Crime beyond Earth: VU-UT researchers offer new Masterclass Space Crime & Policing

As human activity beyond Earth increases, new questions are emerging around crime, safety, policing and justice in space. Who is responsible when a satellite is sabotaged? How should we respond to violence or harassment in confined space habitats? And how can existing legal and governance frameworks deal with crime beyond Earth?

These questions are at the heart of the new Masterclass Space Crime & Policing, developed by Yarin Eski (VU Amsterdam) and Iris van Sintemaartensdijk (University of Twente) as part of the Alliance VU-UT. The two-week hybrid masterclass will take place in autumn 2026 and brings together students and professionals from different fields, including criminology, law, psychology, aerospace engineering and XR technology.

The masterclass brings together different strands of Iris and Yarin’s research and explores how crime, harm, policing and justice could manifest beyond Earth. From satellite sabotage and environmental harm in space to violence and harassment in confined space habitats, and from questions around criminal law and jurisdiction to restorative justice and policing: it is all part of the programme.

If we want to go to space for, indeed, all humankind, to find new hope and prosper, our nature to commit crime must be taken into account.

Through extended reality (XR) simulations, exercises and governance design workshops, participants work with realistic and future-oriented scenarios and explore possible institutional and policy responses.

The masterclass is one of the outcomes of the collaboration between VU Amsterdam and the University of Twente in the field of space criminology. What began with a modest but successful seed-funding initiative has evolved into a broad interdisciplinary programme. Iris and Yarin work with VR-based experiments and analyses of astronaut analogue missions, have published various scientific articles and book chapters, and are developing an edited volume and a book on empirical space criminology.

Their work can also be found at www.SpaceCriminology.net, an academic and practitioner platform dedicated to the study of crime, security and policing in space.

Earlier this year, Iris and Yarin presented their ongoing research at the Stockholm Criminology Symposium 2026, with a paper titled Cosmic Castaway: A mixed-methodological exploratory study on the inescapable realities of harassment and human conflict in outer space.