Making Mining the Asteroids and the Moon Legal

MarkWhittington writes: Popular Science reported on a bill called the Space Act of 2015 that has passed the House and may soon pass the Senate that will allow private companies to own the natural resources that they mine in space. The idea would seem to be a no-brainer. However, the bill is causing some heartburn among some space law experts, especially in other countries. Fabio Tronchetti, a lawyer at the Harbin Institute of Technology in China, argues that the law would violate the Outer Space Treaty.

Comments

Pointless

[Anonymous Coward]

Any company with the capacity to profitably mine the moon, or asteroids, isn't going to give a shit about the quaint laws of an individual nation state.

Re:Pointless

[jandersen]

Any company with the capacity to profitably mine the moon, or asteroids, isn't going to give a shit about the quaint laws of an individual nation state.

Unless said companies are able to base themselves outside the territories of all nations on the planet, they will have to pay attention to the laws of some country. And of course, since a large company requires to trade in many nations to survive, they will have to follow the rules in those nations. And so on.

But there is an interesting twist to this line of thought: if individual companies become, in effect, their own nation states, should we require that they are run more like nations - with all it entails, including citizenship, democracy, social security, infrastructure paid for by themselves etc?

And, if the difference between nations and businesses become ever smaller, why is it actually that nations are not allowed to compete in the market like businesses do? In the past, the argument was that the state would have an unfair advantage over national businesses both because of their size and the fact that they decide the laws etc, but if that national laws are now powerless against transnationals, there is no longer a good reason for states not to compete with business.

US got bored forcing their laws on other countries

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks like the US got bored forcing their laws on other countries here on Earth so they've moved on to the moon and asteroids. First it was refusing to honour EU data protection laws agreed to by international treaty, now it's ignoring the Outer Space Treaty. This is establishing sovereignty on the moon and asteroids by granting businesses permission to operate there and take resources from them. If it wasn't establishing sovereignty, those laws would have no effect, nor would they be necessary. As a European citizen, I really want the US to fuck off.

Re:US got bored forcing their laws on other countr

[joh]

So make the EU outlaw asteroid mining... and give it the resources to police space. Good luck.

By the way, this is inevitable in the long run. Either we will die out or we will start to exploit resources in space. Earth is becoming too small for us fast. Space should be big enough for quite a while...

Can't legalize what isn't theres

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't assign rights you don't have. If that mineral isn't owned by USA how can it decide that it transfers ownership to a corporation?

Re:On the moon at least, Outer Space Treaty is cle

[sociocapitalist]

"Neither the surface nor the subsurface of the Moon, nor any part thereof or natural resources in place, shall become property of any State, international intergovernmental or non-governmental organization, national organization or non-governmental entity or of any natural person."
( Article 11, paragraph 3 ).

On "other celestial bodies" however, e.g. asteroids, the Treaty is silent regarding property and appropriation.

The US'll just 'unsign' it like it did the Kyoto treaty.

Re:Asteroids fine, but the moon should be left alo

[Jason Levine]

The amount that we'd bring back to Earth would be insignificant. The global shipping weight is about 1.4 * 10^6 kg (Source). The weight of the Earth is 5.972 * 10^24 kg. If we assumed that we brought the entire global shipping weight from asteroids to Earth annually, it would take 42 billion years before we brought even one millionth of one percent of the Earth's current mass. I think, at that point, we would have bigger problems than simply "we're making the Earth too heavy."