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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.
Nope, it's the EU requiring companies to comply with its laws when they exert their activities in the EU.
There's nothing like $HOME
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.
"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.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
I kinda want to write some amateur sci-fi on this topic... if I actually had any modicum of talent for writing.
If a corporation / country starts mining an asteroid for materials to use in space, what is anyone going to do about it? Tax them? Declare war on them?
There isn't THAT much unobtanium in space that's usable here on Earth which would make it worth deorbiting. The value of mining stuff in space is so you can build things in space. It's pretty expensive to boost water into orbit. So it seems like it could be pretty lucrative to hijack a few tons of ice comet, wrap it in insulation, and gently tow it into a usable orbit somewhere on the lagrangian transport network over the course of a few years or even decades. From there it could become a nice resource of raw materials to have to help supply a good-sized space station, available to the highest bidder.
Once something like that is set in motion, who's going to stop it? Only another corp with the ability to launch another robotic probe to hijack that hijacked comet. If one probe disturbs another probe, is that an act of war? Probably not, even if they're both pretty expensive. Should it be legal for one probe to "steal" another probe's towed cargo? What if they were just two separate microfactories that landed on the same asteroid and were mining it for minerals? Seems like they should be able to "share", and shall the fastest probe harvest most of the asteroid. But at one point does one probe manage to "stake a claim" on an asteroid, and is programmed to take defensive measures against anything else that approaches to interfere? Knowing that if there were a bunch of territorial probes roaming the solar system, they could all trivially wipe each other out with relatively small lasers or projectiles or explosives if they were at all aggressive. So they would likely be programmed to cooperate as much as they possible, since their missions were so expensive. But they'd have a self-destruct that would take out whatever it is they were carrying and any enemy probes in the area, to discourage probes from trying to "steal". At some point, our fleet of mining probes may have spread out far enough to encounter alien probes, which may as well have been programmed with similar rules of engagement, and it will be interesting to see how they manage to autonomously interact and communicate their intentions to each other.
Back to the subject of actually staking claims, it would be interesting if corps / countries would be required to have a human present to actually plant a flag on asteroids they wished to mine. The logic being if a probe attacked a competing probe in space, it's just business. But if a probe attacks a human in space, that's an act of war, and the companies can go to court down here on Earth or the countries can go to arms or whatever it is they'd do back in the days of imperialism. So it will be neat if that manages to be the impetus to put long-term human colonies in space, if just to be homesteaders. Wonder if they even have to be awake for the trip... or even fully alive for that matter. It would likely be pretty depressing, to have countries scrambling to put just one or two people per asteroid to stake claims and squat in space and try to hang on to survival and maybe sanity for decades at a time. Space cowboys.