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Orbdev Files US Federal Suit Over Asteroid Claim
chongo writes "Orbital
Development has
filed
legal action against the United States by filing a Complaint for Declaratory Judgment in Federal Court.
After NASA's NEAR
probe landed
on the
asteroid
433 Eros,
Gregory W. Nemitz,
who
claims
to have owned the asteroid since the 3rd of March 2000,
sent NASA an $20 invoice for the
first 100 years of parking and storage fees.
NASA told him to "pound
sand".
OrbDev's
Eros
Project seeks to promote their ludicrous ideas about property rights in
space."
If that asteroid were in Texas, the guy wouldn't be able to collect rent unless he'd lived there at least a year.
(Yes, I made that up.)
"If I gave you everything in the world, where would you put all of it?" -God
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Right? Or maybe something like Stranger in a Strange Land, where they sue for ownership of Mars but really want to be denied and set the precedent.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
What is the fine this sort of a thing?
Pointing to a bright light in the sky and saying "mine" doesn't make it so.
Did OrbDev fly up there to mark the boundaries of their claim? Somehow, I think not.
Good luck in enforcing that.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Gregory W. Nemitz
Address: 8301-252 Mission Gorge Road, Santee, Calif. 92071 USA
Tel: 775-450-6144
Fax: 413-460-6480
Email: gnemitz@orbdev.com
Of course, this is all public information, and obviously I'm not encouraging anyone to contact or harrass Mr. Nemitz.
And I charge $100 bucks a week for rent. Me thinks he owes me quite a bit of back rent.
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
In a countersuit to be filed tomorrow, NASA plans to subpoena Orbdev officials under a claim that Orbdev owes NASA $38 million in parking fees for hitching their asteroid to NASA's probe.
An unnamed NASA official claims, "It's [Orbdev's] gravity keeping the thing there. God knows our probe has other places it could be going if it didn't have to drag along this dead weight."
Eros could not be reached for comment.
Kevin Fox
Dear OrbDev,
Department policy forbids payment of parking tickets that have not first been duly affixed to the windshield of the vehicle. Please let us know when you have done so.
Love,
NASA
(yet).
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
Once we can effectively enter outer space, and get energy and materials from there, what use are property rights? I'm serious. We can generate more than enough wealth to keep everyone happy, and I don't buy that nonsense that if people aren't paid they won't work (explain OSS to me then). It would be a very different society than we have now, but certainly a better one.
On the other hand, if we don't somehow artifically separate people into 'rich', 'middle class' and 'poor', the wealthy won't be able to use their superior command of society's resources to steer things in whatever direction they see fit. Frankly I think that's a good thing, but naturally wealthy people disagree. Viewed in this light, I can see why a complex system of property rights for outer space would be advantagous.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
http://history.nasa.gov/1967treaty.html
From Article II:
"Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means."
-----
show me salvation, and i'll hate it.
Now, I'm getting curious - how do one 'establish a claim' on a piece of rock that's orbiting the sun? If it's just a cause of calling dids and grabbing what you can, I think I'ld like to claim ownership of Europa (no, not the continent, the ice covered rock thats up there). Not only can I charge NASA for parking there, but if they do find life, I can sue those organisms for not paying rent as well...
Seriously thought, someone should brief these fellows on the international agreements that relates to 'Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies'. Pay particular attention to the second paragraph in article I, qouted in full;
Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be free for exploration and use by all States without discrimination of any kind, on a basis of equality and in accordance with international law, and there shall be free access to all areas of celestial bodies.
In short, if NASA or anyone else can land somewhere, they are free to do so. End of story.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
...and he threatened to crash his asteroid into my house. Not exactly how I hoped it would go.
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
The right to own property is the foremost right of every person and should be defended above all these other "rights"...
Thank you Ayn Rand.
Now let's get real. Property is not inherent. Moreover, the subject of what can and cannot be property is a limited one; slavery is a form of property that was once legally recognized but is no longer in most parts of the world.
What is inherent is life and liberty. Working from these one can derive certain forms of legitimate property, i.e., a presumed legal right to exclusive possession of things one creates, lest he or she be deprived of the labor (life and liberty interest) invested in its creation.
Now tell me, sir, when and how did you make the asteroid you now claim to own?
Peace and love, y'all
Bzzzzzt.
You'd better leave America (along with Western civilization, and virtually all religion) behind if you think owning property comes before "welfare" - which, in non-reactionary terminology, means efforts by men, through their governments, to help other men - and before "non-discrimination" - which means recognition of equal humanity and everything that flows from it: equal rights, due process, life and liberty, and all those other things Ayn Rand couldn't imagine living without.
Sigh. It takes a fairly well-developed industrial society to produce people with such effective blinders that they mistake their surroundings for the state of nature.
Lemme quote ya yer holy prophetess: I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue.
Say goodbye to the human race, then. Recognition of human inequality - intellectual, yes, but more importantly economic and social - is a bedrock principle of human morality, as is the value of efforts to rectify inequality. Abandonment of virtue is tantamount to abnegation of one's own humanity; and "self-reliance" (a meaningless idea, given the sociopolitical state in which humans inevitably find themselves) at another's expense is no virtue.
From Article 1
From Article 11In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
I've read books about objectivism. I'm afraid I tend not to agree with it. Not that Ayn Rand ever really admited that anyone but her even understood it.
That alone tends to send up my red flags and move the needle of the bullshit meter at least a lot closer to the red zone.
Now please don't get me wrong. I'm anything but an anticapitalist and not against property rights, per se, but my ideas of such are rather more Thoreauian (who, counter to popular opinion, was a practicing capitalist and clearly would have thought a federal welfare system was a daft idea).
I think one must realize that property in the sense that you own the chair you whittled yourself is something rather different than real property. An insect may recognize the former, but not that latter, although they recognize the looser concept of territory or "personal space."
Real "property" rights are simply an extension into the capitalist realm of fuedal/tribalistic territorialism of the kind that Rand despised. I've always found this a bit ironic. Had capitalism not evolved out of such fuedal societies it isn't entirely clear that it ever would have developed a concept of real property at all. It isn't inate to the philosophy, and one might even argue that it's somewhat counter to it.
People didn't buy land. They took it. By force, and defended it by force. Then they could claim the right to "sell" that which they had stolen from the public domain. All real property comes from such a background.
So, you want to claim ownership to an asteroid? Well buddy, you better get your ass out there and build a castle. Then when someone else comes along you tell them to shove off or pay the toll.
If they're sitting there and you can't march the knights out of the castle to defend "your" land, well, guess what, you never owned it in the first place. Where there is no prexisting local legal jurisdiction it's back to might makes right.
Or in the more colorful vernacular, Shit or get off the pot.
If you yourself think we're going to develop property "rights" to space through some local process you're just as daft. We're going to fight and kill for them, just as we always have. And when we "discover" the "people" who already "own" a bit of space we might well expect them to take exception to that and fight back.
Quite frankly I'm already rooting for them, because we've got no fucking right.
KFG
Valentine ends up the sole inheritor of his mother's space-drive engine and the surface of the martian world (due to squatters rights IIRC - IANAL).
A large part of the book is about the governments attempts to take possession of these assets... hence the original poster was correct in his analysis.
Not to say that "The man who sold the moon" is not also applicable in this context, only that it does not preclude SIASL.
Can you "grock" it??
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Typically iron found in Space is contaminated with platinium, normally by about .005 or one-half of one percent. Assuming that 433 Eros is only 5% iron, there are 22.5 billion tons of platinium on the asteroid. The current price for platinium is about $750 per troy ounce. There are 29,167 troy ounces per short ton for a total 656,250,000,000,000 troy ounces. At today's price, that is $492,187,500,000,000,000 (~1/2 quintillion dollars).
Thanks for calculating it for us... now pay up. :)
The guy claims that treaty does not apply, because he is not trying to annex the asteroid as part of a nation. He claims it as personal property, like a house or a wristwatch.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
I live in the netherlands, where we do have a captialistic/socialistic system, and it seems to be the best solution available at the moment.
Doesn't mean it's a good system, it's the least bad.
I'd prefer a system without the concept of money with people working because of the intellectual challenges, not because of the money, but I don't see a workable implementation of such a system in the near future, the problem is there will always be people too lazy to work if they won't get paid.
What needs to be done is that technology has to advance to such a stadium that working is optional, everything should be automated except for the fun stuff (like inventing new things).
I feel compelled to respond on this as I feel it could be the most important issue of the 21st century - especially if the X Prize boys get their mojo on.
Property rights essentially appeared at the same time as the Agricultural Revolution about twelve to fifteen thousand years ago. For the first time, you really couldn't move down the valley a bit if someone you didn't like lived near you. You had a field, and that was the only way your (suddenly) large family could live through the winter. If you let him take or use what you'd literally broken yourself to create - you would die. Harsh stuff, and the reason the core of every successful legal system in the world enshrines property rights over all others. Even the U.S. constitution has property rights so mixed in, so tightly bound, that it mentions them again and again - they were as natural and obvious to the founding fathers as breathing.
So we move on to an age where agriculture is no longer quite as central to our lives. Suddenly we are coming up against the limits of property rights. "Intellectual Property" seems to be an obvious idea to an industrial economy - a simple extension of the concept that's allowed the human population to take over the world. As the discussions on /. have shown, this is no longer quite so obvious, so compelling.
Already you can see where I'm leading. If we take the idea of ownership as we normally see it and then apply it to the stars we come into some severe problems.
No consortium of insurance companies in the world, not even the whole of the Lloyds of London market could insure against a mis-directed asteroid impacting with the Pacific. So how could any mining corporation ever hope to start liberating resources from our solar system? Remember that the Lloyds market is the clearing-house for all insurance and re-insurance in the world, and even they struggled to swallow the risk from the Space Shuttle. Even then it took the intervention of the U.S. Government as insurer-of-last-resort to placate the market-makers.
So don't take responsibility: Let anyone get on with doing what they want? No claim means no liability? Right?
What happens when two mining companies lay claim to the same stretch of asteroids? If they are in the same orbit, and therefore easier to get at, both companies are going to want to protect their investment. Do we want to return to the days when warring villages were continuously slaughtering each other? When simply travelling outside the palisade meant risking death?
Here's another example. What if settlers arrive, and then someone else causes problems - e.g. their solar arrays are rendered useless by the cloud of particulates raised by a "nearby" extraction operation. They could go to court for help. It is a clear tort. After all, they can file electronically and it's only a twenty-four hour round trip to the central courthouse computers. There's just a small problem: They are dying for lack of air right now.
Here's the solution: There isn't one. Not with our current expectations and society.
As with all problems where human beings are involved, this is going to have to evolve. The societal structures that have worked so well for us down here are going to have to change. That isn't to say that there won't be governments, charities and corporations.
More likely, we'll have to have a long and drawn out struggle between the varying imperatives: "It's mine!" "You can't do that to me!" "If you try to stop me I'll defend my rights!" "You must leave that alone!"
Hopefully not too many will die. Some will.
Who knows what will emerge? The governing-corporation? The feudal charity? Maybe the gift economy shown so beautifully in the Open Source Movement will be the governing paradigm? All I know is that our system isn't going to stay the same - because it cannot work when celestial mechanics becomes a part of your insurance quote.
Pimping my Karma Whore since 1847.
To Gregory W. Nemitz
Re: Amnesty for unauthorized use of service
I, Helios Apollo, owner of a main sequence, spectral class G2 star of radius 696,000 km, situated approximately 1.5e8 kilometers from the planet Earth and known in the English language as "the Sun", have been advised that you may have been using the service known as "Sunshine", a stream of photons emitted by the above-mentioned star, for the purposes of visual navigation. Since, according to my records, you are not a licensed user of the service, I am asking that you account for your usage of the service beginning from 0h00 UTC January 1, 2000 according to either of the following billing plans and remit any amounts that may be payable.
The Photon Count Plan. Count all photons emitted from the surface of the Sun of wavelength greater than 395 nanometers and less than 695 nanometers that directly impinge upon your person and all of your belongings including real estate, then multiply by the factor 4.0 times ten to the minus twenty-five to yield the amount in cents of U.S. currency.
The Earth Residency Plan. Only 36 cents per day of use. Use shall be deemed to occur in a 24 hour period if at least one photon would have been used under the Photon Count Plan.
To be exempted from accounting for use of the service, please submit a copy of Certificate of Vampire Status.
...on January 27, 1967, when they nationalized 99.9* percent of everything. The UN Outer Space Treaty purports to make the entirety of outer space off limits to property, held in trust for "mankind". Supposedly, Earth is the single oasis of individual ownership in the vast communist deeps. Yes, I said communist, and I meant it! What else do you call banning all private ownership - of nearly everthing in existence? Besides pure bloody minded hubris.
This treaty is the dragon that the Eros Project is trying to slay. They are attempting to creeate case law backing the natural right to claim, take, and use unowned frontier land - even in space.
If you support private space ventures such as X-Prize, you should also support OrbDev.
Although, he may have a claim against Orbdev for selling him something they did not own {ever been to Paris and had someone try to sell you the Eiffel tower? Or been to London and had someone try to sell you Tower Bridge? Or } Well, you get the idea. And it's Orbdev that are going to be needing the lawyers, because fraud is criminal, not civil.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Pointing doesn't give you property, but nor do physical markers, government laws, planetary authorizations, galactic leases or anything else.
Your property is what you can hold on to, and anything else is just hot air and handwaving.
Hot air and handwaving aren't necessarily worthless, because after all they reduce the pain and suffering in what we loosely call civilization, but to believe that rights have any fundamental substance is simply a delusion. The fact that those delusions are often imposed by force just proves the point.
It all boils down to what you can defend, and nothing more.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Ultimately ownership comes down to who has the bigger army.
If the head of the Mafia declared that he owned all of Chicago, and requested that everyone leave or be terrorized, the police would be dispatched. If the Mafia were sufficiently armed to hold off the police, then the military would be dispatched. In the USA it is a foregone conclusion that the military would win. Thus it is not disputed that US laws govern the territory called the USA. In the USA, citizens are allowed to own private property - in a democracy the citizens band together to fund said army for the common good (in theory).
The Poles probably had perfectly good property laws in the late 1930s - but it didn't due much to deter German trespassing. They didn't send in lawyers, they sent in tanks. Lawyers are only used by people who can't afford enough tanks to do the job (thankfully society has evolved to a point where this is usually the case).
Right now, if somebody could live independantly in space and laid claim to the Eros asteroid, nobody could do anything about it. Sure, somebody could file a claim in the UN, but nothing would stop you from just picking up the NASA probe and using it as scrap metal. No nation on Earth has a significant capability for prosecuting wars in space - yet.
I'm not saying this is how it should be - but this is how it always has been. The guy with the army makes the rules. Courts only have power because of the police. The UN only has power as long as its component nations are willing to supply troops. If you have a weak army, you had better make friends with somebody who has a strong army, and be prepared to pay for that friendship. If not, you won't be sovereign for long...
Property rights and freedom go hand in hand. If you are "against" pritate ownership of property, you are against freedom. Do you not realize that in order to "eliminate" private property, you must do so by force? Or would you actually try to argue that force -- the basic premise of all theft, fraud, rape, and murder -- is a "lesser evil" than private ownership of property?
Moreover, when government owns all property, it is really those who control government who own the property. These are individuals just like you and me, acting in self-interest like you and me. The only difference is that they hold the "right" to invoke force as a means to an end, and we don't.
"Do you have a flag? If you don't have a flag it's not yours."
This reminds me of that Eddie Izzard routine where the Europeans are seizing land from the Indians. After telling them repeatedly that they're not a nation and it's not their land unless they have a flag, the Indians go off and make themselves a flag. When they come back the English say... "Good - do you have a gun?" The Indians are... "Ooooh - you need a GUN and a flag." Sorry but this chap can wave around whatever bits of paper (and make as many flags) as he likes, but unless he has a 'gun' with which to threaten the government, it isn't going to work.
Of course, Terran property rights ultimately come down to who has the most guns too, but people forget that (unless they're Iraqi.)
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
There were communes in the 70s that used a bid system for jobs instead of money. The more bids, the less points. Everyone had to work to a certain number of points. All jobs were open to bidding. Cleaning paid high points, exercising horses paid really low. It actually worked pretty well when people didn't rig the bids (which of course people did).
And those lot of people are total idiots. You either have personal property rights, or you have the government exercising control of all the property.
The moment a government has the power to control the land you need for shelter, food and industry, that's the day that government can control every fundamental aspect of your life. They can tell you where to live, where to farm, where to work.
99.9% of the fools who argue against property rights are basically envious of some rich guy on the hill and either want him living in a trailer park out of spite, or they have some idiotic idea that with the government owning all the land, they'd be living in that house on the hill for free.
Sometimes I wish I could just send them all to a public housing project for six months.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
On the other hand, the Sun's owner will then sue Japan for unlicensed use of its image on their national flag...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Ask the native americans who owns the land. Once upon a time they would have laughed at the concept of owning the land. If you weren't there and using it then how could you deny it to anyone else and furthermore, what right did you have to spoil and damage it for your children. Now they understand too well what ownership means. It means that you will punish those who use something that you have told them not to.
This is often forgotten because we live in a world where we observe these 'laws' and they become our reality. The shifting of these concepts into a new frontier (asteroids) temporarily shows us the arbitrariness of it all. This will last until a property law adapts to cover space and we get used to it again, or until it collapses and we find a different way to orgainize ourselves out there.
The question of whether land claims in space are legal meaningless as far as moral rights go. Claim whatever you want. The correct question is who has the biggest 'guns' to control this space. You can bet new laws will be introduced to allow the government to parcel it out to those it favours, but these laws are in reality no more than threats from a government maintaining its power in a new frontier. That is why this man has no hope in hell of claiming an asteroid. The same goes for people who 'own' part of the moon. They have no 'guns' and thus no power to defend themselves. The government will say 'mine' and the laws are just its way of phrasing that.
Thing is, the US government doesn't have enough guns in the long run, no more than George III did some years ago with another colony. My advice is to get out there and start mining. Possession is nine-tenths of the law. The other tenth is possession.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Locke studied this kind of issue:
when can the commons be appropriated by a private individual?
(1) Individuals can appropriate common goods for their private use.
Reason: because of necessity. If a person is to survive, then by necessity he must take some of the commons for his own use (food, shelter etc).
(2) One justly appropriates common goods by virtue of laboring on them.
Reason: a person owns his own body and his own labor. When he applies this to a previously unowned thing (e.g. works a plot of land to create a harvest), his personal property interests are mixed with that thing and he can claim it as his own.
(3) There are limitations ot the right to acquire unkowned property: (a) you cannot acquire property that you have not worked with your labor, (b) you can only acquire so much as you can use without spoilage and (c) you must leave "as much and as good" as you take (e.g. the acquisition should not impoversh the commons). An example of C is that if there are many oases on a desert route, you can take one and improve it for your private use. However if there is only one, this must remain in the commons.
Locke goes on to point out that these limitations are somewhat ameliorated by the introduction of money. Because you can purchase the labor of others, thta labor becomes your labor, and you can use it to claim more from the commons than you can personally mix your labor with. Likewise, he asserts since you can covert resources into cash and cash is in essence unspoilable, you can acquire more of a resource than you can make personal use of. Finally, because people can purchase the use of things from you, it becomes possible to acquire the entire stock of a resource without making it impossible for other people to survive.
Locke then goes on to argue that people, by accepting the use of money, have accepted the consequences which include vastly unequal wealth and power. Once he gets to this point, he becomes more controversial. Locke was no socialist: he was an advocate of the pursuit of unlimited wealth and personal power, taken from the commons if necessary, even to the point of believing some human beings could own others. Yet even he would not say you could claim something without lifting a finger to do something with it.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
One could argue that the American Indians had no concept of land ownership, and that they didn't realize what it meant to buy and sell land.
Only if you know nothing about American Indians. Native Americans as a group actually exhibited highly sophisticated concepts of land ownership, including negotiating rights connected to the land (hunting, farming, etc.). Do you think it's a coincidence that so many towns in New England are "Springfield", or some other "...field"? The european settlers didn't come ashore to virgin wilderness. They came ashore and found thriving agricultural communities, towns and even cities.
Happily for those settlers, the germs they carried resulted in mortality rates of 95% or more in the native communities, which meant free farms, often already planted. Unhappily for us, that mortality rate and the european position on natives at the time means that we don't get to hear about the history of those groups before that time.
As for the Manhattan purchase, those who "bought" Manhattan actually bought hunting rights for one season from a group not local to Manhattan. When the actual residents objected to being moved out, and requested a hearing, most were killed. The Louisana purchase is similarly troubling, since the US apparently bought the territory of more than a hundred native nations from the French without consulting with any of the Indian nations involved. The fact that many of those nations had gone to all the trouble of sending ambassadors to europe was of little inconvenience to the US or the French.
This is not to present Indians as universally noble, many groups allied with european settlers to gain an advantage over competing groups, and were often quite brutal when they had the upper hand. Still other groups picked up the european habit of scalping with a vengance (used by europeans to establish headcounts for any of several bounties on indian lives).
But don't pretend that they didn't have sophisticated concepts of land ownership. They most definitely did. What they didn't have was resistance to european germs and the firearms and organization to balance the military might of the european settlers. During the US expansion to the west coast, the US signed literally hundreds of treaties with native american nations. And broke every single treaty. Every one. Since then, the US has done just a little better. After all, they still have the casinos...
Regards,
Ross