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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.
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.