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Congress Can't Make Asteroid Mining Legal (But It's Trying, Anyway)
Jason Koebler writes: Earlier this week, the House Science Committee examined the American Space Technology for Exploring Resource Opportunities in Deep Space (ASTEROIDS) Act, a bill that would ensure that "any resources obtained in outer space from an asteroid are the property of the entity that obtained such resources."
The problem is, that idea doesn't really mesh at all with the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, a document that suggests space is a shared resource: "Unlike some other global commons, no agreement has been reached at to whether title to extracted space resources passes to the extracting entity," Joanne Gabrynowicz, a space law expert at the University of Mississippi said (PDF). "There is no legal clarity regarding the ownership status of the extracted resources. It is foreseeable that the entity's actions will be challenged at law and in politics."
The problem is, that idea doesn't really mesh at all with the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, a document that suggests space is a shared resource: "Unlike some other global commons, no agreement has been reached at to whether title to extracted space resources passes to the extracting entity," Joanne Gabrynowicz, a space law expert at the University of Mississippi said (PDF). "There is no legal clarity regarding the ownership status of the extracted resources. It is foreseeable that the entity's actions will be challenged at law and in politics."
Is it just me, or does the phrase "a space law expert at the University of Mississippi" cause you to giggle just a little bit?
Making Up Names Of Bills With Cleverly Crafted Backronyms Is So Fucking Annoying.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I am not bound by treaty. I am bound only by the laws of my country.
If Congress says I can keep the gold I just mined off Ceres, it's mine. Would the Russian government come after me for their share? Good luck to them.
I would say that an entity that managed to get there and posess some mined material up the Earth gravity well can probably deal with attempts to de-legalize it rather efficiently. ;-)
Paul B.
i've worked for the government and seen some doozy acronyms, but ASTEROID has got to be the best I've ever seen. it even stands for something that makes sense. bravo to to coiner.
Yeah, no kidding. They are worried the Chinese are gonna colonize space, and we will be left behind, so they come up with this property bullshit. Dude, property is about respecting others rights. If you go to outer space, and you take a piece of rock from an asteroid, and build a space station from it. people down here in the USA are gonna cry foul, it's common property, you can't take it, it's ours too, but the fact is unless they can send the police over to claim it was theft, or the military, it's all just bullshit. That's where the rubber meets the road. Space war. Over a piece of rock. Who owns is. History of human civilization, who gets what, who owns what, who controls what, west side, west side, nigga die over a block you don't even own, you paying rent, mofo. Maybe we should convince the Chinese to pay us rent for using the asteroid or Moon materials for their space stations, in case they succeed making it there before us.
My problem isn't the resources, it's how they will cut corners to be first and somehow kill us all in the processes.
They just planned to kill their local fishery and destroy a whole ecosystem just so they can build an artificial island in contested waters for an airport.
They are idiots IMO they will probably find the biggest asteroid and somehow change it's direction towards earth while trying to grab the resources.
And there's gotta be a ton of gold at the center of the earth, and platinum, same at the center of the Moon. The Big Dig. How low can you go. Inside the Moon, it does not get very hot, no molten lava to contend with. Who can get there first, and start the digging for them heavy noble elements of platinum, iridium, osmium, gold, all mixed in with nickel and iron. If the theory that the Moon was ejected from the Earth from a massive asteroid impact is correct. Inner planets don't have much moons, for whatever reason, our Moon is special. If the Moon was ejected in a molten lava state, then the heavy, non-oxygen-bound stuff (such as noble metals) had a chance to stratify and collect at the core (It's kind of interesting that there'd be any gold and platinum in the lithosphere of Earth, but volcanoes spit stuff up from real deep, moreover a lot of our nickel-platinum mines are actually asteroid-meteorite crash sites embedded into the lithosphere, that did not have a chance to sink deep.) All they gotta do is some seismic listening experiments to see if the Moon has a dense core, unless you can see through it with ultrahigh energy xrays or even neutrino observations, something that goes through it, and then you don't need seismic experiments. But otherwise it's time to blow some nukes up on the Moon, and place seismic sensors throughout its surface, to listen and probe its internal structure. If it has a core, and it's not molten, it's time for that gold rush, or more like platinum-nickel rush.
To anyone who sues over this chuck of space rock I claim, fine, I'll send it right to you...
Problem solved...
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
Sounds like what needs to happen is a recognition that when an entity mines in space, it can claim that its value-add in extracting those resources gives a claim to those extracted resources and only those extracted resources, with the possible exception of an active, ongoing extraction operation having the right to exclusive use of the mine and only the mine while the operation is active. Once the operation is inactive then it's fair-game for others to start using it too.
I don't see a lot of threat in the Chinese or any other power colonizing space and managing to keep hold of their colonies. Space exploration is in the same place as "New World" exploration was at the first voyage of Columbus, in the sense that as as species we don't really have the developed means to take territory and hold it, and I expect that it'll go through a revolutionary-era as well, when those that have actually done the colonizing or the progeny thereof decides that they don't really need the mother-country anymore. That period might be harder if the colonies don't find ways to be self-sufficient, but given the sheer cost in sending supplies, any colony would have to be self-sufficient to be financially practical. Like the United States was in the 1770s, space colonies will be too far away from the motherland to be easily held if those colonies want to break away, as it'll be too expensive garrison them and simply won't be worth the effort.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
As soon as space mining becomes practical on the near horizon Congress will take the necessary action to legalize it. Otherwise they risk losing all of the money and jobs (not to mention the brib... er campaign contributions) from the support services that would go to non-US companies in countries who aren't signatories to the treaty.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Note: the outer Space treaty only applies to governments, not individuals or corporations.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/...
Article VI
States Parties to the Treaty shall bear international responsibility for national activities in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, whether such activities are carried on by governmental agencies or by non-governmental entities, and for assuring that national activities are carried out in conformity with the provisions set forth in the present Treaty. The activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty. When activities are carried on in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, by an international organization, responsibility for compliance with this Treaty shall be borne both by the international organization and by the States Parties to the Treaty participating in such organization.
Article VIII of the treaty states:
"Ownership of objects launched into outer space, including objects landed or constructed on a celestial body, and of their component parts, is not affected by their presence in outer space or on a celestial body or by their return to the Earth."
So if someone attached rocket engines to a small asteroid and moved it, for example, that could be considered "constructing an object" and they would own the whole thing, including the asteroid which is one of its "component parts".
I would say the same thing, but there are several countries that can effectively impose their will anywhere within the Moon's orbit and a handful that could manage anything within the solar system. That said, having navigational control of a big rock on the edge of a gravity well may prove to be a hefty bargaining chip.
So what? It wouldn't be the first treaty anybody has broken. Are there any penalties? Who is going to enforce them? And, in any case, the US could simply leave the treaty or demand it be renegotiated. The Outer Space Treaty simply isn't going to last in its current form, and it should last in its current form. Get used to it. Treaties aren't binding law, they are simply mutual agreements to help make things work more smoothly.
In any case, private space companies could simply move to countries that haven't ratified the treaty, and they wouldn't be in violation of any treaty or international law.
I think the treaty was OK in the sense that it prevented an arms race in space and the threat of bombardment from space. That was a good thing to agree on. Let's hold on to that for as long as we can.
Prohibitions on asteroid mining, on the other hand, serve no purpose. Either they get renegotiated, or they simply get ignored. Countries that haven't ratified the treaty aren't bound by them anyway.
Sounds to me like it says that whoever gets the iron, gold, iridium, space fairy dust, whatever from an asteroid owns it. I don't see how that is different from what happens on earth (aside from the space fairy dust). Whoever digs the hole generally owns the minerals extracted. What I didn't see is how they determine who owns the mine or has rights to mine a particular rock. Being a pretty extreme environment, at first it may just boil down to possession is nine tenths of the law. But I personally don't see any issues with this. Whoever gets the stuff out should own it. Just as long as they don't fuck up returning material to earth and accidentally drop a football field size chunk of iron or nickel (or whatever) on a city at orbital velocities. Maybe better to make the finished goods on the moon if they need gravity, or in lunar orbit first. Keep the big dangerous shit away from the planet.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Why would space colonies want to break away?
Presumably any earth-entity capable of colonizing the far reaches of the Solar system would have to be a fairly important country. It would also offer any thriving colony the local equivalent of a path to statehood. Why secede when you can get two Senate seats?
A lot of SciFi is based on the assumption that future leaders have not learned the lesson of the past. Even the Brits have learned that at some point you off the colony a choice: go independent without a war, or get a vote in Parliament.
If you are from a nation bound by the treaty, reflag your vessel (nuwclear wessell) to a non-treaty country.
The Moon has more surface area that North America. Even if all of the nations of the Earth conspired and made a deliberate effort to explode the Moon, it can't be done. Mining operations that would produce minerals in quantities equal to the entire mining production of humanity from before the Sumerian empires until now and doing that on an annual basis would take billions of years to mine out enough of the Moon for you to even notice something was happening.
Relax, the Moon is going to be just fine even with extensive strip mining, and arguably it is better to have it happen up there than down here on the Earth while killing habitat for many animals and destroying whole ecosystems.
Only the smallest of asteroids will ever be completely mined out before mankind will have settled and occupied the rest of the Milky Way Galaxy.
I was there at the hearing, and I think the summary is pretty far from the true situation.
First, Prof. Gabrynowicz is in the minority in the legal community on this (her response is also to work for international consensus on these issues, which is not going to happen.
Second, the Asteroid Act has been vetted by the State Department (and by a whole bunch of interested parties) and it certainly is in agreement with the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 (even Prof. Gabrynowicz didn't claim otherwise).
Third, all of the space powers appear to be in agreement with the basic principle expressed by the Asteroid Act - that space mining is a lot like deep sea fishing - you can't claim your fishing hole, but you get to keep what you take.
For a more balanced explanation as to why the Act is needed as a US instantiation of the '67 Outer Space Treaty to clarify the rules for US Corporations, see Dean Larson's WSJ Op Ed (or my own take on it).
> when those that have actually done the colonizing or the progeny thereof decides that they don't really need the mother-country anymore.
I'd be alright with that, but the problem is that space isn't like the surface of the Earth where you have neatly demarcated areas that you can lay claim to and you have to actually travel to in order to use. You could have companies pushing around asteroids and bumping them into Earth orbit, extracting resources, without sending even a single person over to the actual asteroid (all done with a bunch of robotic probes). You will inevitably get two companies (or countries) fighting over who gets the right to push which asteroid around. Neither of them are even near the asteroid, and no colony will be set up on the asteroid since it's probably far too small to support an independent human population by itself.
I guess a good analogy would be the Pacific islands and not the 13 colonies. The pacific islands changed hands so many times and many still have debatable levels of 'belonging' to another country. Now imagine if the pacific islands were free to roam around...
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
You are bound by the treaties your country signed.
Yes: You, and the states, and their courts, are bound by them (to the extent they are clear or were implemented by federal enabling legislation).
In fact, they have more legal weight in the US than laws passed by your own Congress.
NO! They have EXACTLY the same weight as federal law. Both treaties and federal law are trumped by the Constitution, and both are also creatures of Congress, They can be modulated, and destroyed (at least in how they are effective within the country) by congressional action.
The idea that they're any stronger or more permanent than federal legislation comes from a (very common) misreading of the Supremacy Clause:
This says that the Constitution, Federal Law, and Treaties trump state law in state and federal courts. It says nothing about the relative power among the three.
The misreading is to interpret "all treaties made ... shall be the supreme law of the land ..." to mean that treaties effectively amend the constitution. This is wrong. You can see it by noticing the same kind of misreading also makes federal law equivalent to a constitutional amendment - which it clearly is not.
In fact the Supreme Court has spoken on the relation between the Constitution and treaties: In Reid v. Covert, 354 U.S. 1 (1957), the Supreme Court held stated that the U.S. Constitution supersedes international treaties ratified by the U.S. Senate.
Treaties are abrogated, at the federal level, all the time, and there are a number of mechanisms for doing so.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way