265 min read
Science fiction has spent a century filling Mars with colonists, miners, rebels and corporations. Almost never with a duty magistrate. And yet, the day fifty people are living there, the question stops being a literary one: if one of them turns up dead, who cordons off the scene, who takes statements and who makes the arrest?
Who is in charge when the crime happens off Earth?
On paper, the answer has existed since 1967. Article VIII of the Outer Space Treaty says each State keeps jurisdiction over the objects it launches and over the personnel on board. For these purposes the spacecraft is a piece of the country that registered it.
The International Space Station refined that in 1998. Article 22 of its intergovernmental agreement says each partner may exercise criminal jurisdiction over its own nationals: an astronaut is tried by their own country, not by whoever owns the module they were in. Canada has gone a step further: in 2022 it extended its Criminal Code to the future station in lunar orbit and to the surface of the Moon.
So there is a judge. What there is not is anyone who can get there.
Some case files take eight years to close, and others are made to disappear. If you want to read the one ZEUS tried to erase, the case file I share with my subscribers is here.
The “first crime in space” was a false report
In July 2019, Summer Worden reported that her estranged wife, NASA astronaut Anne McClain, had accessed her bank account without permission from the Space Station, where McClain spent December 2018 to June 2019. The press called it the first crime committed in space.
It was not. NASA’s inspector general found that Worden had given McClain her login details years earlier and that both had used the account routinely. In November 2025, Worden pleaded guilty to lying to the authorities; in February 2026 she was sentenced to three months in prison and ordered to pay 210,000 dollars in restitution.
The case left a useful lesson: the system worked because everything that could be investigated was on Earth. Bank records, statements, deadlines. Nothing in orbit had to be preserved.
Antarctica has already rehearsed the problem, and it went badly enough
To see what happens when the scene really is far away, look at the one place on the planet that resembles a colony: an Antarctic base in winter. The same rule applies there as on the Space Station, nationality, and has done since the 1959 treaty.
On 12 May 2000, the Australian astrophysicist Rodney Marks, aged 32, died at the American base at the South Pole. It was thought to be a natural death. Winter made any flight impossible, so the body spent almost six months in a freezer before it could leave for Christchurch, New Zealand. The post-mortem found methanol poisoning. The investigation fell to the New Zealand police, and the detective in charge said the American bodies running the base did not even give him the full list of who had been there. There were 49 other people. The coroner’s report was published in 2008: nobody ever established how the methanol got into his body.
In October 2018, at the Russian base of Bellingshausen, an engineer stabbed a colleague in the chest. He handed himself in to the station chief. It took eleven days to get him out. Months later, a court in Saint Petersburg dropped the case because the victim had forgiven him.
What fails is not the law: it is the first hour
This is where a police officer reads these cases differently. A treaty allocates the power to try someone. It does not preserve a scene, it does not separate witnesses before they talk to each other, it does not collect a sample in time. That is done by someone who is there in the first hour and who is not part of the group. At the South Pole there was nobody like that. For six months, the scene, the body and the forty-nine possible witnesses lived under the same roof.
Now put yourself on Mars. A signal takes between three and twenty-two minutes to reach Earth, depending on where the planets are, so there is no such thing as a call: there is a message and a wait. The window for travelling opens roughly every twenty-six months. Whoever runs the base will be authority, neighbour, witness and, perhaps, suspect all at once. Cinema solves this with a sheriff. Reality, so far, has solved it with a freezer.
I wrote something similar about data centres in space: jurisdiction over an object in orbit is written down, and still nobody can go and look. And it is the same discomfort as in Starship 14 and the perimeter cinema always leaves out: we keep putting more things where there is nobody to call.
A place where nobody has jurisdiction
In Zero Frequency there is a planetary network that works perfectly precisely because nobody has jurisdiction over it. When I wrote it I was thinking of Earth. Mars will be the same with less oxygen: a place where the rule exists and whoever has to enforce it is months away.
The first colony will not need a constitution, which is what science fiction likes to imagine. It will need something far less epic: one person who does not answer to the head of the base and who knows what must not be touched. Who is going to pay the fare for someone whose job is to hope they never have any work?
Next read
Data centres in space: the server outside the law
The police officer who writes the thrillers of the future.
© 2026 Jose M. Aldasoro