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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.'"
If you can't defend something, you can't own something.
Sig: I stole this sig.
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.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
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.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Just open the windows.
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.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
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)
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.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Who's getting the rights to Uranus?
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
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.
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.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
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."
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
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.
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?
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
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.
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.
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.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
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.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
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.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
'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?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
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.