How would a government prevent astronauts from making political statements?
In the future a major problem arose: a habit spread among the astronauts to make political statements upon landing on a new celestial body, often the statements were unpleasant to their government. This happened not only with astronauts from one country but with several countries.
What legal measures can the government undertake so to prevent this from happening?
Obviously, the governments could make a provision in the contract that stipulates the astronauts will not make such statements. If they do, the suffer some penalty, such as lower pay. However, this may not stop people from using such opportunities, especially after they risked their lives.
And more importantly, such behavior may be encouraged by the foreign powers and/or media. As an example, a Chinese or Iranian astronauts making statements against the regimes in their countries or an American astronaut criticizing a newly planned war etc, which is welcomed by other countries.
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1 answer
Based on the fact that a habit spread among the astronauts to make political statements upon landing on a new celestial body, often the statements not pleasant to their government... (One way this could happen might be if a large fraction of the astronaut corps internationally move from being employed by a government agency, to being employed by private corporations.)
Basically, I don't think you can actually prevent astronauts from making such statements. At least not directly. (And no, legalese do not prevent bad things; it provides for a hopefully reasonably standardized means of reprimanding the individual after they have done something the society they live in deems inappropriate. Also, what you are proposing sounds akin to limiting free speech, which most democratic societies should be wary of doing through general, legal means.)
You say "upon landing on a new celestial body", which implies they are quite some distance away; absent a FTL communications system (which you do not specify, so I assume that you do not want) much too far away for a two-way communications link. In such a communications environment, transmissions are likely to be batched up and relayed when appropriate. Compare the communications system shown in the movies based on Clarke's books, for example.
There is the possibility that you have enough processing power to run speech-to-text and text (or speech directly) analysis on the results, before transmitting back to Earth. In such a case, if you are able to devise clever enough algorithms to detect such inappropriate statements, the system could theoretically refuse to transmit those over the air. But that comes with a host of problems, not the least of which is false matches. You do not want a genuine problem report to be mistaken for an inappropriate political statement and transmission of it rejected, and if the astronauts are somehow informed of the rejection and want to make such a statement badly enough, they could game the system.
However, the fact that transmissions are batched up allows for another possibility. If you are willing to deny the public at large (or at least, those with large enough antennas and sensitive enough receivers) the ability to listen in, you can have someone back home pre-screen everything and only release to the public what is deemed "appropriate", for some definition thereof. If the radio communications link is encrypted on the air, that effectively means that while the astronauts can still say whatever they want and have it transmitted, only a few people at their mission control or communications center will know exactly what was said before it is cleared for public release.
Maybe that would be good enough for the purposes of each respective government?
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