Hotel Tycoon Seeks Property Rights On the Moon

SonicSpike writes "The founder of Bigelow Aerospace, Robert Bigelow, made a fortune in the hotel and real estate businesses, and he's pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into an enterprise that will create inflatable habitats designed for life beyond Earth. He entered into an agreement with NASA to provide a report on how ventures like his could help NASA get back to the moon, and even Mars, faster and cheaper. Bigelow is applying to the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation to amend a 1967 international agreement on the moon so that a system of private property rights can be established there. 'When there isn't law and order,' he said, 'there's chaos.' Bigelow said he believes the right to own what one discovers on the moon is the incentive needed for private enterprise to commit massive amounts of capital and risk lives. 'It provides a foundational security to investors,' he said. Bigelow does not feel that any one nation should own the moon. 'No one anything should own the moon,' he said. 'But, yes, multiple entities, groups, individuals, yes, they should have the opportunity to own the moon.'"

Comments

If you can defend it .. it's yours

[ModernGeek]

If you can't defend something, you can't own something.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can't defend something, you can't own something.

I already own the moon with the rest of the world under the current treaty which is using the "rule of law", (not the "chaos" the article claims).
Under your theory, we only need shoot him down on his way up or I loose my right to own the moon?

fine.
I am tired of reasoning with small minds too. Lets just get on with the first lunar war.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[Guillermito]

Well, he obviously can't. That's why he is asking the US government to do it for him.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[LifesABeach]

I am reminded of a book, "The Man Who Sold the Moon." Compared to todays culture, it is a very telling story. Also, trained seals is a very telling concept.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[lgw]

If you can defend it .. it's yours

Not if your main properties are back here on Earth. Really, until some distant future of entirely off-Earth sustainability, you need to make nice with at least some Earth government.

Once you can push CHON asteroids around, that's a different story, since then you have both sustainability and military supremacy over Earth.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[Hartree]

"you need to make nice with at least some Earth government."

I think that counts as not being able to defend it, and ceding the rights for the promise of security.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[VernonNemitz]

The normal variation on that theme has to do with Governments (usually local) doing the defending for you, per the police forces. Meanwhile, Government also arbitrates between claims -- if two dudes claim the same piece of landscape for development purposes, who gets it? So, even if the Moon Treaty needs to continue keeping any one Nation from claiming ownership of the Moon or other bodies, it needs to have added to it some sort of system for arbitrating between ownership-claims made by others. And, possibly, defending its decisions. Else there will indeed be all the chaos that can result from "might makes right".

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[SJHillman]

I own the sun. Go ahead, just try landing there, my defenses will obliterate you!

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[pigiron]

The moon is a harsh mistress.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[lgw]

My point is: it's not about physical defense of your property on the moon, you can do that and still have it effectively taken from you because you need the Earth. That's different from the colonies that led to America, or the frontier thereafter.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[thomst]

pigiron quipped:

The moon is a harsh mistress.

And Bob Bigelow is a slumlord.

I've lived in one of his bigger "residence hotels". It was a hellhole. Cop cars day and night, shootings and stabbings, bloodstains on the carpet.

I understand Bob Hsieh, co-founder of Zappos, has bought up a big chunk of Fremont Street, and is steadily redeveloping it into a pretty decent area - but, five years ago, downtown Vegas was a complete slum. And Bigelow helped create that slum.

BTW - I think he's probably right about private property rights being the key to giving private capital the incentive needed to invest in colonizing and economically exploiting Luna. That, however, does not change who he is.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[Anonymous Coward]

great book thx for reminding me.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[Princeofcups]

If you can't defend something, you can't own something.

Because we are still a barbaric world where basic human courtesy doesn't apply. What a sad, sick statement.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[CreatureComfort]

That doesn't make it any less true.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[aztracker1]

And that is why I support the right to bear arms. As long as there's a discussion about the right to be had... that right should remain because we still need it.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[jythie]

Which I am guessing it can not since for the US government to recognize his property on the moon, the US would first have to claim the moon as its territory, which other nations would probably not be happy about. So the US would have to take a significant diplomatic risk which, if the profit for a local company is great enough it likely would, but I do not see a business plan here that would even begin to justify it.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[Hartree]

I mostly agree with you, but the example of the colonies in the Americas isn't a good one.

The initial settlers absolutely needed Spain, Britain or other established powers. The continent had challenges that were far more tenacious than those on the moon. Specifically, the weakened, but still much stronger than a few colonist, existing civilizations.

The Native Americans didn't always appreciate the Europeans moving into their territory and it often had to be accomplished via force of arms, wealth and people coming from Europe.

Ask the Vikings how easy it was to maintain New World colonies in the face of opposition from existing civilizations. They tried, and had significant technological advantages, but didn't have the brute power to maintain their colonies in the face of bad weather and the people already there.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[davester666]

That's why I ALWAYS wear a condom. And a thick rubber whole-body suit.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[stewsters]

You are sending harmful radiation into my yard, causing me skin cancer. Please cease and desist.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[joebok]

Yes, by Robert Heinlein. My first thought was a scene from that, or maybe it was another story, I don't remember - but the character D.D. Harriman walks into a Pepsi exec's office with a Coke logo pinned to his suit (I'm sure the companies weren't mentioned by name, but that was the idea). The exec is pissed about it, Harriman says from the distance from me to you, this button is the exact size of the full moon. I just came from there - they've got a great plan to write their logo across the face of the moon. The exec - that's outrageous! Harriman - yes, a travesty - we've got to stop it, but I just need some more money to get this ship launched - if I get there first, then it won't happen. And, of course, Harriman does the same thing the other way around, extorting every dime he can.

Anyway, it's a fun story - very interesting to see real life creep up on it!

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[smooth wombat]

Because we are still a barbaric world where basic human courtesy doesn't apply.

Such as turning off your phone when in a meeting, dinner date or at the movies, not trying to get one car ahead by jamming your vehicle into the six foot space, not walking across the middle of the street and expecting traffic to stop on a dime, not using a curse word every three seconds because you think it's cool or being edgy, answering a question with "Read the fucking manual!"

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[multimediavt]

The normal variation on that theme has to do with Governments (usually local) doing the defending for you, per the police forces. Meanwhile, Government also arbitrates between claims -- if two dudes claim the same piece of landscape for development purposes, who gets it? So, even if the Moon Treaty needs to continue keeping any one Nation from claiming ownership of the Moon or other bodies, it needs to have added to it some sort of system for arbitrating between ownership-claims made by others. And, possibly, defending its decisions. Else there will indeed be all the chaos that can result from "might makes right".

Agreed. The first thought that came to me was how do you have law and order without a nation? Are you going to have different laws on the moon for each entity's home nation? Do you treat it like the high seas and use maritime law? Whose law and order do you impose in order to secure property rights if no nation has claim to the property to begin with. I think Mr. Bigelow is a greedy bastard trying to fool people into giving him property rights that are indefensible. So, what--private security? Yeah, then we have warlords on the Moon. Nope. It's there for everyone and no one (individual, community, nation) owns the Moon. Fuck off! Go buy an asteroid past Mars and STFU!

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[GameboyRMH]

...EVE Online.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha, I can steal energy from you without landing and you can't do anything about it.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[Anonymous Coward]

So if I can beat you up, I get your computer? Win.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[Anonymous Coward]

The ficitious company Harriman uses to illustrate his point is called "Moka-Coka", an obvious riff on Coke. And you're right, that scene was from "The Man Who Sold The Moon." I just re-read that story recently.

The sad part of the story is that Harriman wanted to go to the moon himself, which was the sole reason he threw the financial weight of his empire behind the venture in the first place, only to be prevented from going for health and liability reasons. Eventually, at the end of his life, he talks a couple of space jockeys at a fair who are using one of his old spaceships to give rides to fairgoers to fix up their ship on his dime and take him to the moon, where he dies finally living his dream.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[Anonymous Coward]

It is this bastard who should be in jail, not Jeremy Hammond.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[Dunbal]

No. What GP means is that if someone goes up to the moon and manages to live there, good luck pressing your claim. You can't defend something if you don't own it, and to own land you have to live on it. Even here on Earth it's true. Witness squatters, and their "business model".

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[Dunbal]

Don't mind me, I'm just at your POS, siphoning your moon goo...

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[newcastlejon]

pigiron quipped:

The moon is a harsh mistress.

That's not a quip, it's the title of a book. A rather well-known one.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[Dahamma]

You can't defend something if you don't own it, and to own land you have to live on it.

Eh? Sorry, but there's just nothing true about that statement...

Clearly you don't have to live on your land to own it. Literally countless examples of that. And clearly you don't have to own it to defend it. Various government enforcement agencies are happy to defend your land for you (that's what we pay them for!) And good luck as a squatter if you aren't living in a VERY liberal community. Most of the time it will get you tossed out on your ass if you are lucky or in jail if you resist.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[Anonymous Coward]

"I am reminded of a book, "The Man Who Sold the Moon.""

      Actually I thought of Disney's "Zenon III". Guess the hot looking punk bitch hasn't told them to buzz off yet.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[SJHillman]

As you can see, my young apprentice, your friends have failed. Now witness the firepower of this fully ARMED and OPERATIONAL battle sun!

*Cue coronal mass ejection*

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[killkillkill]

It is about physical defense. Lacking the supplies or being cut off from needed supplies means your physical defense was compromised by attrition. In no way does your point logically counter the comment you were trying to refute. Are you arguing to be difficult or is your reasoning really this weak?

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[Joce640k]

And good luck as a squatter if you aren't living in a VERY liberal community. Most of the time it will get you tossed out on your ass if you are lucky or in jail if you resist.

Good luck with that if they ever get into your house. They often have all sorts of legal protection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squatting

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[lgw]

Lets say you have an entirely self-sufficient and impregnable moon colony. It represents 10% of your company's assets. The other 90% are here on Earth. Your military ability to defend your moonbase isn't all that relevant to the bigger picture.

Lets say you have an impregnable moon colony that needs supplies from Earth, and you're financially self-sufficient and don't care whether your Earth assets are seized, and your supplies are perfectly safe in transit. All your military goals are met, but no one will sell you supplies. Is an embargo now a question of physical defense in your head?

The likely, practical problems are these political issues, not space pirates looting your base, as colorful at that would be.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[khallow]

No country that has actually put people in space is a signatory to the Moon Treaty. While the Outer Space Treaty is a similar obstruction to owning property in space, the Moon Treaty is much more of an obstacle. As a result, the only countries to have signed the Moon Treaty are pretty much those which have no expectation of ever doing anything on the Moon.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[khallow]

I already own the moon with the rest of the world under the current treaty

Not everyone recognizes the "current treaty". And I can draft up a new treaty in the next five minutes which doesn't recognize your claim to anything on the Moon or elsewhere.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[Joce640k]

Update: I see the UK has recently changed it's squatting laws. They had a terrible problem with organized squatters who knew all their legal rights (and often posted them on the front door for the owners to read...)

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[Teancum]

The alternative to dealing with squatters and people who claim property that isn't legally theirs is to have a bunch of big bad ass folks (usually wearing uniforms and on occasion wielding various weapons from a simple rubber club to a nuclear warhead) that decide to enforce your property claims on your behalf.

The statement above is most certainly true, as if you don't defend your property, you lose your property. You can defend your property through proxies, but it most definitely requires constant and active defense to maintain property rights.

In fact, in the state I live in, if you pay property taxes on a piece of real estate for more than five years in a row without contested claims upon that property, it is legally considered your property regardless of any prior claims upon that property. Contested claims have a whole separate set of rules and it is fairly easy to drop a lien or register another legal dispute on any piece of property. Those disputes are also easily dismissed too without a valid claim and subject to barratry counter claims if done for spurious reasons, but the point is that it still takes active effort to maintain property even here on the Earth in most places.

Regardless, on the Moon there are treaties in place that prohibit government agencies from getting involved, hence the massive concern about private property rights, the chaos of squatters showing up that can only get tossed out by killing them, and the general lack of laws which would apply to those who are in space. Heck, as long as you figured out a way to get into space, as long as you don't have any citizenship claims upon you as a person, you are truly an "outlaw", meaning you are completely outside of the law and can neither claim protection under laws nor can any laws be enforced upon you. It would be a violation of these treaties for a government like the U.S. government to even send its military up into space to enforce any sort of law.

It really is a silly situation at the moment.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[Teancum]

There is talk about renegotiating the Outer Space Treaty, which is the only real international agreement that stands in the way at the moment. There is an "exit clause" on that treaty where the chief executive of the signing country (in the USA it would be the President) could announce they are leaving the provisions of the treaty in a year and after that year has expired that country is no longer bound to the treaty.

As you say, that would be a diplomatic time bomb which could cause wars and other sorts of fun, so it is in the interests of everybody involved to try and come up with an alternate agreement or at least work out some sort of method for legal property rights recognition elsewhere besides the Earth. It wasn't done earlier because the Soviet government (the only other country besides America that really mattered when the Outer Space treaty was negotiated) didn't want to have any sort of property rights on the Moon or elsewhere, and the U.S. State Department didn't realize what they were negotiating away... or at least didn't care. Since those negotiators are now either retired or dead, it isn't their problem either.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[nitehawk214]

I own the sun. Go ahead, just try landing there, my defenses will obliterate you!

So, you are this woman.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[killkillkill]

If political pressures cause you to abandon the location, your lack of physical presence has deemed you unable to physically defend the location, so it is no longer yours. It is yours for as long as you stay at your impregnable base. Read the post by ModernGreek again. he said what I did a bit more succinctly.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[Teancum]

Some of the problem is dealing with situations like a mining operation that would require a claim to a sizable chunk of the Moon. You can treat things like a habitat or research station like you would a space station or spaceship (hence treating it like maritime laws and treaties), but dealing with disputed mining claims is entirely the realm of either a bunch of guns (hence the warlords like you are mentioning) or some sort of property title recording agency that has the backing of a sovereign entity.

Luckily, the Moon is about the same size as the entire continent of North America, so there is plenty of room there for multiple nations to co-exist peacefully if that is something you want to deal with. The area of Mars (which is really the next huge issue to deal with) is the same size as the land area of the whole of the Earth. Add in asteroids and other moons of other planets and you see there is room to expand out and have plenty of space to tell brats to stay off your front porch.

The real question in my mind is if these sovereign entities that will hold claim over stuff on the Moon and elsewhere in the Solar System should be indigenous to those areas being claimed (aka the government is established by and subject only to those who actually make the effort to go into space and live in those places) or if they should be treated as colonies of Earth-based governments. You (multimediavt) are seemingly against the idea of a colonial system of dependent governments sponsored by major governments here in the Earth. I also think that turning this over to the United Nations is a bad idea, so far as making the UN into a sovereign entity in its own right. That is just substituting one bad tyrant with one that could be much worse.

Then again, my own political philosophy is one where I think small independent governments with a minimal amount of overhead from anybody "over" those governments tends to make for a better system of living where you can "vote with your feet" when a small government like that gets tyrannical in ways you can't stand. Many of the problems we are facing on the Earth right now are due to large governments with far reaching powers which turn their citizens into slaves.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[Impish]

Because we are still a barbaric world where basic human courtesy doesn't apply.

Such as turning off your phone when in a meeting, dinner date or at the movies, not trying to get one car ahead by jamming your vehicle into the six foot space, not walking across the middle of the street and expecting traffic to stop on a dime , not using a curse word every three seconds because you think it's cool or being edgy, answering a question with "Read the fucking manual!"

You lost me on the bold bit (emphasis mine). Having just come back from Vancouver Island I can assure you that cars stopping when you attempt to cross the street (no matter where) is very courteous and civilized.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[thomst]

newcastlejon remonstrated:

pigiron quipped:

The moon is a harsh mistress.

That's not a quip, it's the title of a book. A rather well-known one.

Yes it is. One I read the year it was published.

But pigiron was trying to be funny. (I think he succeeded, btw.) That makes his post a QUIP. From Goggle's search page for the term:

quip
/kwip/
noun
noun: quip; plural noun: quips

1.
a witty remark.
synonyms: joke, witty remark, witticism, jest, pun, bon mot, sally, pleasantry;
informal one-liner, gag, crack, wisecrack, funny
"the quip provoked a smile"
archaic
a verbal equivocation.

verb
verb: quip; 3rd person present: quips; past tense: quipped; past participle: quipped; gerund or present participle: quipping

1.
make a witty remark.
"“Flattery will get you nowhere,” she quipped"
synonyms: joke, jest, pun, sally;

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[Dahamma]

The statement above is most certainly true, as if you don't defend your property, you lose your property. You can defend your property through proxies, but it most definitely requires constant and active defense to maintain property rights.

Except you are not addressing what he said, you are saying something totally different.

To repeat the comment, it was: You can't defend something if you don't own it, and to own land you have to live on it. Neither of those make sense. Of course you can defend something you don't own, whether it's physically or legally. And second, there are millions of rental properties that are clearly owned by someone not living on it, and millions more commercial properties that are not even zoned for *anyone* to live on. It's just untrue on the face of it!

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[Ambvai]

The other brand was 6+... a thinly veiled 7-Up.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[Anonymous Coward]

I probably couldn't defend my house against reasonably organized criminals (more than 2, especially if they have lights, I know the house very well in complete darkness, and more than a couple of things about combat, especially close in - the secret is that attackers will hesitate at first - most don't want to murder, but for my family and myself I would not hesitate) or a SWAT team.

Does that mean I cannot own it?

I will admit to having a mortgage, so I don't own it in the first place (as most people don't, home ownership is mostly the realm of the elderly, even the wealthy mostly hold mortgages and therefore liens against their property (tax purposes) - but possibly the ability to cover such obligations more-so than the middle class).

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[turbidostato]

"The first thought that came to me was how do you have law and order without a nation?"

Law an order comes from a group of people that agree on a way to act.

In the past, this group of people needed to be in close contact and usually shared other common traits and thus became nations.

Please, think that the need for physical proximity and cultural/racial similitudes might be no longer needed and thus the concept of a nation for a legal corpus to arise.

"Yeah, then we have warlords on the Moon. Nope."

Please pay attention that in order to avoid warlords to get their will you need to become a warlord yourself.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[manu0601]

Agreed. Property right is a consequence of the social contract, but the social contract cannot be enforced outside of territories controlled by the society.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[Anonymous Coward]

And, just like every other "treaty" you have ever "drafted up", the paper it is "drafted" on will have more value.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[Anonymous Coward]

That doesn't make it any more right. Petty human greed is still stronger than the desire for our species to live in harmony and develop without animosities - how is that good in any way? Truly a sad, sad world we live in. But it will only be as sad or as beautiful as we make it. Let's start by agreeing not to kill each other over material wealth, be it located on the Moon or here on Earth. I've done my bid - never killed anyone and do not have a slightest desire to do so. Your move. Pass on, maybe it will catch on.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[khallow]

Which is my point, treaties only have value when they're recognized and can be enforced. Just saying a treaty exists as the previous AC did, doesn't mean much on its own.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[Anonymous Coward]

He was talking about j-walking.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[Teancum]

I think you are getting hung up on the "living on the property" issue. While you may personally not need to live there, somebody does and that somebody needs to answer to the property owner in some way which is mutually agreeable (either as an employee or getting some benefit by living there and defending that property).

I have known some people who've tried to manage properties from afar without actually being physically present, and those properties usually turn out to be an utter disaster.... both in terms of literally falling apart from vandalism and tenants who don't give a damn about that property to having it confiscated due to a failure to pay taxes or even having neighbors encroach upon that property by doing subtle things like moving fences or simply "taking over" that property. Absentee landlords who don't live at their properties and also fail to have an on-site manager are practically the definition of tenement slum-lords. Some of those properties in some cities have even been flat out condemned and confiscated by the government as a part of a "redevelopment effort".

Ditto that for commercial properties. While there may not be a huge need for somebody to have a physical residence at the property in commercial and industrial areas, you pretty much need to have somebody at those properties who is responsible for their maintenance and upkeep on almost a daily basis (with perhaps a day or two off each week) that is monitoring what is going on. They need to be physically present or have an agent or manager to deal with those places. If you want to see a place become a ruin in a hurry, remove that daily maintenance and just watch what happens including homeless folks who enter into those businesses and turn it into their home... getting back to that squatter issue mentioned above. I can count hundreds of examples like this I've personally witnessed, including one commercial property that was abandoned for about ten years that when the new owner wanted to inspect the commercial property they needed a police escort simply for protection against the nearly 200 homeless people living in the building. I worked with that new owner and tried to help repair some of the damage done to that property.

I really think your example of rental properties is severely flawed. I agree that it is possible to loan (aka rent) some property to somebody else with a formal agreement, and it is also further true that a good tenant might even maintain a property with a minimal amount of effort on the part of the actual landlord.... but I dare you to show me an example of a property that is not physically occupied and in current use which also does not suffer from significant problems of loss of property rights in some fashion or another... especially squatters or even other individuals laying claim upon that property and confiscating it.

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[aurizon]

Back in the 1800's, in the USA/Canada you could stake a 16 hectare claim(more or less, acres etc) and it was your patent land surface a mineral rights forever.
The land cost nothing to keep, so craft people staked and staked and staked and in time had all the good land. They did nothing, but if you worked it, you earned half the gold etc.
This egregious abuse led to a renewal fee and work requirement.
In Quebec, the 16 hectares costs $53 to stake and every 2 years you pay the $53 again (this fee escalates with inflation). Before the 2 years elapses, you must perform $1200 worth of work. If you fail to do the work or pay the fee, the land reverts to the government and in 30 days they allow it to be staked again - you must wait 60 days.

So if they do this, for the same 16 hectare plots and the same work, if Bigelow grabs large tracts = large fees, and he is nor rich enough to grab the whole moon which 37.9 million square KM or 3,790 Billion Hectares or 237 billion 16 Hectare claims times $1200 = $284 trillion to renew every 2 years (choke). So let him stake a little land, and others can stake other areas

Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours

[Phoghat]

I say finders keepers

Nobody owns the moon.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why try to develop the moon anyway? It's almost as extreme as space itself, so why not just build an orbiting hotel instead?

Re:Nobody owns the moon.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because all spacecraft leak and an astronomical body has can replace lost volatiles?

Re:Nobody owns the moon.

[hebertrich]

Many will respond : because it's there .. I do not see the " future " in this .. first major accident that will happen and their business will be washed off and stamped out of existence , who will want to die for these individuals corporate profits ? they would need to pay ME big time for me to take the risks associated with this.
Astronauts knew it was dangerous and took a step for their Nation , Who will take a step for Bigelow's wallet ?
 

Re:Nobody owns the moon.

[leonardluen]

Could have probably said something similar about airplane travel a hundred years ago.

Re:Nobody owns the moon.

[0123456]

Why try to develop the moon anyway? It's almost as extreme as space itself, so why not just build an orbiting hotel instead?

Bigelow is working on orbital hotels. But, when all's said and done, there's not much to do in orbit once you've looked out the window for a few hours and tried out some zero-g shagging. At least on the Moon you can climb into a space suit and go exploring.

Re:Nobody owns the moon.

[luis_a_espinal]

Could have probably said something similar about airplane travel a hundred years ago.

This. And that was also certainly the same concern with trans-oceanic exploration. Shit, I sure that Homo Erectus had the same argument

Grok: Be careful.

Ung: What?

Grok: This taming fire business, you are going to burn yourself. I don't see the ROI considering the risks. Just munch the raw bone marrow. Much safer that way.

Re:Nobody owns the moon.

[alexander_686]

It depends on what you mean by hotel. If you mean “resort hotel for tourist”, then I would agree.

But I am thinking “extended stay hotels for workers”. Build a research stations then rent out rooms and lab space. I think that could work if there were any serious need for commercial research. Unfortunately I can’t think of any demand for that type of research over the next 10 to 20 years. (Please do not confuse commercial research with basic research. They are 2 different animals.)

Re:Nobody owns the moon.

[SydShamino]

It's not as extreme as space if you can dig. Underground, it's easier to protect against radiation and air loss. Plus you can maybe do so using resources you acquired there, instead of resources you pulled out of a gravity well.

Re:Nobody owns the moon.

[Anonymous Coward]

This.

This is getting annoying.

Re:Nobody owns the moon.

[jythie]

True, and they were wrong. But it is hard to say if that will be the case here or not. We do not even know if we can build a cost effective habitat that far out.

Re:Nobody owns the moon.

[westlake]

Why try to develop the moon anyway? It's almost as extreme as space itself

Gravity.

Strong enough to simplify many problems. Weak enough to be good fun --- assuming you could build a large enclosed arena, you could have human flight with wings, an idea sci-fi writers have been playing with for three generations.

Re:Nobody owns the moon.

[morgauxo]

"It's almost as extreme as space itself"

No, we don't know that yet.

The surface of the moon has all the radiation, lack of air and extreme temperature issues as space. But...

It has a lot more gravity. We know that life in zero g is very bad for the human body. What would the moon's gravity do over time though? We don't know. It's less than Earth's so maybe it's still bad. We haven't ever exposed people to it over long enough duration to find out. Maybe 16% of Earth's gravity gets you 84% of the problems that develop in 0 gravity but then, maybe it's less linear than that. Maybe over a certain amount you are fine? Let's find out.

That's just the surface. Make an underground shelter and the radiation problem goes away.

Then there is the fact that the moon is essentially a great big ball of resources which require a lot of energy however nowhere near as much as from Earth to get into space. Resources mined from the moon could be used for building your orbital hotels, or for other spacecraft that could then be sent to explore and/or settle the solar system.

Re:Nobody owns the moon.

[Anonymous Coward]

This.

This is getting annoying.

^^^This! /runs :-)

Re:Nobody owns the moon.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, airplane travel serves an existing need better than existing alternatives.

Lunar living doesn't.

Re:Nobody owns the moon.

[turbidostato]

"No, airplane travel serves an existing need better than existing alternatives."

Yes, it does it... now.

Do you think Wright brothers', Lilienthal's, Santos-Dumont's... planes served any real need any better than anything already existing?

Re:Nobody owns the moon.

[Anonymous Coward]

They were better at getting over those stupid city walls and bombing with precision than artillery shells.

Re:Nobody owns the moon.

[turbidostato]

"They were better at getting over those stupid city walls and bombing with precision than artillery shells."

No, they were not at first. It took years and tests to reach that point -which was my point.

Re:Nobody owns the moon.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, anything that COULD FLY was obviously more useful than not having ANYTHING that could prior to.

We've BEEN to the moon for short stays - there's not a real ongoing value in that!

Just what we need...

[Anonymous Coward]

An eyesore to ruin the moon with ads that you can't avoid and can be seen by everyone on Earth and can't be removed because...they own it.

Re:Just what we need...

[Penguinisto]

An eyesore to ruin the moon with ads that you can't avoid and can be seen by everyone on Earth and can't be removed because...they own it.

You have no idea how frickin' BIG the Moon is, do you?

The amount of material and energy required to make something on it big enough to be visible from Earth would be way too prohibitive.

Here: let me help you a bit...

Re:Just what we need...

[Teancum]

Robert Bigelow has already plastered advertisements on the outside of his Genesis spacecraft that are orbiting the Earth. They are even technically visible from the ground with an unaided eye.... and has this AC ever bothered trying to look at those advertisements?

I don't think so. The sense of scale is definitely missing here, just as you've pointed out.

Not a fan...

[intermodal]

Can't say I'm in favor of developing the moon, but when I sit back and think about it, it seems inevitable. Doesn't mean I have to like it, though.

Good Grief

[MightyMartian]

It's rather irrelevant what you think, Mr. Bigelow. There are currently international treaties banning any nation (and by extension any citizen of a nation) from claiming extraterrestrial territory. So bugger off and do something useful with your money.

Re:Good Grief

[Anonymous Coward]

And we all know that international treaties are NEVER broken....

Re:Good Grief

[Anonymous Coward]

and it is attitudes like yours why we will never get off this planet.

Re:Good Grief

[alexander_686]

Well, that is kind of his point. He is asking for the US to try to amend the treaty. Even if he gets the US to ask for an amendment it does not mean it will be granted. The way I read this, Bigwlow wants to open preliminary discussions.

Re:Good Grief

[Mitchell314]

Uh, no. The reason we don't send people to other celestial bodies is primarily due to cost and safety.

Re:Good Grief

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Except for the manned visits we already made to the moon, you mean?

Or maybe you meant the unmanned probes that have visited many other planets and even left our solar system entirely.

Re:Good Grief

[0123456]

The Outer Space Treaty is one of the worst pieces of communist garbage of the last hundred years, and another reason Apollo put space travel back decades.

Re: Good Grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Great. US style capitalism screws up pretty much everything it touches these days, and now one of those who've benefited from that wants to use public resources to give him private property.

Typical.

Re:Good Grief

[jfengel]

Which seems reasonable. The treaty is easy to follow when nobody's actually going there. It helped allay paranoia when the US was going there: we weren't going to set up a base anyway.

Sooner or later, though, somebody's going to start going on some kind of regular basis. And it would be nice to have clearer guidelines than high-minded, utopian dictates that nobody owns anything.

I'm skeptical that anything will come of it, since nobody's really in a mood to cooperate, and it's too abstract and far-off for it to really focus anybody's attention. New rules are likely to be just as bad and impractical as the existing ones, in the absence of knowing what it's actually like to live and work in space.

Re:Good Grief

[clarkkent09]

Given that historically anything that is owned by everybody (i.e. by nobody) tends to fall apart from abuse and neglect, if we are going to develop Moon (a long shot but whatever, the guy is thinking long term) the best model is one where many people OWN small parcels of it and are free to do with them as they please. Sort of like the way US was developed, not by a grand government plan but by dividing it up between individual with a stake in making it work.

Re:Good Grief

[thomst]

MightyMartian sneered:

It's rather irrelevant what you think, Mr. Bigelow. There are currently international treaties banning any nation (and by extension any citizen of a nation) from claiming extraterrestrial territory. So bugger off and do something useful with your money.

There ARE current international treaties banning ownership of an extraterrestrial body. They're foolish and outdated, and they need to be amended. Bigelow is attempting to persuade the US government to begin negotiating that process.

I think Bigelow is a swine - but he's right about what it will take to give private capital the incentive to invest the blood and treasure necessary to colonize and exploit extraterrestrial resources. We're getting ever closer to the day when companies like SpaceX will be capable of creating conglomerates that possess the technology and financial resources to do exactly that - but they won't commit them until they see the possibility of getting sufficient return on their investment to make the risk worth taking.

I'm all for government funding - NASA, the ESA, and so on - for space exploration efforts. But we can't COLONIZE the Moon without first modifying the existing Moon Treaty. Nor can we conduct commercial operations (such as ice mining) without amending it, because that 50-year-old treaty prohibits them.

Anybody - including people you despise - can have a good idea. Ideas should be considered on their own merits, rather than being dismissed out of hand, simply because you dislike their source.

Re:Good Grief

[Anonymous Coward]

They meant something more permanent like colonization, not individual instances of escaping Earth's gravity.

Re:Good Grief

[jythie]

I suspect that even though the point that it feels far off has probably delayed reexamining the treaty, another big problem is it represents a rather significant can of worms that governments just do not want to deal with right now, not unless one of them has something significant to gain from it.

Re:Good Grief

[GameboyRMH]

That's probably a good way to do it. Have the countries that signed the previous treaty agree to something like a "land rush" on the moon. Divide it up into many lots big enough for any space station, and any private entity that gets there can claim one. Rules would have to be strict to prevent a ton of adjacent lots from getting Disney'd in corporate shell games though.

Re:Good Grief

[artfulshrapnel]

Those treaties are what he's requesting an amendment to, unless I missed something?

It makes perfect sense that eventually we will want to colonize land on other planets, and those colonists should have the right to own and protect the land they settle and improve. The treaties were to prevent one nation from getting there first and just claiming the whole thing as their own sovereign soil, but there shouldn't be an issue now that transport to the moon is available (in theory at least) to anyone from any nation that has enough money.

This suggests something like the Homestead act perhaps, enabling each person or family that lands on the moon the right to claim a certain amount of it, so long as they produce a given amount of improvement. In the American Homestead Act, for example, the settler was required to do things like build roads, plant crops, or fence in areas for livestock, with an upper limit of how much land they could take ownership of in this way.

Perhaps owning a piece of moon soil could require setting up air and power generating stations, sustainable occupied structures, and roadways?

Re:Good Grief

[Dunbal]

Cost and safety are not the main problem. The main problem is the lack of return on investment. Right now the only use for the moon is a) saying you did it and b) collecting moon rocks. The minute some creative individuals spot an unusually healthy ROI, you will get men on the moon and safety be damned. That's pretty much all of human history right there.

Re:Good Grief

[Dunbal]

He's making the rather large assumption that US law applies on the moon, or that US law can be enforced on the moon. You could argue that there's a few American flags there. You also could argue that the moon was claimed "for all mankind", and there's a plaque that says so. At the end of the day it's a ridiculous argument and I wonder what he is trying to shift attention towards or away from with his claim.

Re:Good Grief

[alexander_686]

You might want to reread the article – he is not making that assumption. He knows that there is an international treaty that the US has signed. He knows the US government can’t act unilaterally, which is why he is asking for the US to renegotiate the treaty.

Re:Good Grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you mind elaborating why the treaty is so bad? 2D property rights in a 3D world with the Earth's center as its center have worked fairly well so far because all land area is also divided into nations, which thus enforce them. But how would it work on the moon which at the moment doesn't have any division among nations and thus there's no nation enforcing rights (so you could also say it's like Somalia). Even if the Chinese build a permanent base there (let's be realistic, they're the ones that will do it first) would you consider it reasonable to let them claim that the entire moon is part of China? Probably you wouldn't so what would be reasonable? Any area they draw a line around in the lunar sand? Do you think they would agree to it? Presumably they could defend any area they like on the moon simply through the technological advantage they're likely to have by then but at the same time no other nation would consider it reasonable to let them call the entire Moon as theirs. So would it then be an act of war if they e.g. destroy an unmanned lander from an American billionaire? And if so, do you think the US would really go to war with China over it? If not, the US have accepted the unreasonable claim by China and if yes the US is going to war over what isn't much more than China wrecking an expensive RC toy in what China claims as its airspace (and as we all know, drone incidents in "ambiguous" or disputed airspace are not unheard of).

Now, what could work is that the surfaces of other celestial bodies are treated like international waters and resources harvested like fish caught there. Any construction would be treated as a vessel at sea and thus when operations on a lunar mine or "hotel" cease, it's treated like a shipwreck (assuming that whoever put the base there doesn't remove take it with them). Thus the surface is never owned by anyone but what is placed on it is owned by a party from a nation and they can profit from whatever they do there for the duration of their stay in said location (defined e.g. as a certain radius around every base outpost with some type of activity and not just a flag in the sand). And that would be pretty close to what the situation already is. The idea should be to ensure that only technological limitations stop you from benefiting from space exploration and resource harvesting but at the same time political conflicts shouldn't arise from unreasonable claims made by those who overcome the difficulties first and those who refuse to respect those claims because they're unreasonable.

Re:Good Grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Anonymous Coward sneered:

And why shouldn't we colonize the moon? Especially in light of the wonderful job we've been doing here on Earth...

Antarctica and the moon... leave 'em alone. We've got plenty mess to clean up right where we currently live, every piece of real estate on Earth or its moon need not have human footprints that trek across it.

Re:Good Grief

[Dunbal]

Re-read the article? Hell I'd have to start by reading it. Welcome to slashdot.

Re:Good Grief

[thomst]

jythie speculated:

I suspect that even though the point that it feels far off has probably delayed reexamining the treaty, another big problem is it represents a rather significant can of worms that governments just do not want to deal with right now, not unless one of them has something significant to gain from it.

I suspect you're right.

That doesn't alter the fact that it's important to the future of the human race that the issue be addressed.

Re:Good Grief

[Anonymous Coward]

They aren't pointless. It doesn't mean someone can't own the moon, just earth nations can't. If your goal is truly noble then any colony would be able to assert it's own independence. Nobody wants another revolutionary war.

Re:Good Grief

[Teancum]

Your proposal here is simply unworkable in terms of resource extraction. When you have a mining claim, you don't want to have some other stupid idiot jumping into your mine and working the same mining claim. That implies some sort of real estate property right that must be enforced as the mine will occupy a specific area of the land for occupation and extraction.

In terms of fishing, you don't need those strict kind of property rights as you can have multiple fishermen working the same general area and simply maintain a good working distance to avoid fouling the nets. Then again, there are regions of the world like George's Bank which have been the subject of major wars (in this case the war of 1812 between the USA and the UK was in part over this part of the ocean along with the related Grand Banks) and others are frequently the point of territorial disputes. In that sense even the maritime laws and precedence sort of throw that whole notion out the window that you can "peacefully" resolve disputes in extra-national areas without a sovereign government stepping in to negotiate issues involved.

Re: Good Grief

[Teancum]

Great. US style capitalism screws up pretty much everything it touches these days, and now one of those who've benefited from that wants to use public resources to give him private property.

Typical.

What other kind of economic environment do you want to live in? One where I simply take everything from you at gunpoint and then dribble back barely enough for you to live from day to day as my slave?

Re:Good Grief

[Areyoukiddingme]

The Outer Space Treaty only bans its signators from claiming extraterrestrial territory. Nations that haven't signed the treaty can claim whatever they like.

Space itself is treated as "international waters", unowned by anyone, but you are expected to identify craft moving through the territory. So how can you legally own a piece of the moon? Fly a flag of some nation that never signed the Outer Space Treaty on your spacecraft. Land on the moon. Make your claim. A good lawyer could make it stick. The thing about international law is most of it hasn't been written yet. A good lawyer could write an argument for that claim and other lawyers would nod sagely and agree with it.

There are 102 signators of the treaty. That leaves you somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 others to choose from.

Of course, the moment that happened, every signator to the Outer Space Treaty would unilaterally withdraw from it.

Re: Good Grief

[drinkypoo]

Great. US style capitalism screws up pretty much everything it touches these days, and now one of those who've benefited from that wants to use public resources to give him private property.

Typical.

What other kind of economic environment do you want to live in? One where I simply take everything from you at gunpoint and then dribble back barely enough for you to live from day to day as my slave?

I read it as an assertion that this was an example of that kind of behavior.

Re:Good Grief

[turbidostato]

"Cost and safety are not the main problem. The main problem is the lack of return on investment."

So too high cost and risk. Good to see that you agree.

"Right now the only use for the moon is a) saying you did it and b) collecting moon rocks."

Basically the same can be said of Everest's tip or Las Vegas, you see...

Re:Good Grief

[Anonymous Coward]

What if I want to set up a factory that produces robots that take over other people's parcels until all of the Moon is under my control? Try and stop me - send an army to the Moon, I dare you. But which army? That is exactly the reason why no one should ever own anything outside of our planet. Greed creates conflicts and those in turn escalate into wars. Do you really want to see an arms race to build the biggest flotilla of space warships capable of obliterating entire continents from orbit? Don't answer...

Re:Good Grief

[kermidge]

The way I read it is the Bigelow is trying to get serious discussion going, leading to practical serious discussion. From previous statements he obviously intends to try to get to the Moon when he can, so's to do whatever it is he wants to try doing. China is going to go. Japan and India and likely Brazil as well, as and when they can.

Most entities will initially go for visits - a little flag waving and some science. Barring major gotchas, those visits and science and eventually economic extraction (whatever can be done or gotten that increases advantage for doing something else), and finally, permanent human habitation in support of whatever it is that makes sense for having people living there. All of this will come about in fairly short order, so long as it remains roughly feasible and reasonable to do.

The issue is not really all that far off; avoiding useful discussion that leads to some sort of practical framework is simply doing an ostrich number and is grossly irresponsible.

Right now the only practical way of enforcing any off-planet treaties is to prevent launch or to injure craft in near-Earth environs. Those are easy enough to apply to some commercial entity. What will you do for, or to, a nation-state?

It's not always directly about dollars. It's about advantage - often, but not necessarily, measured in dollars.

So we can try to level the playing field a bit, in a way agreeable to enough people for a while until the question has to be re-visited for some next thing, which will likely involve moving asteroids around, building large colonies, or having sufficient infrastructure "out there" so's to constitute a potential threat in some real way.

Re:Good Grief

[Teun]

There is good example in the Antarctica treaty.

Re:Good Grief

[Teancum]

The enforcement of the Outer Space Treaty is simply the non-recognition of any extraterrestrial sovereignty claims. In other words, if China starts to build a mine on the Moon, Russia, the UK, or even the USA can assert the right to plunk a spacecraft down in the middle of that mine (after billions of Yuan have been dumped on clearing away lunar regolith to get down to bedrock for something useful) and put down their own mining equipment.

Perhaps China won't mind having a bunch of American wandering around their facilities.... but maybe they will care about that kind of thing too. There is precedence in that kind of thing in American diplomacy in the past like the Gulf of Tonkin incident as well as a similar incident in the Gulf of Sidra, where sovereignty claims by Vietnam and Libya respectively were flagrantly ignored even to the point of engaging in acts of war when they weren't "internationally recognized". I can definitely see something like that happening on the Moon simply to push that lack of recognition.

It really will be about the money ultimately though. Yes, not directly in the value that has been extracted already, but when resources and labor have been expended and claims have been made there is going to be a desire for people to protect their infrastructure. It also becomes a big deal for companies who want to make investments into infrastructure and other long term project to know that their efforts won't be in vain.

Re:Good Grief

[jfengel]

I think Antarctica shows fairly well what happens when nobody wants to be there. It's resource-poor.

The more compelling example, I think, is at the other extreme: now that the melting North Pole is making new oil deposits available, there is considerable squabbling over boundaries.

Re: Good Grief

[Teancum]

I read it as an assertion that this was an example of that kind of behavior.

You have a very warped view of America to think everybody in America or where American armies are at are just a bunch of enslaved peasants.

Re:Good Grief

[Teun]

There are at least proven coal reserves on Antarctica and likely more valuable stuff.

It's the treaty that keeps the miners away, not the lack of interest.

Re:Good Grief

[kermidge]

Yes, thank you. And yes, the several Treaties are in need of revision or re-writing - which is the point I was trying to make, given the examples you give and others that have arisen; look at the couple of centuries leading to what's now lumped as maritime law. I know I'm a real feather-weight in the brains department around here, but I did kinda think a bit on this.

My contention was that we need to be doing effective thinking leading to practical policies now, not some other when.

I do understand that it generally always comes down to a money equation or such some where/when. My point was trying to make the point that not all the relevant and important issues involved are readily evaluated in definitive, specific monetary terms.

That being so, it does in no wise negate the need for getting to useful policies soonest. I suspect the need will likely arise long before the politicians get around to it.

Re:Good Grief

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm the same AC that responded to the troll (at least it was later modded so and IMO rightly). Because I'm more familiar with maritime law (I'm a sailboat captain so I have had to study it a little). The follow-ups to my post were better able to formulate what I also had in mind, i.e. that you get a particular area surrounding whatever facility and construction you have made instead of just a flag.

You also brought up the very good point that the political process will be slow since the party with the best technology will have exactly the opposite agenda as parties with just long-term plans. The political lobbying could also become unlike anything we've seen before since as China is opening up more and more to foreign investment it's not unthinkable that American companies that have joint lunar extraction ventures with Chinese companies will not just lobby against national interests as is the norm already with all the greedy outsourcing but directly in favor of China.

Re:Good Grief

[kermidge]

Thanks, AC - for the clarification and the discussion. (I appreciate and respect your situation as a sailboat captain; I once had ambitions in that area, and so had to try to learn some of the basics of what goes on. A friend now contracts with oil companies for transport, he's licensed for about everything but passenger liners; we've talked a bit about some of the realities viz. liabilities and responsibilities.)

History shows that usually politicians get around to dealing with things after they're already somewhere between a mess and outright conflict with casualties and damage - not a good portent in my book, but it's likely what we'll see happen yet again.

Right now we're left with laissez-faire and that the Moon has a lot of real estate, so in early efforts there's probably plenty of room for all for a while. OTOH, some areas could quickly bring things to a head - ice deposits at the poles comes to mind.

The situation you bring up regarding corps and China is really interesting, now, isn't it? Somewhere in dim memory comes a discussion a year or so back where there've been some situations with large economic combines - the East India Company, I think, and some others. Where you have multi-nationals taking unto themselves positions and powers formerly known only for nations... United Fruit, the Seven Sisters, Bechtel, et al come to mind. Fold in shadow banking, shown to be at minimum thrice the activity of known banking flows.

So until things get codified in a hopefully congenial way we're left with the hopes that in the interest of smooth flow of return conflict will be avoided. China will have a base. Bigelow or someone will have a hotel. Science will be done. Extraction and manufacture will happen.

Timeline is open, but twenty years ought to see some kind of at least semi-permanent structure; I place no bets on permanent human habitation - for many things it's simply not needed, at least early on.

Ah, crap. Y'know, was a time I had hopes of seeing a few what I thought reasonable things - repairing the soil, cleaning up our mess a bit and not further contributing to it, exploring the depths and at least cis-Lunar space - a bit of flowering, if you will. What I and so many others overlooked was the continuing sheer blind power of greed. Lot more hope than reality, the '60s. I remain intensely curious but not so happily as before.

Sorry, I'm already there hunting whales.

[rolfwind]

We're whalers on the moon,
We carry a harpoon.
But there ain't no whales
So we tell tall tales
And sing our whaling tune.

Re:Sorry, I'm already there hunting whales.

[ArcadeMan]

Forget about your whales. I'm going to build a theme park, with blackjack and hookers.

Re:Sorry, I'm already there hunting whales.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's one whale on the moon.

Re:Sorry, I'm already there hunting whales.

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget the park and the blackjack.

Re:Sorry, I'm already there hunting whales.

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, forget the theme park, and the blackjack.

FAA rights?

[sqorbit]

Did I miss something, since when does the FAA control the rights to the moon? I think that the other countries on this planet would be a little upset if the US decided the moon was ours and we would decide who could do what with it.

Re:FAA rights?

[Overzeetop]

That's the kicker - they've asked the FAA to amend the international agreement which can't be done unilaterally. OTOH, since it's a treaty between nations, no private entity can initiate a change request.

It's quite impractical, I'm afraid...

[tibit]

Just read The Apollo Experience Lessons Learned for Constellation Lunar Dust Management. Summary: Moon is a rather impractical place to be, unless: you have a way of washing everything on your way in and all of the exterior equipment is designed to be dust tight in vacuum environment (a nigh impossible feat). The dust will grind everything to a halt. It's that bad. And you better not got any into the shuttles subject to microgravity - both the people and the equipment will be in bad shape after a trip.

Re:It's quite impractical, I'm afraid...

[spire3661]

Hard to take the report seriously with glaring errors like this "Spetember 2006" "

Re:It's quite impractical, I'm afraid...

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with Spetember? It's the month after Augist and before Otcober.

Re:It's quite impractical, I'm afraid...

[tibit]

So, you agree with my conclusion, then - I mean, the only nitpick you have is a typo. Um, thanks?

Re:It's quite impractical, I'm afraid...

[Convector]

That's actually not an error. It's a contraction of "Space September", the name of a time unit in the early attempts at a Space Calendar or "Spalendar" that wouldn't be tied to solar or lunar cycles as viewed on Earth. It never caught on, which is too bad, because "Spock-tober" would be awesome.

Re:It's quite impractical, I'm afraid...

[Plazmid]

Making something dust tight in a vacuum environment can't be all that hard. We have standards for preventing dust intrusion and they aren't all that different from standards for preventing water intrusion.

And we do have a way to clean dust off equipment in a hard vacuum. Moon dust easily picks up an electrostatic charge, allowing one to use an alternating electric field to remove regolith from solar panels.

The same technology, shouldn't be all that hard to integrate into space suits or other equipment.

Risk lives ?

[hebertrich]

mmit massive amounts of capital and risk lives ..
let him be the first to risk it and then i might have respect , but risking someone's else's neck is nothing short of cowardice.
let him be his first passenger. then we talk .
Property rights on the Moon is totally moronic. It does not belong to a person or country , it belongs to humanity and as such noone should be making claims on it.
Use it , go visit , do what you want but never should the Moon be the property of an individual or organisations.

Re:Risk lives ?

[alexander_686]

The guy is what – 67 years old. Another 10 years until the first flight. 77 seems old to be a astronaut. And this is going to be team effort. Or are you suggesting that JFK should have been the first man on the moon because he pitched and backed the idea?

As for property - how would you handle somebody wanting to build a multibillion dollar research facility on the moon? Should the people who built it be able to run it or should it be the people with the biggest guns? If I wanted to build a Helim-3 mine can I build it anywhere that I wanted because nobody owns anything so nobody controls anything?

Not sure what the answer is but I might lean towards the UN granting 99 year leases or something along those lines.

Now this sounds like a perfect job for

[ihtoit]

Clothcrete. Now, since I can't find a link, here's the SP:

What this stuff is, is what it sounds like: a heavy canvas-type material doped in cement. What the inventor had was an air bladder which he'd fill, this would be wrapped in this cloth. When the bladder's fully inflated (various shapes available), you'd spray this stuff with water, wait an hour or two for it to set hard, then set to cutting holes for windows and hatches. After about a day it's cured and a: strong enough to lean on and b: basically invulnerable to small-arms fire. Apparently the MoD were all over this as an alternative to lean-to shelters for troops in semi-permanent encampments.

Re:Now this sounds like a perfect job for

[wagnerrp]

You need a whole lot of mass for any permanent structure, as you need to shield from radiation. The only reasonable solution is to build your structure using the available local materials. To that end, you actually can produce a form of cement using the lunar regolith.

Re:Now this sounds like a perfect job for

[Concerned Onlooker]

Do you mean the Neff bubble houses? He developed a technique called airforming in which a big air bladder was inflated then sprayed with gunite. After the gunite set up the bladder was deflated and pulled out to be used again.

http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/bubble-houses/

Re:Now this sounds like a perfect job for

[ihtoit]

no, this wasn't a shotcrete application, the cement was in the covering cloth already, a bit like two part epoxy composite where one part of the epoxy is already in the fibre and just needs a liberal spraying of activator (in this case, H2O) to set it. The clothcrete used non-reusable bladders, though there's nothing stopping you leaving the bladders on the inside walls to offer an insulating layer... you might try and pull the bladders out and reuse them but they didn't offer flat doped sheets to achieve this (if you managed to extract the bladder without breaking it). I guess it's down to the heat given off by the cement reaction as well that might damage the bladder material (polythene?) that would negate the possibility of reuse.

Re:Now this sounds like a perfect job for

[Plazmid]

Only problem is that the Moon lacks large amounts of water and carrying said water to the Moon would be energetically costly.

Re:Now this sounds like a perfect job for

[ihtoit]

not true, apparently there are copious deposits of water ice in the permanently shaded polar craters. On top of which, if you had to make it in situ (you wouldn't have to carry water) you would only need to carry oxygen, there is oodles of (albeit charged and otherwise highly energetic) solar proton mass flying around out there. You just have to find a way of slowing it down. Nowhere would you ever have to store hydrogen for transport from one planetary mass to another, it's the most abundant element in the entire universe.

Re:Now this sounds like a perfect job for

[Dare nMc]

Not conclusive, but Nasa says:We estimate over 600 million cubic meters (1 cubic meter = 1 metric ton) of water in these features

Re:Now this sounds like a perfect job for

[Plazmid]

That is not a lot of water. 600 million cubic meters is roughly the volume of Sydney harbor. In human terms, this is certainly quite a bit of water, however, this water is spread out over a very large area. This makes getting sufficient amounts of water difficult, especially in cold, shadowed craters(no solar power!).

Re:Now this sounds like a perfect job for

[Plazmid]

The solar proton flux is really, really, really, really low, even during a solar flare! We're talking 10s of protons per square centimeter at best here.

 

Re:Now this sounds like a perfect job for

[ihtoit]

according to io9, there may be proportionately similar quantities of water trapped in Lunar basalt as there is in terrestrial mid-ocean ridge regolith. That is a buttload of water, in potentially viable concentrations.

The moon is a harsh mistress

[Anonymous Coward]

IT'S HAPPENING

Well...

[Rorgg]

I'd like to visit The Moon on a rocket ship high in the air. Yes, I'd like to visit The Moon, but I don't think I'd like to live there.

At least bed bugs will be easy to kill there

[JoeyRox]

Just open the windows.

reexamining the idea of property

[ffflala]

Bigelow's move sounds like a bald attempt at a money/power grab, but hopefully it will help trigger some long-needed reflection on the concept of property rights. We just kind of accept how it works and get on with our lives, but there is a very strange bit of reasoning at the root of property ownership. If someone wants to "own" a bit of the moon, who should they pay, if anyone? Should it be enough that they get there first, AND can afford the weapons required to defend it from subsequent travelers? And what about real estate on Mars, Europa, and habitable planets beyond our solar system?

When a person or organization owns a bit of land, they have the right to keep (mostly) everyone else off of that property. Does that mean that anyone who owns property has in effect taken that property from everyone else? Well, sort of. The systems we've come to accept tend to ensure inequality, as property = capital, capital gains create massive wealth, and that wealth is subsequently kept from everyone else in the world, because... someone was lucky enough to be born to a property owner. It's not a particularly fair system.

Re:reexamining the idea of property

[NoImNotNineVolt]

Homesteading is the principle by which one gains ownership of an unowned natural resources by performing an act of original appropriation. Appropriation could be enacted by putting an unowned resource to active use (as with using it to produce a product), joining it with previously acquired property or by marking it as owned (as with livestock branding).

This is how the Earth's surface, originally not "owned" by anyone, turned into what it is today. If you accept that it worked here (as most people do), then there's no reason to suspect it won't work on the moon or anywhere else.

Re:reexamining the idea of property

[ffflala]

That's a good theory, but I don't believe it accurately describes how things came to be as they currently are. Some examples include: the ongoing conflicting claims of ownership rights in the middle east (particularly the so-called "Holy Land"), and also the entirety of the continents of South, Central, and North America.

Both are examples of massive tracts of land of which the original appropriators (whoever they were) have long since been displaced from "their" lands in the face of invading military forces.

Re:reexamining the idea of property

[NoImNotNineVolt]

Annexation and appropriation as a result of military conflict is orthogonal to the issue of initial appropriation. That is, nobody has currently claimed the moon. That means we don't need to kill anyone before we pry it from their hands.

Your counterexamples, the Americas, are no exception to the idea of homesteading. The indigenous peoples (or their ancestors) that once ran the show did at one point in time arrive in an unpopulated land. They, through homesteading, appropriated said land. Many centuries later, white man came and killed them.

When the indigenous peoples' ancestors first pouring in across the land bridge where we find the Bering strait today, they didn't feel the need to reimburse everyone "back home" for the new land they were homesteading. When they settled on the American land, they had not "in effect taken that property from everyone else". They had taken that property from nobody else.

Of course, with extraterrestrial land, people have this odd notion that the human race collectively owns the entire universe. Perhaps the result of some unfortunate treaties, this belief is one of the biggest obstacles to commercial development of space. Why should I have any stake of ownership in the moon? I've never been there, I've never done anything to warrant such ownership. Though it would be incredibly profitable to mine the moon for water, why would anyone bother if they couldn't legally sell any of the water they mined for lack of ownership rights?

Re:reexamining the idea of property

[jythie]

Homesteading, however, presupposes a government willing and able to enforce it. All of those 'unowned natural resource' that were appropriated WERE in use by someone else already, their original appropriation was only from the perspective of various governments which were willing to back up their own citizens occupying land. In many ways 'homesteading' was really just 'wealth redistribution' combined with 'imminent domain'., one government taking land away from people in a weaker government and giving it to their own people to develop under the idea that their people made better use of it.

Re:reexamining the idea of property

[ffflala]

In terms of legitimacy, homesteading makes as much sense for the basis of a property claim as would "first post!" So someone got to the resource first. Regardless of whether they are capable of defending their claim or not, why *should* they be able to prevent everyone else who subsequently comes along from having the same access to the land and resources that they did when they first arrived? IOW, let me turn this question back on the underlying assumption:

Why should I have any stake of ownership in the moon? I've never been there, I've never done anything to warrant such ownership.

To understand my perspective, try apply this same question to everyone else besides you. Why should the first person who can afford to get there and work resources have a claim of ownership? Why should they be able to prevent others from getting there and working the same resources? When you get down to it, property rights are based on an odd bit of reasoning: it's mine because I say it's mine, and/or because I got here before anyone else did. It might very well be how things are, but it is a bizarre bit of recursive mental bootstrapping.

Re:reexamining the idea of property

[NoImNotNineVolt]

When the ancestors of indigenous Americans crossed over the land bridge to the Americas ages ago to appropriate the newly discovered lands through homesteading, what government was willing and able to enforce it? Who were these unowned natural resources in use by? Are you really honestly suggesting that all land was always owned by someone, since the dawn of time, and that never in the history of the human race was unowned land appropriated by humans?

Re:reexamining the idea of property

[NoImNotNineVolt]

Well, sure, I suppose it is a very arbitrary approach to the problem of appropriation of unowned property. Really, it's no better than simply holding a lottery to award parcels of land to random people. The end result would be the same: unowned property becomes owned property.

My point is that today we have a problem. There is no extraterrestrial real estate. It's not that there isn't stuff out there, it's that nobody owns it, and that nobody can own it. This prevents commercial development of space. Now, you may believe that commercial development of space is undesirable. That the last thing we need is billboards and McDonalds in space. That we belong down here, on mama Earth. Everyone's entitled to their own opinion. Conversely, there are those of us that believe that commercial development of space is our best chance at getting off this rock in any meaningful way. This isn't currently possible, due to a legal vacuum when it comes to extraterrestrial property rights. The solution to this problem is to establish ownership rights in space. Whether it's by homesteading or by lottery or by any other means, legal recognition of ownership of property is necessary for commercial development.

That being said, I feel that homesteading is the best approach here, for several reasons. One, it's how we did things on Earth, so we know that it works. Two, it seems to many people less arbitrary than a lottery (regardless of whether or not it actually is less arbitrary). Three, it's an actual proposition. That is, I'm proposing homesteading as the mechanism through which property rights can be established on the moon. You're proposing that it's a bad idea. Your proposition does not result in property rights being established on the moon.

Re:reexamining the idea of property

[multimediavt]

Homesteading is the principle by which one gains ownership of an unowned natural resources by performing an act of original appropriation. Appropriation could be enacted by putting an unowned resource to active use (as with using it to produce a product), joining it with previously acquired property or by marking it as owned (as with livestock branding). This is how the Earth's surface, originally not "owned" by anyone, turned into what it is today. If you accept that it worked here (as most people do), then there's no reason to suspect it won't work on the moon or anywhere else.

But--and this is a big but--someone or some nation had claim to the land before the homesteaders got there. Undeveloped land in the U.S territories prior to the states being there was still claimed by the United States and by the indigenous peoples before. Today, there truly is no unclaimed land in the world, and now they are starting to claim chunks of ocean floor. So, homesteading works on undeveloped land, sure, but you still have to get past any national claims or an army will remove you. In the case of the Moon, the U.N. has declared it belonging to no one, but not all nations necessarily signed that treaty. That's not to say the others won't defend that treaty regardless.

Re:reexamining the idea of property

[multimediavt]

That is, nobody can currently claim the moon.

FTFY. We don't think we own the entire universe. Your hyperbole aside I would have to say that most of us have grown up from the Manifest Destiny thinking you are demonstrating. As far as land appropriation goes, I would call the early peoples of North America a migrating species more than on a land grab. Most all of those peoples lived in harmony with nature and most of their neighbors. Any boundaries or claims were simply there to keep peace, not to claim ownership. The whole concept of personal property was foreign to most Native American tribes.

Why should we not mine the moon? Well for one thing it could potentially alter the mass of the moon, thereby altering the tides on Earth and screw us all. Yeah, the moon is slowly drifting away and some loss of mass might fix that, but Mars is a much safer place to colonize, mine, develop. The impact on Earth is negligible compared to what disastrous things could happen to Earth if we ef up the moon. That's why people smarter than you are in charge. Because they have the foresight to think of these things and not just dollar signs.

Re:reexamining the idea of property

[jythie]

True, if you go far back enough there was some point in history when there were no people on an area of land, but we are talking tens of thousands of years ago and, also rather importantly, those people were essentially small governments claiming land. Even then you generally had nomadic groups who settled rather asymmetrically and there were usually conflicts when one settled and another did not.

That being said, homesteading can be shoehorned into ancient humans yes, but as a philosophy and legal framework it did not exist until LONG after that point and was part of a larger moral framework for transferring land from one group to another.

Re:reexamining the idea of property

[NoImNotNineVolt]

And when the indigenous people appropriated this land through homesteading, who had claim to the land before that? Are you honestly suggesting that all land has always been owned by someone since the dawn of time?

But yes, homesteading only works with unowned land. That's why I brought it up in the context of appropriating the land on the moon. Because, as you point out, the moon belongs to no one (and there are no national claims or armies to worry about). If we want ownership rights on the moon (widely believed to be a prerequisite to commercial development), then homesteading seems to be an appropriate means to bring that about.

Re:reexamining the idea of property

[ffflala]

That being said, I feel that homesteading is the best approach here, for several reasons. One, it's how we did things on Earth, so we know that it works. Two, it seems to many people less arbitrary than a lottery (regardless of whether or not it actually is less arbitrary). Three, it's an actual proposition. That is, I'm proposing homesteading as the mechanism through which property rights can be established on the moon. You're proposing that it's a bad idea. Your proposition does not result in property rights being established on the moon.

I'm afraid you're taking my position to an extreme I did not intend. I'm not proposing that homesteading is a bad idea, rather that it is a arbitrary one. We seem to agree on this point. I also agree that space *development* is in the best interest of humanity, and possibly all other forms of life on earth.

Where we part ways, I think, is on our opinions of the desirability of the *commercial* development of space --that is, profit-generating activities. I will gladly grant you that, in practical terms, that is how things work right now, it's how things have worked for quite a long time now, it probably won't dramatically change any time soon, and it is probably one of the more realistic approaches we can take to actually get humans off of this one rock and out into the rest of the universe.

What I am unwilling to grant you is the idea that applying concepts of property rights, as we have come to understand them, is the right approach simply because it will spur a certain type of development. There are other reasons for extraterrestrial human development besides turning a profit: survival of the species, expanding our knowledge, that sort of thing.

My concern is that if we just unthinkingly apply an arbitrary system as we expand, we will also expand the injustices and inequalities that this arbitrary system brings us. If commercial activities indeed turn out to be the primary motivation behind developments on the moon and elsewhere, it will simply serve to increase the unequal distribution of wealth and power that we're currently facing, and the myriad injustices that come about because of it.

Re:reexamining the idea of property

[smugfunt]

Why should I have any stake of ownership in the moon? I've never been there, I've never done anything to warrant such ownership.

Some of my tax dollars (hypothetically) went towards opening the road. Not enough to claim ownership perhaps, but maybe enough to have some say in who can.
Suppose some aliens turned up tomorrow and claimed the Moon for themselves. Fair enough?

Re:reexamining the idea of property

[NoImNotNineVolt]

We don't think we own the entire universe. Your hyperbole aside I would have to say that most of us have grown up from the Manifest Destiny thinking you are demonstrating.

I refer you to the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, more commonly known as the Outer Space Treaty:
The treaty explicitly forbids any government from claiming a celestial resource such as the Moon or a planet, claiming that they are the common heritage of mankind.

So now that we've established that my hyperbole is really more like a quote of the relevant treaty, and that actually none of us have grown up (sic) from the Manifest Destiny thinking that is embodied in the relevant treaty, we can move on to your other points.

Regarding classification of the initial appropriation of American land as "a migrating species" rather than "a land grab", that's really not relevant. The aboriginal people came, and they settled/developed land that was previously uninhabited, simply by virtue of being the first to do so. That they lived in harmony with their neighbors (a questionable claim) would only further demonstrate that the land was in fact appropriated by homesteading and not annexed via violent conflict. Feel free to quibble over semantics, but in the end, this initial appropriation of America meets the definition of homesteading. That it was tribes doing the homesteading, as opposed to individuals, would be analogous to corporations homesteading on the moon, as opposed to individuals.

Regarding your argument against mining the moon, it's rather absurd. The moon's mass is about 7.35e22 kg. There is 1.4e21 kg of water on the Earth (Earth is only 0.023% water, by mass). If we mined an "Earth's total water" amount of water from the moon (way, way more water than is expected to be on the moon, as you may expect, since Earth is covered in oceans and the moon is made of dry ass dust), we'd decrease its mass by a whopping 1.9%. I don't think that a reduction in tidal forces of this magnitude would be noticeable on Earth, but don't forget that this is an absolute worst case scenario. The actual effect, after robbing the moon for all of its water, would actually be orders of magnitude less than this, since there just isn't that much water on the moon. Even assuming the moon is as wet as Earth (by mass), we'd be stripping 0.023% of the moon's mass. But again, the moon isn't quite as wet as our pale blue dot, so I'd expect an effect orders of magnitude smaller than that. In a nutshell, the idea that we could "ef up the moon" by changing its mass is... lunacy.

For an interesting read about mining the moon, read up on Jerome Pearson's proposal for a Lunar Space Elevator. It really is quite sad that we're not doing this yet.

Re:reexamining the idea of property

[NoImNotNineVolt]

Well, it seems we're on the same page after all.

I have a history of posting diatribes against capitalism, against the widening inequity in the distribution of wealth, against the exploitation of the poor by the uberwealthy. I understand that commercial development of space, if undertaken the same way business ventures are undertaken on Earth, will likely exacerbate the economic problems I regularly complain about. I fully expect that peons like you and I will see a disproportionately tiny share of the benefits afforded by the exploitation of extraterrestrial resources.

I just think that getting off this rock takes priority over anything else. I'd gladly give my own life (and yours too!) if it guaranteed mankind a ticket to the stars. At some point, I can't help but see economics and preservation of the human race as two separate propositions, and the latter is to me infinitely more important than the former. If we have to suffer under some rich assholes even more than we do today in order to get off this rock, I'm still all for it. Sure, ideally it wouldn't have to be like that. Ideally we could all high-five each other in a Star Trek camaraderie into space, with nobody worrying about trite shit like profit or private ownership. But there may not be time for idealism. This is too important to be patient, be measured, and ensure we get it right the first time. We need to go, go, go before the big one hits. We need to get off our asses and move it. We as a race have incurred great increase in inequality for much less worthy causes, like, say, the industrial revolution. If factories were important enough for us to just wing it and press forward, I think the preservation of the human race is at the very least an equally valid justification.

Re:reexamining the idea of property

[NoImNotNineVolt]

Suppose some aliens turned up tomorrow and claimed the Moon for themselves.

Possession is nine tenths of the law?

I see your argument, and it does appeal to me at some level. Indeed, we all helped with the first steps, and it would be nice if we had something more to show for it besides grainy footage of guys bouncing around in black&white. However, it's clear to me that we need to establish a framework for ownership of property on the moon (and elsewhere) if we want any commercial development to take place there. While I'd like to get some more out of the investment in NASA paving the way to the moon, I'm much more interested in seeing real development of the moon happen as soon as possible. If I have to forfeit any claim I may or may not have to the moon for this to happen, I'm all for it.

Re:reexamining the idea of property

[ffflala]

That's a very interesting and selfless approach. I did not mean to suggest that commercial development of space be halted until we figure out some utopian approach to justice and equality. Rather, I hope that the idea of lunar real estate heralds a broader reexamination of the its own underlying, bizarre assumptions, assumptions that are usually just taken for granted.

If we ever do get off earth in a sustainable manner, I suppose a lot of the problems with an arbitrary systems of property rights will naturally disappear -- after all, for-profit enterprise seems like it would make little sense to explorers whose intention is to venture only further outwards.

Re:reexamining the idea of property

[Bismuthprince]

Whatever the solution, some hardcore diplomacy will be in order.
Homesteading has a very definite problem of it's own: where is the lower limit on what is considered appropriation? What's to stop a person or organisation from doing the bare minimum of land development on unreasonably giant tracts of lunar landscape just to lay claim to it first, like some real-estate patent troll?
Acts like that will most definitely lead to disagreements on land ownership which will eventually lead to violence, which I think we'd like to prevent.

Then again, feel free to disregard this post as I've thought long and hard but I can't think of a solution that wouldn't be crushed by greed, insanity and/or a lust for power.

Re:reexamining the idea of property

[NoImNotNineVolt]

Our current approach to preventing the inevitable bullshit/violence that would result is unacceptable to me. Instead of allowing people to get out there and figure shit out in whatever messy way they inevitably will, we've outlawed any such attempts. We've become party to a treaty that effectively bans commercial development of extraterrestrial resources. I think this approach is a little extreme, analogous to locking everyone in their homes to prevent street crime. Sure, homesteading isn't perfect, and I agree that it will most definitely lead to problems. However, I'm not convinced that a de facto ban on development is any better.

Re:reexamining the idea of property

[Bismuthprince]

I don't disagree with you. As I said, I've failed to come up with a safe solution; it's just that I see some problems with implementing old laws and practices in this case. However, for lack of a perfect solution; I agree it would be more exciting to see if we went with the least-bad solution.

Re:reexamining the idea of property

[Anonymous Coward]

> And when the indigenous people appropriated this land through homesteading...Are you honestly suggesting that all land has always been owned by someone since the dawn of time?

Nowhere was either of those statements implied. The concept of ownership isn't applicable outside of an organization to make a claim. He mentioned that the land had been claimed (and ostensibly appropriated), not homesteaded, by indigenous people. Why are you quibbling over semantics if you aren't going to pay attention to the wording?

Appropriation and claim (almost interchangeable) are soft terms. Claiming is a legal act. How do you appropriate a chunk of space? You choose to defend it and usually demarcate it to ensure you don't stretch your own resources chasing someone X distance away. This is how indigenous peoples and most homesteaders originally appropriated land and later laid claim to it.

Re:reexamining the idea of property

[canadiannomad]

Really, it's no better than simply holding a lottery to award parcels of land to random people.

I actually think it should go a step further. Lets say the entire surface of the moon is property of all humans alive today. Assign equal sized parcels by a pure random lottery to every man woman and child. If they sell their property on the moon to some rich guy, then it isn't our fault. Just let economics take its course from there.

See: overreach

[Anonymous Coward]

1b) defeat one's own purpose by trying to do more than is possible.
"he was an arrogant egotist who overreached himself"

A dollar a square metre

[petes_PoV]

The Moon is about 38 million sq. km. Divided amongst 7 billion people, that is just over 5,000 sq. m. each.

With shades of The Man Who Sold the Moon, this guy can have my piece at the rate in the title. Just send me the cheque.

Re:A dollar a square metre

[Anonymous Coward]

yea but only half of that is prime real-estate. The rest has a view on the parking lot.

Re:A dollar a square metre

[Anonymous Coward]

yea but only half of that is prime real-estate. The rest has a view on the parking lot.

That depends on what you want to do. Radio telescopes don't want your scenic Earth view.

Own???

[Anonymous Coward]

I just have this mental picture of Daffy Duck jumping up and down shouting "Mine! Mine! Mine!'...

The man who sold the moon.

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds like something straight out of a Heinlein novel.

SOLD

[Anonymous Coward]

I will sell my 5 moonacre claim to Mr. Bigelow for 30,0000 in Bitcoins. Contact me.

Hotel Tycoon Moon Version

[Anonymous Coward]

Hotel Tycoon Moon Version

Americans seem to think

[Anonymous Coward]

that because someone made money in one field, being rich qualifies you for any other field. Bigelow is a howling lunatic, money just means other people listen to the howls. If Bigelow was some guy dressed in tatters pushing a shopping cart yelling about the Moon, you'd walk on the other side of the street.

This the same Bigelow that laid off half his workers just two years ago?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/20/uk-space-business-bigelow-idUSLNE79J01T20111020

Oh yeah! But now suddenly it's Moon Hotel time?

Oh wait, didn't someone else want a space hotel?

http://www.cnn.com/TECH/9705/25/japan.space/

Well, it's only been 16 years, maybe they need 50 more?

Re:Americans seem to think

[0123456]

A 'howling lunatic' who's actually put space station modules in orbit for testing. That puts him ahead of everyone in the 'space hotel' business, unless you count the Russians flying tourists to ISS.

Re:Americans seem to think

[Anonymous Coward]

Howard Hughes got the Spruce Goose to fly for a minute too.

Re:Americans seem to think

[jythie]

Well, that is pretty ingrained into our culture. Wealth is associated with superiority, often linked to intelligence or morality. It is one of the reasons the small business lobby is such an easy sucker for manipulation.

Official space helmet on, Captain Video!

[bobbied]

One of these days... One of these days...To the moon, Alice! -- Ralph

Oh

[Anonymous Coward]

No single entity should own the moon (subscript: without giving me cash)!

'Murrica!!!

[bob_super]

Hey look, there's something! I must figure out how to own or profit from it!

(yes I know, everyone did that at some point, not just the US)

All of a sudden Joni Mitchell's inside my head...

[ArtFart]

...singing "Pave paradise, Put up a parking lot"

Re:the whole thing is backwards

[pigiron]

Communism!

Give everyone a few square meters

[Princeofcups]

Divide the moon up into N Billion equal pieces, and give each person on the planet an equal share. Then Bigelow can buy his land on the free market. Oh wait, that's not what he wants. He wants the moon carved up and given to the wealthiest people to make them even wealthier, backed by the world military to make sure that the poor get nothing out of it. Ah, capitalism. How you solve all the world's problems.

Re:Give everyone a few square meters

[Anonymous Coward]

Americans are screwed anyway, thanks to the travesty known as "Eminent Domain."

captcha: unfair

Re:Give everyone a few square meters

[XcepticZP]

The moon is not yours to cut up into "N billion equal pieces", just like the earth is not yours to cut up in those pieces. Quit blaming capitalism for everything you see as greedy. It isn't capitalism when your own moral system can't extend to novel scenarios. It is not capitalism when you see someone trying to gain benefit from investing in a new frontier.

We may very well have problems coming up with a framework for dealing with these sorts of things. But to come out and call it evil capitalism for someone trying to get reform in that area, even if it's for their own benefit, is just bullshit.

He wants the moon carved up and given to the wealthiest people to make them even wealthier, backed by the world military to make sure that the poor get nothing out of it..

Well, why the fuck not? I'm not doing anything with that land that you claim is mine, supposedly. Why the fuck should it "belong" to me solely because I exist on planet earth? What about all our children that you are fucking over by not giving them their share? Are you going to take it from someone that already owns a moon share? And if you did want to give it to subsequent children what's to stop people from over-breeding just to get "their fair share" of the moon land by having it taken from existing owners? Because fuck them, that's why? And people like you think capitalism is somehow wrong.

Face it, communal property is just bullshit. Either you admit it belongs to those that use it first, or you admit to it being given equally to all and constantly take from existing owners to give to newborns, or you give it all to some authoritarian entity to divvy up in whatever manner it sees fit (or rather tax it). I don't know about you, but I see only one option above that is fair to all.

Re:Give everyone a few square meters

[ninjacheeseburger]

Divide the moon up into N Billion equal pieces, and give each person on the planet an equal share. Then Bigelow can buy his land on the free market. Oh wait, that's not what he wants. He wants the moon carved up and given to the wealthiest people to make them even wealthier, backed by the world military to make sure that the poor get nothing out of it. Ah, capitalism. How you solve all the world's problems.

Then all he has to do is go to a poor country, where he can buy it all up for next to nothing anyway as no one is going to turn down money for land on the moon if you can't afford to eat.

survey

[photo pilot]

I say we give him clear title to anything he gets surveyed.

So...

[Capt James McCarthy]

Who's getting the rights to Uranus?

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Too late!

I gave you ten bucks for Uranus last night.

What if...

[scuzzlebutt]

...that's no moon [but] it's a space station?

Too. Fucking. Early.

[luis_a_espinal]

Bigelow is applying to the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation to amend a 1967 international agreement on the moon so that a system of private property rights can be established there.

Too early. And if ownership is to be given, let it be to nations in terms of sovereign rights (or leases), not private individuals. Then those nations can lease exploitation/leasing rights to individuals and corporations.

The Moon is humanity's patrimony. Individuals and private entities must not have ownership right on the moon just in the same way we do with Antarctica. It is simply just too early. Here be dragons.

I would much prefer private entities explore the concept of asteroid mining and space station building. Once that is done, and it is done for a while, maybe, just maybe we can talk about private property rights on the Moon.

Re:Too. Fucking. Early.

[multimediavt]

I would argue against ever effing with the Moon. It kind of has some serious implications for Earth if things go horribly wrong down the road. Space stations, asteroids, or even Mars colonization don't bother me. The impact on the rest of us is negligible compared to something causing the Moon to crash into us, or it get destroyed by something stupid we did. Nope, LITFA!

Re:Too. Fucking. Early.

[artfulshrapnel]

Heck, I say make the moon folk establish their own nations, keep the international treaty in effect. You say you want to own part of the moon? Renounce your earth citizenship and take up residence. You can have as much as you can keep control of and utilize.

Re:Too. Fucking. Early.

[baKanale]

The Moon is rather big, and therefore would take an enormous amount of energy to de-orbit or destroy it. If we ever get to the point, technologically, where we could do something like that then you'd have to be equally worried about that same catastrophe happening on Earth and ruining everything down here.

Re:Too. Fucking. Early.

[XcepticZP]

The Moon is humanity's patrimony. Individuals and private entities must not have ownership right on the moon just in the same way we do with Antarctica. It is simply just too early. Here be dragons.

Oh, so you want it to be like public property, right? Where it's simultaneously your property, everyone's property, and nobody's property but the government's all at the same time? Yeah, how about no.

Land is precious. Land is what set a lot of humanity free from oppressive/persecutive states and religions. People explored, created new frontiers and made new lives for themselves in new lands at great expense and danger to themselves. This is no different. Just because you feel some sort of sentimental attachment to a dead piece of rock floating around us does not give you the right do deny it to those who wish to go there to make a new life. A new life free from interference by people like you, who think they have some sort of intellectually-imposed authority when it comes to decisions like this.

You have taken ALL the land on this earth, divvied it up to groups of individuals and now you seek to do the same on the moon? So much for being a free society, when you force people to live under your rule while at the same time you call "dibbs" on every useable piece of land in the solar system. Because yeah, people like you will eventually extend whatever you do to the moon such that it applies to the solar system, and beyond.

God I hope not

[Phoenix666]

The day terrestrial laws apply to extraterrestrial space is the day humanity curls up into a little ball and dies. Space is vast, and the ability of dissidents and frontiersmen to charge out into it and carve life from cold balls of rock gives hope to all those who despair of the cause of freedom here on Earth.

And if I'm the intrepid guy who makes it to Mars and builds a sustainable colony there, the last g*damn thing I'm gonna worry about is filing paperwork with retard bureaucrats in Washington DC or the UN. They can all go hang. In fact, I would post a sign on the outskirts of my settlement: "Lawyers, politicians, and bureaucrats shot on sight."

Re:God I hope not

[DerekLyons]

Space is vast, and the ability of dissidents and frontiersmen to charge out into it and carve life from cold balls of rock gives hope to all those who despair of the cause of freedom here on Earth.

It's nobodies fault but their own that the "dissidents and frontiersmen" live in a world so totally disconnected from reality. And seriously, if it's choice between providing a foundation for proper exploration and expansion and feeding the childish fantasies of the "dissidents and frontiersmen"... well, it's no choice really. Screw them. It's past time the grew up.

Re:God I hope not

[Anonymous Coward]

"Lawyers, politicians, and bureaucrats shot on sight."

That's funny. I have the same sign on my lawn.

Owning The Moon

[Anonymous Coward]

So this guy is making the claim that someone (or multiples of someone) should own the moon. Reading between the lines, I guess he means that person is him, or entities that he owns. What are the chances the average person will be able to own more than a couple of square inches of the moon? In the meantime the wealthy will buy up hundreds of square kilometers of property and mineral rights, thereby making the rich even richer.

Gosh, who could have predicted that outcome?

What the heck. I'll sell it to him

[Mike Buddha]

Gimme a call. I'll sell you the whole moon, man.

I'm totally cool with it, except...

[Overzeetop]

He can't put it on the side facing the Earth. I don't mind him building a hotel there, but I don't want it in my view shed, or in the view shed of [insert favorite historic landmark here].

Re:I'm totally cool with it, except...

[morgauxo]

Why?
Do you really think what you see is going to change? Do you have any concept of scale?
How about if I paint a single grain of sand at an otherwise pristine beach that you are looking at from a couple of miles away?

Of course, if we someday have several whole large lunar cities that might be visible. Even then I doubt we would see much except for the lights in the dark parts. That might look kind of neat actually. Instead of phases where parts of the moon look 'natural' or aren't visible at all we would have phases of still natural looking part vs city lights part.

Re:I'm totally cool with it, except...

[Agent0013]

And you don't see how that could mess with coral reef spawning times? And I could very well see that large mining operations could change the look of the full moon also. I do see the point that letting commercial ownership of the moon will help to spur the innovation to get us there. I am just pointing out that it has a big impact on life for everyone down here on Earth. We might just end up having to take out those lunar cities to reclaim our dark night skies during the new moon. Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure! But that would leave a mark also.

Let the big boys (government) do it:

[Hartree]

"So bugger off and do something useful with your money."

So, he should shut up and just play Kerbal Space Program like the rest of us?

If Elon Musk et al had that attitude, they wouldn't be about to launch the Falcon Heavy.

What's needed by private enterprise

[sl4shd0rk]

Is more focus on humanity and less on capitalism. What's wrong with spending $20B to benefit people who can't afford to spend $20? Especially when $20B isn't even a drop in the bucket to your collective wealth.

We need the 1% to start acting more like the tiny speck of life that they belong to in comparison to the scale of the very large and perhaps unpopulated universe -- wIth interests to coincide with that. Living for your wealth and greed only goes so far in the large scheme of things.

Re:What's needed by private enterprise

[morgauxo]

The best thing to do with money is to keep it moving. Starting a new industry in an unpopulated place will generate jobs. Giving billions of people handouts will just make the money disappear and at the end of the day all of the same people are hungry.

Re:What's needed by private enterprise

[TheSync]

Is more focus on humanity and less on capitalism.

Capitalism creates the economy that produces wealth to reduce poverty and improve living conditions. For example, China's decision to abandon strict communist has brought hundreds of millions of Chinese out of the extreme poverty of living on under $1 per day.

Capitalism also allows companies to effectively meet the individual needs of people. Compare the small number of models of Soviet-built cars with the vast selection of cars available in the capitalist sphere, from the Smart Car to the Hummer, to meet every possible personal need.

Isn't meeting the individual needs of people a "human" effort?

Capitalism is also slowly working its way into the "bottom billion" of world consumers, figuring out ways to bring them all of the consumer goods we have in the west, but sold in ways that meet their needs - for example, Unilever's Comfort One Rinse, designed to reduce the amount of water used when washing clothes in areas where water is scarce.

Or take D.Light, a for-profit social enterprise that has sold 12 million solar-power lamps to people in 40 countries who don't have regular access to electric power.

No, he can't own the moon. He can take it though.

[whistlingtony]

Why bother? What resources are there? Helium3? Gravity? Is having gravity worth it? If he wants property rights, why not just build up a satellite hotel. There's nothing special about the moon. There's no magnetosphere to protect from radiation, correct? A floating satellite would get just as much solar power. If he wants to give people a chance to walk on the moon (that is something lots of people would pay for, so I guess the moon has THAT going for it), why not just ride down from the satellite?

I wonder... If I go on a space ride, do I own my exhilations? How about my shit and piss? Can I charge for them? That's valuable mass there, and someone will eventually use it to grow food in. Can I charge him? Or does he own it since he paid to have it "escape" the gravity of Earth?

Not that my opinion matters in the slightest, since I'm not rich, but I say.... No. He can't have the moon. It's a cultural heritage of the folks on Earth. Go mine an asteroid or something that no one gives a shit about. I think he can own the colony. He can own the ship, and the walls, and the shit, and the piss... but he can't own the moon. Unless he takes it by force. Then we're SOL.

dear Mister Bigelow:

[Ralph Spoilsport]

FUCK YOU.

Re:dear Mister Bigelow:

[multimediavt]

[golf claps] Well said! That greedy bastard can go buy an asteroid and shove it up his ass. Leave the thing that regulates tides on Earth alone!

Re:the whole thing is backwards

[jythie]

Ahm, except for no subletting, that is how things work. What you described are essentially property taxes.

Advertisements

[stewsters]

He is trying to get room to display giant billboards, isn't he? Perhaps using lasers at first?

colony

[Anonymous Coward]

The moon will be like the United States when it first formed.The first colony to establish residence there will own it,make it a sovereign nation unto itself.The other countries will try to take it away and enforce their rules,and the lunar colony will rebel ,and become an independent nation.At least I hope that happens.

I saw it first!

[Anonymous Coward]

Having seen the moon before Bigelow, I believe that I have a more valid claim.

Re:the whole thing is backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

No. People and legal entities own land. The Catholic Church owns huge stretches of land. Why? Because it "discovered" the land some centuries ago. There were people using it, but fuck them.

Is this moral? I don't think so. There are people that have land with the sole purpose of renting to the people who actually work on it to produce food. They don't provide tools, seeds, anything, just the license to use the land. And why do they "own" the land? Probably because an ancestor sucked a priest's dick, and received it in return.

You should have the right to rent the land which is owned by every living organism on Earth. If you don't make use of it yourself, other people should be able to rent it.

1967 or 1968

[Anonymous Coward]

"Bigelow is applying to the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation to amend a 1967 international agreement on the moon so that a system of private property rights can be established there."

And a dude in Iran is applying to the Federal Atomic Administration's Offlice of Commercial Nuclear Weapons to amend a 1968 international agreement on nuclear weapons so that a system of private weapon rights can be established there.

Re:No, he can't own the moon. He can take it thoug

[artfulshrapnel]

I think that you're both suggesting the same thing. He's requesting they establish rules for private property ownership on interstellar bodies, and is opposed to a single entity claiming ownership of the entire moon. See that last sentence: "But, yes, multiple entities, groups, individuals, yes, they should have the opportunity to own the moon." He's saying something like this:

I want the ability to own a square mile of the moon and build an ice mine there, separate the water, and sell the hydrogen and oxygen to NASA as rocket fuel. But I need assurances that nobody will just walk up and take my mine later by saying "you can't own part of the moon because of this treaty from the '60s".

Also the resources worth having are: Assembly and work space that are in low gravity, launch platforms with 1/10th the fuel requirements for orbit, unknown mineral resources, water to turn into rocket fuel, and tourist destinations. (just to name a few that occur to me off the top of my head)

Re:No, he can't own the moon. He can take it thoug

[Plazmid]

The Moon has no resources we don't have on Earth, however, it has them 'cheaper.'

Building a large structure in space like an orbital resort or a solar power satellite from materials sent from Earth would be impractically expensive. However, if one gets this material from the Moon, these sorts of structures become a lot more practical.

It is a lot less energetically intensive to launch a kilogram of something from the Moon(hard vacuum, low gravity) than it is to launch a kilogram of something from the Earth(air, high gravity). Just compare the Apollo Lunar Lander to a Proton rocket bound for the International Space Station.

Now as for mining the Moon as opposed to asteroids:
1. asteroids are typically quite a bit farther out than the Moon
2. the lunar environment is fairly well characterized: we have 382 kg of near pristine samples of lunar material, while we have only micrograms of samples of asteroidal material.
3.we know how to mine stuff in gravity, we currently do not know how to mine stuff in microgravity

Re:the whole thing is backwards

[morgauxo]

I've put a lot of time, effort and money into repairing, upgrading and maintaining my rental property. What gives someone else the right to enjoy the fruits of my labor for free? There is a reason that it is cheaper (over time) to buy a home than to rent one. You are paying for a lot more than just the right to 'be there'.

Tragedy of the Commons

[ZombieBraintrust]

My parents purchased a house. My dad got a job somewhere else and they rented the house out. When my dad eventually moved back that house was trashed. Roaches, weeds in the yard, damage inside and out. The people renting the house had no incintive to keep the place clean let alone build improvents to it. Your also putting a huge block in front of anyone who wants to build on the moon. The only people who can build on the moon with your law are the Googles and Apples of the world. Common people can't afford to pay every earthling a share.

another sell-out

[Tom]

Look, the next sell-out is in the making.

There's a reason for those international treaties, and they come from a time when mankind still had vision, not just credit lines.

Private enterprise is a medicine with side-effects. It brings much good, but it comes with a price-tag. One of them is the loss of the commons, the sell-out of the public to the private.

There used to be a lot of public goods. Spaces, streets, whole corporations owned by the people. Usually in the areas where we agreed that the benefit of everyone is more important than the profit of the few. The postal service, the Internet of our grandparents, is one of them. In private hands, it could have gone any way of many. Maybe similar, but maybe some analysts would have convinced the postal company/ies that higher prices would be more than offset by the lower amount of customers, resulting in higher margins and thus higher profits - and writing letters would have been reserved for the rich.

As a society, we decided it's not worth taking the risk and we'd rather have the ability to communicate for everyone.

So, which risk are we taking in giving private ownership of moons and planets to private enterprise, and why did our parents decide against it to the point of making a treaty about it in a time long before it was even near practical?

Don't think proposals made by the super rich are for the general benefit of humanity. Nobody ever became super rich by being selfless.

financial crisis

[Tom]

'When there isn't law and order,' he said, 'there's chaos.'

Did someone just describe the financial crisis and how de-regulation caused it?

Re:No, he can't own the moon. He can take it thoug

[morgauxo]

Gravity is a pretty big deal. Look at the health effects of long term ISS stays.

Helium 3 - might be priceless! Might be worthless! We don't know how that will work out yet.

What else?
Water, oxygen, metals, even rock to make cement. Not exactly stuff that is hard to come by on Earth but a whole lot harder to get into space from Earth than it is from the moon. Your floating satellites could be made of lunar materials.

Riding down from a satellite to the lunar surface? Nope, not a viable tourism idea. Satellites are stable when they orbit Earth. They are NOT stable in orbit of the moon. the moon's gravity is too 'lumpy'. It would take too much fuel to keep a 'hotel' in orbit of the moon permanently. Ever wonder why the moon has no natural satellites of it's own? It's not because the Earth would steal them. If that were true than the return home for the Apollo asronauts would have been free!

Re:the whole thing is backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

You might have misunderstood the post. Despite the fact that it referred to land and you refer to property = a building. I'm not going to say what kind of system would be the best but obviously you should benefit from the effort and money you've put in but at the same time someone who does nothing else than "owns" land shouldn't necessarily benefit from it if there are other people who would work and build on it. A system in which nobody "owns" land but only rents it from the collective could then build or produce something on it. That kind of system might work better if it was regulated so that as long as whatever you have built on the land you rent keeps generating a certain profit adjusted for inflation, you can rent it for an infinite amount of time (to encourage long-term investment) despite other interested parties willing to pay more. It would then not be that different from property taxes but with the advantage that people who cannot be bothered to do anything useful with land they're lucky enough to inherit would not get rent money they've done nothing to deserve. Because if property taxes came even close to covering defense, a lot of such land owners would sell. And IMHO property taxes should almost exclusively cover defense since what else is as closely linked to land than defending it? Defense is a continuous expenditure and you get a disproportionate benefit from it for the one time investment of buying land because land is such a ridiculously safe investment.

Hawaii

[Diakoneo]

In Hawaii, I believe no one is allowed to own land. That state owns it all and leases it back to the homeowners. Maybe we could create some independent government authority that would 'own' the Moon, and lease land out to the homesteaders.

Apples and oranges.

[DerekLyons]

The problem is that lunar dust isn't like earth dust. Earth dust consists largely of organic materials (which are relatively soft) and well worn non-organic materials (which are relatively rounded). Lunar dust is something entirely - it's all non-organic and it's very little worn, meaning it's abrasive as hell. This means that if there's any relative movement or wiping, it simply abrades ordinary dust seals away. (Very quickly in fact - the Apollo astronauts suits were badly damaged after only a few hours of exposure.) Keeping lunar dust out is like keeping sand out, which is a much harder task.

Re:Apples and oranges.

[tibit]

Yep. So you have some lunar dust on a spacesuit glove, and then you attempt to wipe any transparent surface. Poof, your transparent surface is now a milky surface that you can't see through. That stuff is nasty and will eat through elastomeric seals on, say, rotating shafts, like there was no tomorrow. Lunar dust is the mother of all dusts. It is the reason anyone with any brains should be shorting any lunar colonization/hotel stocks if such become publicly traded. It'll be a sure bet for at least the first decade of permanent Moon inhabitation, if any company can survive that long, that is.

Re:Apples and oranges.

[Plazmid]

Well, we have plenty of technologies for dealing with highly abrasive materials and operating in highly abrasive environments.

Take for instance the concrete pump, it's a device that moves a slurry of fine(and many times not so fine) particles at high rates of speed with a decent MTBF.

We have cars, trucks, and mining equipment that can operate with a decent MTBF in abrasive and sandy environments

We have helicopters that have to deal with operation in sand environments, where blades and other fast moving components essentially get sand blasted!

And there has been some recent work on lunar regolith tolerant connectors.

Now the bigger issue that we have isn't that the dust is abrasive, but that we can't model how the dust behaves! Granular materials like lunar regolith do not have scaling laws. Thus, we can't make small scale 'wind tunnel tests' on systems that handle granular materials, the only way to test is at full scale.

So when someone wants to build a new type of concrete plant, they test it out at near full scale and tweak it until it works, because we have no good way to computationally model it before hand. And even then, most concrete plants and other systems that handle granular materials do not work very well. They tend to experience jams and other problems which must be fixed with regular maintenance.

And we don't know why they jam or even in some cases why they work in the first place!

Thus we'd have trouble building a 'concrete plant' on the Moon without impractically large expenses, because we don't understand dust.

Putting the buggy in front of the horse

[Anonymous Coward]

Until this bigelow guy has the capacity of putting a lemonade stand on the moon, he should leave the FAA alone.

Blackstone nailed it

[spasm]

"There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property, or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe." (Blackstone, 1766 Commentaries on the Laws of England: Volume II of the Rights of Things

The US does NOT own the moon

[msobkow]

You go get property rights/permission from EVERY nation in the UN, you greedy fucking pig.

Re:the whole thing is backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

Naw, just some fucking hippie, that's all.

I wonder ...

[golodh]

How the US government should come to have any right to award property rights on the moon.

Can anybody explain to multi-billionaires Hung Ho, Baksheesh Kapor, and Rubel Gazpromovitch why they should file their claims in Washington rather than with their local government?

19th century economics for a 21st century moon?

[Paul Fernhout]

Great post on recognizing public goods (due in part to both positive and negative externalities). Further, in order to live well on the Moon or Mars or Asteroids, we will need all sorts of post-scarcity technologies like robotics, AI, 100% material recycling, self-replicating machines, 3D printers, telemedicine, maybe DNA-reprogramming or advanced medicines for microgravity survival, distributed information systems, advanced design tools, better power systems be they solar or muclear fission or fusion, improved forms of governance and conflict resolution, and lots more things. The same sorts of ideas when applied on Earth could (if wealth is distributed, like with a basic income) make the Earth a pleasant place for almost all humans, like Bucky Fuller talked about decades ago. We may well see that in the coming decades on Earth (if we do not destroy ourselves with the same tools fighting over 19th century economic dogmas). So, it would be ironic if we were to spread the very ecnomic dogma we are struggling to move past on Earth into space using the very technologies that coudl liberate humanity everywhere.

Re:19th century economics for a 21st century moon?

[Tom]

Sorry, but we will not see that in the coming decades.

People thought the same thought 50 years ago. But you see, being rich only means something if others are poor. In the Weimar Republic, everyone was a billionaire, it just didn't mean a thing because that was the price of bread.

There are people on this planet who have no interest in everyone being rich. Sadly, we have more and more given them control of the government. And if you think I mean humans by "people", you are less than half right, because the other kind of "people" - corporations - is even worse. They have no fear of death and no grandmothers to tell them they're mightily fucked up.

Georgism

[Anonymous Coward]

One possible resolution to this can be found in the economic theory of Georgism. I'll do my best to give a fair treatment, but the basic premise is this - the natural world cannot be "owned" in the traditional sense, as it predates any claimant. If one wishes to have the privilege of being able to EXCLUDE others from access to a resource, they are required to pay into a public treasury - as it is the public who is deprived by their decision to impose a restriction on a resource, such as land. This also holds for cases like pollution of a natural resource, use of the airwaves, etc. in its furthest conception.

So before we start messing things up in space, I think it's worth considering a more humane way of regarding the use of property and natural resources. Private, exclusive ownership is fundamentally outmoded and leads to profiting off a resource which is not put to productive use - land speculation is a prime example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

All I hear is...

[Anonymous Coward]

"I want 'property rights' so I can privatize my profits and leave you with the bill when things go wrong."

Obligitory XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can't defend something, you can't own something.

Shoot for the moon!

If a sequel for Alpha Centaury gets made

[aiadot]

I hope that quote makes in the Morgan Industries datalinks.

Define @discover@

[RockDoctor]

the right to own what one discovers on the moon

The surface of the Moon has been mapped to approximately 1 metre resolution (a bit more than a yard, if you're into measurements based on a horse's ass or a monarch's nose). Mineral mapping has been carried out to a somewhat lower resolutino, but to far higher resolution than for comparable mapping on the American mid-west in the mid-19th century.

So what you're saying is that NASA (with contributions from the ESA and Russians and Chinese and Indians) already own essentially the whole of the Moon, having discovered what is there already.

Massive Capital, Risk lives?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bigelow said he believes the right to own what one discovers on the moon is the incentive needed for private enterprise to commit massive amounts of capital and risk lives.

I guess he hasn't noticed what pharma companies have been doing for decades in the name of profit. :)

Does anyone believe this for even a second?

[badasawsomeness]

He obviously isn't asking the US to give him rights to build on the moon, he is asking the US to defend whatever he builds there. He has as much power as anyone else does to build a house or a hotel up there, but then, as other have stated, he will have to defend it from someone else deciding they now own it and taking it by force.

I also doubt his intentions are even that pure. I assume hes intelligent enough to know the US cant actually sell him any part of the moon, and that even if they did it would not be recognized by any other countries. Which would lead me to believe he sees it simply as an investment opportunity. He would the have a small assurance that the US government would defend his claim legally (even if he doesn't actually have anything on the moon), at least against other US companies. Then allowing him to make a profit off of it in one way or another.