Bill Confirming Property Rights For Asteroid Miners Passes the Senate (examiner.com)

MarkWhittington writes: The Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee announced the passage of a bill called H.R.2262 — SPACE Act of 2015, which is designed to facilitate commercial space. The bill has a number of provisions for that purpose, including extending the "learning period" during which the government would be restricted from imposing regulations on the commercial launch industry to September 2023. The most interesting and potentially far-reaching provision concerned property rights for companies proposing to mine asteroids for their resources. In essence, the bill confirms that private companies own what they mine. The bill is a compromise between previous Senate and House versions.

Comments

National level?

[Big Hairy Ian]

How can this be at the national level? Surely this is something that should be hashed out at the UN rather than proposing national laws for something that is already outside your jurisdiction.

Re:National level?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> How can this be at the national level?

The assumption seems to be that the US will get there first and claim whatever it finds for the US. (Seems reasonable.)

>> Surely this is something that should be hashed out at the UN

Surely you understand that the US only uses the UN when it needs to have a resolution bottled up in committees until the news cycle moves on. When we're talking about money, life or property the UN has and will be ignored.

Re:National level?

[bfpierce]

Because it applies to US companies launching from US facilities and returning to US facilities. If the UN wants to handle organization of space based 'land grabs' that's on them, not on US Congress.

Re:National level?

[Richard_at_work]

Its at the national level because its basically the US government saying "*we* won't interfere with miners property rights". That doesn't conflict with someone else interfering with miners property rights.

Re:National level?

[ShanghaiBill]

Other space-faring nations are unlikely to challenge America on this issue, because they have an interest in staking their own claims. Since the asteroid belt contains more than 100 million cubic miles of ore, weighing several quadrillion tonnes, there should be enough to share. Space is big, and there is plenty of stuff out there.

Re:National level?

[GLMDesigns]

Because the UN has no authority. Ultimately this will apply to only the entities (individual or corporate) under the jurisdiction of the US. It does not apply to China or France or Russia or Zimbabwe.

Re:National level?

[Applehu Akbar]

Under the UN Space Treaty, all government on space settlements must arise from the culture of the settlement itself, rather than being imposed from Earth. A law like SPACE can only affect how our own legal system treats space settlers within our own jurisdiction.

The one exception is that if drug production and/or usage in space becomes an issue. In that case the DEA (if recreational) or the FDA (if pharma) would be given the budget snd manpower to build starships, if necessary, to enforce its galactic powers.

Re:National level?

[Raseri]

A better question is, Who thinks asteroid mining is economically feasible to the extent that they needed a law regarding property rights for it? This supposes that the money that can be gained from asteroid mining would exceed the cost of launching mining equipment into space, mining the asteroid, hauling the ore to Earth, landing it safely, and processing it into a usable form, all of which seems like it would be prohibitively expensive. This would only be the case if the materials which compose asteroids were substantially different from materials that can be obtained on Earth, but they don't seem to be: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activit...

Re:National level?

[idontgno]

The history of claim-jumping argues against you. More efficient than prospecting on your own someplace away from other claims, is to let someone else do your prospecting for you and then take the claim for your own. If they're working an asteroid, presumably it's rich enough to make it worth taking from them.

The Earth is big but humanity has always been willing to kill each other for chosen and desirable bits of it. Space probably won't be different, because even if Space is different, humanity is still humanity.

Re:National level?

[blue9steel]

A better question is, Who thinks asteroid mining is economically feasible to the extent that they needed a law regarding property rights for it?

A couple of billionaires are exploring that issue right now. The quantities of precious and heavy metals contained in some asteroids is valued in the trillions. Sure, no one is going to be bringing back iron ore any time soon but there are plenty of other items of interest.

Re:National level?

[Anonymous Coward]

The vast majority of anything that will dissolve in iron is hugely depleted on the earth's surface, because it all sank to the core where it doesn't really come back from much. Much of what we've got now for those is added later from asteroids - it's very likely that a lot of the rarer metals here that turn out to be quite useful are abundant up there, simply by dint of not having gone through that separation process in planetary formation.

Re:National level?

[Immerman]

I don't know - what is the US policy on terrestrial theft by foreigners? I would assume that theft by foreign actors that occurs outside US jurisdiction gets ignored by US authorities, unless it was something of significant value stolen by someone well-connected, in which case jurisdiction be damned - political pressure and illegitimate military/police action is likely to be brought to bear.

Still, I don't see that there are a lot of other alternatives if we want to encourage space exploitation.

Re:National level?

[sycodon]

What government entity can possibly claim jurisdiction over asteroids or any other object in space?

What they SHOULD be doing is making it clear that if you mine an asteroid, and then accidentally drop it on a city, you are going to jail.

Re: National level?

[ememisya]

This is more along the lines of, "Go forth and discover the dark seas little billionaires, we won't shoot you down, oh, here are some rules." I'm sure Madagascar had a thing or two to say to weigh in on the issue but US don't care baby.

Re:National level?

[erikkemperman]

Other space-faring nations are unlikely to challenge America on this issue, because they have an interest in staking their own claims. (...) Space is big, and there is plenty of stuff out there.

I'm not sure they wouldn't challenge this. While it may only apply to companies in its jurisdiction, what gives US congress the authority to decide about ownership of stuff in space?

Re:National level?

[Joe_Dragon]

Burns Slant-Drilling Co will do an under ground claim jump.

Re:National level?

[Type44Q]

Surely this is something that should be hashed out at the UN

If it's outside the jurisdiction of one nation, it's outside the jurisdiction of multiple nations. Hell, it's outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. Senate; perhaps it could be argued that the intent of this bill is simply to recognize that...

Re:National level?

[JasterBobaMereel]

If a company registered in the USA, launches from the USA, mines asteroids in space, and returns to the USA, the the US senate currently says that the company will own what they mined and brought back at least according to the USA... others may dispute this

Taking off elsewhere, landing elsewhere, the journey there and back, and exporting to other countries could be very interesting ...

Re:National level?

[Immerman]

Only an idiot would launch their mining equipment into space and haul the ore back to Earth. The whole point of mining in space is to build stuff IN SPACE, which you can then sell to other people in space at radically lower prices than Earth-made equipment while still maintaining lucrative profit margins. Only the largely useless "waste" byproducts such as gold, platinum, etc are likely to be worth sending back to Earth.

Now, there is of course a chicken-and-egg problem there which requires that at least the first few mining operations do in fact launch their equipment from Earth, and they may well lose money, though there is a chance they can send back enough "waste" to Earth to break even, or at least recoup a large portion of the initial costs.

After that though things can begin to snowball rapidly - evidence suggests that many asteroids contain iron ore of sufficient purity to require little if any refinement before working. And while freefall casting, forging, etc will doubtless present some challenges not present on Earth, they are unlikely to interfere with the production of crude structural components for long. In the worst case you simply do your metalworking under the influence of centrifugal "gravity". Then you only need to send up the "high-tech" components from earth - rarely more than a few percent of the total mass of a piece of industrial machinery. It may be a long time before it's worth it to make CPUs or even circuit boards in space, but girders, hulls, electric motors, etc. can be manufactured with extremely primitive technology. Even fuel tanks and rocket engines are fairly simple when you're not limited by the performance-to-mass constraints needed to escape Earth's gravity well.

Basically it comes down to the colonial mindset - by and large when a new frontier is first exploited it's mostly by those looking to pillage for a quick buck, and space may not be terribly conductive to that seeing as how there's no technologically inferior natives to massacre and plunder. Once it's been shown that people can prosper there though, then the second-wave settlement begins. Send the poor and downtrodden to seek their fortune exploiting the available resources in dangerous territory (while paying juicy interest on the debt they incurred getting there of course). And with the settlers come the traders, after all there's lucrative profits to be made on all that fancy stuff from the "old world". And before you know it you have a whole new chunk of empire paying taxes. Sure, if you get too heavy-handed they're likely to rebel, but there's lots of money to be made in the interim. Do you really think things will be any different simply because the empires are run by corporations rather than monarchies? The only real challenge is jump-starting that initial wave of exploitation.

Re:National level?

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue is that why would the US have the jurisdiction to say that it can be used commercially, if it has no ownership over space?

Re:National level?

[kheldan]

How can this be at the national level?

Could this be creating a paper trail for the future of the military out in our solar system? The Earth's Moon may be, by mutual agreement (for the time being, anyway) declared to not be the property of any one nation, which makes sense because it's in orbit around the Earth, but asteroids are most certainly not; nations (not just the U.S.) could potentially use them as military bases out in the solar system. Starting a paper trail now, asserting that there are private-sector property rights to asteroids, would make it plausible that a nation's military could also claim property rights to asteroids. Really, though, I hate to have to go there with this, but humans be humans after all, and we're still rather warlike, so it's a factor to consider.

Re:National level?

[Attila Dimedici]

Because the UN does not actually have the authority, as part of its charter, to actually pass anything binding concerning this.

Re:National level?

[Attila Dimedici]

What government entity can possibly claim jurisdiction over asteroids or any other object in space?

The government entity with the ability to enforce that jurisdiction claim...the same as for any place here on earth.

Re:National level?

[iamgnat]

A better question is, Who thinks asteroid mining is economically feasible to the extent that they needed a law regarding property rights for it?

Ones that are far thinking enough to realize that they can get such laws passed now while both the law makers and general public A) are ignorant of the impact and B) aren't interested enough to care.

This isn't about anyone doing anything now, it's prospecting for the future.

Re:National level?

[Anonymous Coward]

Has having no jurisdiction ever been problem for US?

Re:National level?

[azcoyote]

It's true; in fact, the real beneficiaries of the U.S. frontier gold rushes were the merchants who sold supplies for mining rather than the miners themselves. With this in mind, however, it seems that any intrusions from other powers will be in accord with a principle of commercial viability. Whether or not someone steals another's asteroid claim will depend upon the potential costs and profits of benefiting in another way. Thus what might contribute to some likelihood of respecting other's rights is not some innate goodness of human activity, but rather the potential to profit off of such a respect. Other countries might indeed benefit from asteroid mining much like the merchants of the past did. They might even be able to develop technologies for their own mining more easily because they will benefit from the mistakes of the first pioneers. But this principle of commercial viability could just as well lead to a non-recognition of supposed rights and outright violation of claims.

Re:National level?

[argStyopa]

A few answers to your question:

First, yes, on the face of it this should be a UN sort of question. But in the same sense that the UN is unlikely to adopt a US law, the US is cantankerous about adopting UN agreements since many of them are so patently political and over-reaching. Let's also remember that the UN is fundamentally NOT 'democratic' so really, their "resolutions" have no inherent moral value more than US fiat anyway.

Second, as a matter of practicality, the US is technologically the most likely power to GET there, so it would make sense that insofar as US law is concerned, it's hashed out. In fact, the resolution of these property rights at least in regards to US courts and jurisdictions, probably makes it even MORE likely that a private venture would be willing to commit the $ to be earlier even than national space programs (again, pretty much only US firms are anywhere close to that capability).

Thirdly, also as a matter of practicality: *nobody* can enforce jack in space. It's going to be the Wild West to some degree (if you can wreck someone else's stuff and NOT BE RECORDED DOING SO, you'll get away with it almost automatically) until an actual police force could be put in place. And guess which power that's likely to be? Hint: it won't be the UN.

Re:National level?

[thegameiam]

Part of the viability of claim-jumping is the notion of getting away with it. At least for the foreseeable future, there will be a lot of eyes on any given asteroid mining operation.

Re:National level?

[erikkemperman]

A couple of billionaires are exploring that issue right now. The quantities of precious and heavy metals contained in some asteroids is valued in the trillions.

The preciousness of those materials is in its rarity. If the amount of gold on earth suddenly triples, it'll presumably affect its value. Well, unless we make some arbitrary distinction like the one that attaches different value to artificial vs natural diamond, which everybody accepts for romantic reasons (and to keep De Beers filthy rich).

Re:National level?

[buchner.johannes]

Who owns the Moon rocks then?

Re:National level?

[careysub]

The history of claim-jumping argues against you. More efficient than prospecting on your own someplace away from other claims, is to let someone else do your prospecting for you and then take the claim for your own. If they're working an asteroid, presumably it's rich enough to make it worth taking from them.

The Earth is big but humanity has always been willing to kill each other for chosen and desirable bits of it. Space probably won't be different, because even if Space is different, humanity is still humanity.

I'm sorry this not the Wild West in space*. Not even the bill just passed lets you claim an asteroid - which is still explicitly prohibited by international treaty. It lets you claim the the stuff you got from the asteroid only, which is quite reasonable.

Translating notions of "claim jumping" to a space mining operation does not take into account the vast differences. For one, asteroids never had ore concentration processes, beyond what differentiation on formation might have accomplished, and space mining relies on the high average abundance of siderophile** elements in various classes of asteroids. The entire asteroid will be the ore body, and even a small one will vastly exceed the scale of plausible human mining operation. The whole point of space mining is the lack of scarcity up there. Earth mining practices are based on the fact that scarcity is normal.

*In science fiction this is called a "Bat Durston", translating notions of the Wild West into a space opera. For good reason these are looked upon with derision.

**The rare iron-loving elements that sank to the core of the Earth.

Re:National level?

[careysub]

Under the UN Space Treaty, all government on space settlements must arise from the culture of the settlement itself, rather than being imposed from Earth. A law like SPACE can only affect how our own legal system treats space settlers within our own jurisdiction.

Nothing like this in is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. Is there some other UN Space Treaty I do not know about?

This claim is, frankly, impossible to credit. The whole focus of the the 1967 treaty is to make sure that States are responsible for the regulation in space of all entities under the authority. The UN does everything through the world state system.

Re:National level?

[lhowaf]

It does seem presumptuous but I think they are only talking about stuff brought back from space to the US .

Quoting the act:

Any asteroid resources obtained in outer space are the property of the entity that obtained them, which shall be entitled to all property rights to them, consistent with applicable federal law and existing international obligations.

That also indicates that, if somebody finds an asteroid made of crack, they can't keep it.

Re:National level?

[radarskiy]

" outside your jurisdiction."

It doesn't actually cover anyone outside of the US borders. You have to get back to the US for any property rights to be recognized.

Re:National level?

[sycodon]

If you fetched them, you own them.

Re:National level?

[sycodon]

One of the methods of mining them are to bring them back to earth orbit for processing. If a bunch of PhDs can crash a satellite into Mars, company engineers can crash an asteroid into the earth.

Re:National level?

[erikkemperman]

I think you may have missed my point; by what right should the US get to allocate ownership of stuff it doesn't own?

Re:National level?

[Immerman]

Obviously. Nobody is going to waste resources building mining equipment until they have chosen a likely profitable target and have a launch window within a few years - until then designing, prototyping, and telescopic prospecting have much higher returns on investment - and all of those are currently occurring. Otherwise you've spent a bunch of resources building equipment that's just sitting around in a warehouse getting more obsolete by the day.

Just as crossing the oceans to the New World, the reasons for going to space will be profit - first in terms of rare earths returned to Earth, and later from selling supplies to both existing labor and those who follow. It probably doesn't make financial sense just yet unless someone finds an extremely lucrative rare-earth asteroid, but as launch costs fall that will change rapidly, and government backing or long-term speculation could change that overnight.

And of course there's always the military angle - once any nation develops an industrial presence in space, the others will have to follow suite or risk eventual conquest - there's just too much strategic advantage to holding the ultimate high ground.

As for the ad-hominem attack - you're far wrong. And actually I'd have no interest in going to space except perhaps as a brief visit if it were sufficiently cheap - I enjoy nature far too much, and it will likely be at least several tens of millenia before even the most ambitious terraforming projects would yield anything comparable on our sister-planets.

Re:National level?

[lhowaf]

That's what I thought you meant but it seems like a rare bit of humility for the US government to essentially say, if you bring it here, they won't interfere with your claim to ownership. It says nothing at all about the ownership of anything in space.

Re:National level?

[erikkemperman]

But they are saying something about ownership by allowing (US) companies to "bring it here" with no regard for other interested parties. Substitute something like Antarctica in the bit you quoted earlier, maybe you'll see what I mean.

Re:National level?

[lhowaf]

I was going to argue that Antarctica was different because it is covered by treaty but I think you may be right. There is a UN Outer Space Treaty that has this provision: "the exploration and use of outer space shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries and shall be the province of all mankind."

Re:National level?

[Applehu Akbar]

More precisely, it prevents Earthly governments from militarizing space or extending their territory into space, while saying nothing about "local" government. This has been interpreted to mean that no barrier exists to space settlements governing themselves.

Re:National level?

[SoftwareArtist]

by what right should the US get to allocate ownership of stuff it doesn't own?

Clearly, it can't. But what it can do is say, "We won't interfere with your claims to own it." If other countries do object to your claims, then there will be a conflict that needs to get resolved. But I suspect all the other countries with active space programs will be setting up their own asteroid mining programs, so they won't be minded to object. Ultimately it will take international treaties to set out the rules. But those rules will get set out, and they'll almost certainly end up permitting asteroid mining in some way. So this is a first stake in the ground about what the US Senate thinks those rules should be.

Re:National level?

[rtb61]

Claims will not be any where near sufficient. No million remote probes with flags staking claims to everything. The only claims that should be accepted should be factual real ones. Want to stake a mining claim, then show the actual mine being built with the intention of being used. No flag claims or pile of rocks claim. Want to claim the asteroid mine, then build an actual mine on that asteroid. So first to mine can make the claim and nothing short of that will be accepted.

Things tends to balance out as the race to claim an asteroid by sending out a mine construction fleet, means that any one who believes they will not get there first and start setting up first, will simply pick a different asteroid. Bullshit with US corporations trying to lay claim to the entire galaxy under threat of war will not be accepted or tolerated.

So many entities can declare their intent to mine a particular asteroid and the first to start substantively mining wins and the losers can either join with them or relocate, depending upon the size of the target (more than one mine possible, even likely, mutual support should anything go wrong).

Re:National level?

[bughunter]

And before that, it was the English, Spanish, Portugese, Dutch, and French colonial powers.

And before them it was the Muslim Arabs and the Mongols.

And before them it was the Romans and the Macedonians.

It's a human thing, really.

Re:National level?

[default luser]

Part of the viability of claim-jumping is the notion of getting away with it. At least for the foreseeable future, there will be a lot of eyes on any given asteroid mining operation.

Exactly right. Compared to a claim in the middle of the desert/tundra/mountains in the days before TCP/IP, the amount if eyes on each claim will be simply staggering.

And thanks to the incredibly slow speeds in space, we'd probably have the hot land war that erupts over your asteroid theft over and done with before it ever reaches orbit. Because anything worth spending billions to send a miner out is certainly worth destroying millions of lives defending it!

Re:National level?

[thisisauniqueid]

I'm pretty sure the UN is the wrong level too. It's space.

Re:National level?

[samwichse]

Leviathan Wakes has probably some of the best depiction of asteroid claim-jumping I've seen. Along with the wild west of poverty-stricken miners trying to eke out a living. Highly recommended (the rest of the book/series is "pretty good," but not amazing).

Re:National level?

[Stuarticus]

Exactly, and the same bunch of idiots who put this thing forward don't believe in Global Warming! It baffles the mind to think they believe they need to put this in place right now. They're must be so bored ignoring real issues they can devote an inordinate amount of time to blue sky thinking.

Re:National level?

[Stuarticus]

From what I've heard whoever nicked them from NASA.

Re:National level?

[RockDoctor]

Since the asteroid belt contains more than 100 million cubic miles of ore, weighing several quadrillion tonnes,

In geological terms, it's whatever number in whatever measure you want of ORE plus GANGUE. The ore is the stuff you want, which you can separate from gangue by crude physical processes (digging here, but not there ; blasting out and taking for processing the ore from that vein before cutting an access tunnel through the gangue). The terms become a bit vaguer when the ore is highly dispersed as it is in most ideas about asteroids (modern copper mines, for example, run to 1 to 2 % ore in literally mountains of gangue, but since the ore veins are typically under a millimetre across, separating the ore from the gangue is unfeasible ; naturally, this generates mountains of waste). Of course, these are just ideas - we've very few ground-truthed measurements of asteroid composition, and our remote sensing technologies are not up to the task of detecting the ppt or ppm levels of minerals anticipated in these ores. At the very least, we need to get an XRF (or similar) machine to within metres of the rock in question, and measure a few thousands of data points (to understand the distribution of high- and low- grade ores in the gangue.

There is a lot of wild, wild optimism expressed on the topic of asteroid mining. But chondritic elemental abundances are pretty well known, and we know that there will be a lot of gangue to get through. some of that you can possibly re-form (stick it into bags ; part-melt it into slabs) to use as radiation shielding ; some of it you might use for soil in your agricultural modules. but most of it is going to be waste. And sending waste to somewhere else (particularly given the unfortunate habit of things in orbit to come back) costs energy.

Re:National level?

[Bing Tsher E]

The US Frontier gold rushes really didn't have much to do with gold in the first place.

Take the California Gold Rush as an example.

The US had just won the Mexican-American war in 1848 and we had this big strip of land (California) that we'd siezed from Mexico. There weren't enough white American settlers on the land for us to maintain our claim on the land effectively.

Solution? Holler "Gold" and get every fool and idiot not otherwise occupied to rush across the continent to the new territory.

There was some gold, of course, but everybody eventually figured out, not that much gold.

Re:National level?

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

If I mine something from an asteroid, why shouldn't it be mine? All this does is say that the US recognizes your ownership; other countries aren't under an obligation to, at this point. It's not really much different from laws regarding fishing in international waters. If you catch it, it's yours (except for limits in place on certain kinds of marine life, for instance).

Is it just me ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it just me, or did I just interpreted this summary as "USA considers whole outer space their property, and as such drafts laws how to handle that property without any consensus with anybody else."

Re:Is it just me ...

[Rei]

If a US company launches into space, reaches an asteroid, mines it, takes the stuff, and lands back in the US.... they want to know whether the US government is going to let them call what they mined their property. They could care less what Tajikistan thinks. The launch, operations, and returned goods would be within the US. If someone from some other country wants to try to intercept and destroy them en route, that's a "hurdle" this doesn't address. It's also not a realistic scenario in the near-term, or even mid-term, future.

Re:Is it just me ...

[Errol backfiring]

It is just you. All American property bills, like intellectual property bills, make as much sense.

Re:Is it just me ...

[fustakrakich]

they want to know whether the US government is going to let them call what they mined their property.

It would suck if the government were to claim otherwise. But we should disallow any claim to the asteroid itself.

Re:Is it just me ...

[Pseudonymous Powers]

If a US company launches into space, reaches an asteroid, mines it, takes the stuff, and lands back in the US.... they want to know whether the US government is going to let them call what they mined their property. They could care less what Tajikistan thinks. The launch, operations, and returned goods would be within the US. If someone from some other country wants to try to intercept and destroy them en route, that's a "hurdle" this doesn't address. It's also not a realistic scenario in the near-term, or even mid-term, future.

Yeah. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 is pretty vague, and maybe even self-contradictory, about how property works in space. This ambiguity was probably intentional, as it would otherwise have been impossible to get so many countries to sign on to it, especially in the midst of the Cold War.

Personally, I think we should just agree to treat outer space the same way we currently treat international waters. Seems like the underlying problems and legal issues are mostly the same. But I guess some people wouldn't agree with that, either. That's diplomacy for you.

Re:Is it just me ...

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

The US recognizes people may eventually mine asteroids. I don't see a problem. The idea the proper state of a free human is to presumptively kneel for permission for everything from the King is a historical anachronism unfortunately adopted by modern democracies happy to let The People feel a taste of royal power.

Your attitude is akin to the concrete canyon dwellers in New York and California dictating how places like Arizona and Idaho should use their land.

Re:Is it just me ...

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

And long term, unless the US is derelict in extending naval dominance into space to protect the trade routes there, as they do on the high seas today.

Hint: Any conflicts will be between powerful countries seeking resources. Whiney also-rans who feel things like they own asteroids they have no means to get to, will not enter into the equation in practice.

Re:Is it just me ...

[ShanghaiBill]

Is it just me, or did I just interpreted this summary as "USA considers whole outer space their property

No. This law says pretty much the opposite: "Space belongs to no one, so if you go get some it, it is yours." There is nothing in this law that applies only to American citizens or American companies. So if a Chinese, Russian, or Indian company brings back ore from space, America would recognize their ownership (although their own government may not).

Re: Is it just me ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a believer in "it's not yours unless you can defend it"

US can't stop anyone from doing whatever they want in space.

Re:Is it just me ...

[MachineShedFred]

Is it just me, or did you not even think about this for 5 seconds? The US Government just said that they are treating space mining exactly the same as any other mining operation - those that dig the shit out, keep it. This equally applies to a Euro / Russian / Chinese / Indian company if they decide to go space mining, though it doesn't appear to be an issue in any of those jurisdictions as there are not private enterprises actively performing space activities outside of government contracts.

Re:Is it just me ...

[pr100]

Any company with international interests will care very much what other western nations (if not Tajikistan) think. If a court in (say) England rules that something is owned by someone other than the US company then it could be a huge problem for that company. Multinational companies ignore the rulings of courts in any country where they hope to do business or have assets at their peril.

Re:Is it just me ...

[jeti]

Why would it land on earth? The mined material is almost worthless here.

Re:Is it just me ...

[Immerman]

Countries? Really? Seems to me the dominant actors are likely to be corporations. Far more durable and conductive to the ever-changing alignments of space-rocks - awfully hard to draw borders in space when everything is traveling at different speeds.

Besides, corporations pretty much control most of the major governments on Earth, and will have significant incentive to play on nationalistic fears to ensure that nations have a hard time extending their reach into space, but let "their" (hah!) corporations do the hard work instead.

Re:Is it just me ...

[Rei]

Most near-term commercial "space mining" proposals are about mining metallic asteroids which contain high concentrations of metals which are rare/valuable on Earth, and which could be taken back to Earth via ion tug or rail gun/coil gun/etc at little cost compared to the value of the resources.

There is a hypothetical future market for resources mined in space to be used in space, that would theoretically pay lots of money for common things like water and base metals. However, there is a very real, present market for valuable metals on Earth today.

We may be sending a probe soon to a potential mining target (although not to mine it, just to study it) - 16 Psyche. It's over 200 kilometers in diameter, contains about 1% of the mass of the entire asteroid belt, and is believed to be 90% metal (the same sort of iron-nickel combination that we find in some meteorites). Nickel is a reasonably valuable metal on its own and Psyche has enough for millions of years at Earth's current consumption rate, but that's not really the target of mining. It's things like gold, iridium, silver, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhenium, rhodium, ruthenium, tungsten, etc that mining companies are after. They're far more concentrated on metallic asteroids than in Earth rocks, and they're unoxidized to boot. Also some asteroids have gem-quality peridot in them in abundance. That alone could be worth a fortune even if it weren't from space (ignoring what some people pay for otherwise uninteresting "rocks" from space). Metallic asteroids usually show a beautiful Widmanstätten patterns as well, which would give them value as decorative stone even if they became commonplace on Earth. Picture how much some luxury-obsessed sheikh would pay for say a countertop of Widmanstätten-patterened asteroid studded with peridot from the birth of our solar system.

But again, the prime mining market is the rare metals.

Re:Is it just me ...

[Rei]

And you're assuming it would be a multinational why?

Re:Is it just me ...

[david_thornley]

Intercepting and destroying a spacecraft would involve militarizing space, which is also against the treaty.

Re:Is it just me ...

[david_thornley]

If we start bringing in those rare metals by the megaton, how expensive are they going to be? How much money will the operation make until it's not longer economical to ship metals to Earth?

Re:Is it just me ...

[sabbede]

Look at it this way - there needs to be an international agreement on the rules, but there won't be until nations start making their own. Somebody has to kick it off.

Own what you mine

[fustakrakich]

That is the proper way. There should never have been any dispute. We should have the same rules on Earth. You shouldn't be allowed own the land, but you own what you extract, build, harvest, etc.

Re:Own what you mine

[ShanghaiBill]

We should have the same rules on Earth. You shouldn't be allowed own the land, but you own what you extract, build, harvest, etc.

That is a really, really bad idea. In terms of wasted lives and excess deaths, it is probably the worst idea in history. People have little incentive to build and grow on land they do not own. Collectivization of land ownership resulted in the mass starvation of 7 million Ukrainians and 30 million Chinese. Even today, millions of farmers in Africa and China are summarily evicted from land they have tilled for generations, because they have no legal title. Others are forced into subsistence agriculture because they have no ability to use their land as collateral, or sell it, or consolidate land into an economically viable size. The World Bank considers a lack of clear property rights to be one of the primary reasons for persistent 3rd world poverty.

Re:Own what you mine

[MachineShedFred]

There never was any dispute. However, sometimes it's necessary to codify common sense, in order to preemptively ward off greedy assholes who suffer from an astonishing lack of common sense.

Re:Own what you mine

[fustakrakich]

You are talking about something else entirely. Your work, crops, buildings etc shall not be uprooted. What should not be allowed is the speculation that keeps others off of unused land.

Re:Own what you mine

[Immerman]

By what right would a person be evicted from "their" land if no one can own it?

The problem is that every attempt at large-scale "collectivism" to date has actually been a power-grab under a rabble-rousing banner. They say "We claim these resources/powers for The People" to gain popular support, when what they mean is "This all belongs to the ruling class now. Suckers." It's why claims that Communism has failed are baseless - communism works fine on small scales, and has never been attempted on a large one. Communism requires ownership by the people - the only way that's compatible with ownership by the government is if the people own the government. And a precondition for that is having a truly functional democracy - something that has never existed on a large scale in all of human history.

And I have absolutely no doubt that the World Bank considers the lack of clear property rights a major problem - property rights are inherently a way for the wealthy to consolidate wealth, and the World Bank is a ruthlessly exploitative example of wealthy bankers at their worst.

Re:Own what you mine

[ShanghaiBill]

By what right would a person be evicted from "their" land if no one can own it?

Because that person doesn't own it. It is owned by the "collective" or "the people", which in practice means the government. So rather than paying market value to the farmer whose family has farmed the land for generations, a property developer can just pay a small bribe to a bureaucrat, and have the farmer evicted with no compensation.

claims that Communism has failed are baseless - communism works fine on small scales, and has never been attempted on a large one.

You need to get your cuckoo clock repaired. It has lost its connection with reality.

Re:Own what you mine

[Immerman]

Try reading the next sentence smartass, and go ahead an give me even one example of a nation in which land or anything else was owned by the people rather than an elite governing class cynically labeling itself "The People". Communism is impossible to implement beyond the scale of a stable democracy. The USSR called itself communist to garner popular support, the US called it communist to breed fear of wealth-distributing socialism. Both were cynically lying for the sake of concentrating more wealth and power into the hands of the elite.

Re:Own what you mine

[smugfunt]

People have little incentive to build and grow on land they do not own.

In the UK all land is 'owned' by the 'Crown'. There are several buildings and farms though, as the people using the land have freehold or leasehold contracts (in effect) with the Crown. In fact most people are unaware of this legal nicety and go about their business as if they owned land themselves.

I don't suppose the World Bank has mentioned it, but the private monopolisation of land also has some negative effects, as famously noted by Henry George.

Re:Own what you mine

[david_thornley]

The Holodomor (the famine in the Ukraine under Communist rule) was not just a matter of inadequate food production. The Communists continued to take what food there was away. It was deliberate starvation on a very large scale. From what I've read, whether it counts as genocide depends on whether it was specifically aimed at Ukrainians with other nationalities suffering as collateral damage, or whether it was directed at a large area regardless of ethnicity.

The first word spoken on Mars ...

[scunc]

"Dibs."

Re:The first word spoken on Mars ...

[ClickOnThis]

An old joke from comedian Robert Klein...

Neil Armstrong missed a great commercial opportunity when he placed his foot on the moon. With all of Planet Earth listening, he should have said 'Coca-Cola.'

Re:The first word spoken on Mars ...

[Areyoukiddingme]

Heard that Apple? With as little as 100 billions of cash you have on hand you can organise mission to Mars and have yours astronaut advertise your products on arrival. This type of advertisement will be in history books!!!

Microsoft will buy the contract to send Surfaces with the astronauts. And the commentators will call them iPads.

Earth level?

[QuietLagoon]

How can this be done on the level of Earth? Why do we think that we have the rights to distribute what is on the asteroids?

.
Is this like the Europeans coming to North America, and giving out land rights for land they did not own?

Re:Earth level?

[Viol8]

"Why do we think that we have the rights to distribute what is on the asteroids?"

Why shouldn't we? Do you think ET has summer houses on them?

Idiot.

Re:Earth level?

[presidenteloco]

I believe the Americans call this principle "Eminent Domain" which means, not to put too fine a point on it: "Although we allowed you to have guns, we have way more of them, so f**k off your land. This is our lawn now. Get off it."

Just remember that a right is something given by the one with might. It may not be how things should be, but see quoted text above. Civilization? Snivelization!

Re:Earth level?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your property is what you can defend with weaponry (either yours or the state's) against other people who come to take it from you using their own weaponry. When both contenders have lots of weapons then such a conflict is called a war.

Re:Earth level?

[QuietLagoon]

Your property is what you can defend with weaponry...

LMFTFY

.
Your property is what you can steal with weaponry...

Re:Earth level?

[careysub]

I believe the Americans call this principle "Eminent Domain" which means, not to put too fine a point on it: "Although we allowed you to have guns, we have way more of them, so f**k off your land. This is our lawn now. Get off it."

To be fair, you left out the part about "And here's a check for the full fair market value of the lawn. Buy yourself another one, if you like.

Re:Earth level?

[PPH]

We'll just tell the aliens to endeavor to persevere. And once they've thought about it long enough, they'll vaporize the Earth.

Re:Asteroid Orbit

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> danger of altering an asteroids orbit and having it eventually hit Earth

How did this get mod'ed to 3? Asteroids are #1 big (making them hard to alter), #2 far away (making it unlikely that they will accidentally get close to us), #3 already in an orbit (making it easy to predict what our efforts will change them) and #4 easy to track once we know they are there (e.g., slap a solar-powered transmitter on 'em). Of all the problems with asteroid mining (see the "pot of gold" and "but the UN" comments nearby) this is one for the bottom of the list.

Bill includes provision to group asteroid natives

[Kevoco]

onto reservations

Re:I have a new law too

[Pseudonymous Powers]

It's about who the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow belongs to. That's about as realistic as asteroid mining. Leprechauns, space mining, same thing. You can talk all you want, fantasize all you want, it will never happen. Ever.

Bah! You're just as bad as the rest of the space nutters on Slashdot. How many times do I have to tell you space nutters? Space doesn't exist! It's just a sheet of canvas that God put up above the Earth to keep us from seeing what else is on his desk.

Space nutters!

the word

[dwpbike]

"unilateral" comes to mind. does the usa congress know this word?

as an alien can i extract/own anything from earth?

[sittingnut]

since i designate myself an alien, i intend to extract and own the resources in so called north american continent of space object earth ( intend to own especially those human animals who refuse to be aliens ) :-)

Re:Asteroid Orbit

[ShanghaiBill]

Seems like there could be a danger of altering an asteroids orbit and having it eventually hit Earth.

Simple solution: Improve math and physical science education, so people have a better sense of scale, and can think more rationally. Then this will no longer be a problem.

Re:Economically feasible

[presidenteloco]

It may become economically feasible if and when most large mining concerns on Earth get stopped from expanding due to environmental concerns, such as protecting shrinking ecosystems, avoiding polluting shrinking fresh-water sources etc.

Just like clean renewable energy could become economically feasible in a hurry if a significant carbon tax was imposed.

Well, one can always dream.

Re:Asteroid Orbit

[MachineShedFred]

Yeah, except any asteroid big enough to not just break up in the atmosphere and make a fairly impressive light show would require an amazing amount of fuel to be burned to get enough delta-V to alter it's solar orbit in any meaningful way. As it turns out, the more mass something has, the harder it is to move out of it's current trajectory.

Why would anyone waste the resources engineering and executing such an effort unless they were a Bond villain in one of those bad late 70s movies? Also, if they are there to mine that fucker, why wouldn't they just drill out whatever they're there for and leave? Also, even if they were to dig out enough mass to make it easier to move, it's in orbit around the sun; it would be much easier to deorbit into the sun than execute what is essentially an interplanetary transfer to orbit Earth, much less intersect with it...

Predictions for a Not So Far Future

[famazza]

Considering that there will be asteroid mining in future, which I believe to be feasible, and that it will basically be prospected by autonomous systems (rovers or robots) I can predict a lawless situation, where group of space pirates, commanding space drones that will disable or destroy regular established company's equipment.

No law from UN nor USA will be able to legislate where there is no law enforcement.

With all this space hype -

[no-body]

Is there any knowledge about environmental impact this fantasy has?

Heaving the tons of equipment and initial human support environment against native planets gravity - does it help the ionosphere destruction some more and if so, how much and what is put into the atmosphere, is it just burnt hydrogen (water) or ?? and how much energy is used to produce the fuel?

How about bringing the harvest back - using the atmosphere as brake - how many more trillion-joules of energy would be put into the air and below?

My guess, by the time this would fly, some more pressing issues need attention, but one never knows what strings are pulled on the bribed political body in this clown-theater, so the dream continues...

Interesting times, that's a fact.

Re:With all this space hype -

[careysub]

Is there any knowledge about environmental impact this fantasy has? Heaving the tons of equipment and initial human support environment against native planets gravity - does it help the ionosphere destruction some more and if so, how much and what is put into the atmosphere, is it just burnt hydrogen (water) or ?? and how much energy is used to produce the fuel?

The cost of space launches will always be very high, due to the cost of the hardware, even if it is reusable. Airline flight costs on the order of $4 a pound. Spaceflight costs on the order of $4000 a pound. Spaceflight will always have a minor impact on the world environment, compared to air travel (for example).

The energy investment in space travel is vastly smaller than people imagine. It seems huge because a relatively large amount of energy is transferred to a small amount of material quickly, but launches are rare and intermittent, and the amount of material being launched is tiny. The mighty Saturn V burned up energy equivalent to $100,000 worth of wholesale electricity, an afternoons output from an average power plant.

How about bringing the harvest back - using the atmosphere as brake - how many more trillion-joules of energy would be put into the air and below?

There you have a valid cause for concern. The amount of platinum group metals consumed annually is quite small, a few hundred tons a year, and asteroids are about ten times richer than the best ores on Earth, but that is still only 0.01% PGM, so a few million tons of asteroid material will need to be deorbited a year. It will be interesting to see the proposals for doing this. The cost of doing anything in space is so high that the idea of actually processing the ore in space is truly fantasy for a long time to come.

Re:Asteroid Orbit

[blazer1024]

Now I'm imagining the Nostromo painted brown with gold lettering...

Re:Asteroid Orbit

[Immerman]

Agreed in general - especially if we're talking about the asteroid belt, in which case the orbital energies are so different than Earth's that pushing them onto a collision course would require a large and intentional effort. Well, at least if we're talking about asteroids large enough to be worth establishing infrastructure on. They do come in all sizes after all.

The first asteroids to be mined though will likely be those in the Earth's L4 and L5 points, many of which have orbits that take them back and forth between the two, passing near (in orbital terms) the Earth in the process. The complex orbital dynamics involved mean that relatively small orbital perturbations may result in quite large deflections after a few passes. Of course since orbital mechanics are well understood it shouldn't be difficult to monitor the asteroid's orbit and recognize when cumulative perturbations are beginning to push things into a dangerous course. And correcting or avoiding such problems should be a relatively trivial matter of selectively ejecting matter/launching rockets, etc. at different times or directions.

So a non-issue for any responsible mining group. Unfortunately I look around at corporate behavior on Earth, and can easily imagine a group acting to maximize profit by neglecting such monitoring, scheduling launches to minimize fuel cost in a manner that consistently pushes the asteroid toward a collision course. And of course there's always the chance that some other event, say a major fuel-depot explosion, could nudge the asteroid on course for an eventual collision, and the group is uninterested in footing the bill for orbital remediation, which if significant infrastructure was damaged could rival or exceed the cost of establishing the mining operation in the first place.

The only solution I see is to
1) require all exploited near-Earth asteroids to be equipped with transponders to allow easy orbital analysis by independent parties on Earth (shouldn't be too much of an issue - they should be cheap, and secrecy is pretty much impossible in space anyway)
2) Make the group exploiting an asteroid responsible for any necessary orbital remediation - up to and including liquidation of corporate assets to fund government action if necessary.

Both of which would require international agreement

Re:as an alien can i extract/own anything from ear

[Righ]

I have an alien registration card that allows me to legally extract resources from the United States of America.

Re:Beg to differ

[Anonymous Coward]

Like that extra apostrophe? Man, I think I found dark matter!

Re:Asteroid Orbit

[raftpeople]

Tunguska was a 50m asteroid...a 350m asteroid would destroy a small state. I could be wrong, but it seems like just landing on an asteroid could have enough force to alter the orbit (depending on how the landing is handled).

Re:Asteroid Orbit

[raftpeople]

"especially if we're talking about the asteroid belt" - one companies plans are for small near earth asteroids (165 feet wide)

Re:Asteroid Orbit

[raftpeople]

"Asteroids are #1 big (making them hard to alter), #2 far away" - the plans are for small near earth asteroids (e.g. 165 feet wide, comes within 1.5au's of earth)

Sweet! Gonna go undock my Retriever and get some!

[samspock]

Anyone know if they have spotted ganking out there yet?

US being Reasonable (for once)

[Roger W Moore]

I think you may have missed my point; by what right should the US get to allocate ownership of stuff it doesn't own?

Actually this bill seems quite reasonable. It is not granting anyone rights to claim asteroids all it says is that if you do go out into space and bring back minerals to earth (and the US) then you own those minerals. As such it only applies to things which you bring back into US jurisdiction which seems perfectly reasonable: as a sovereign nation the US is perfectly within its rights to determine who owns what within its own territory. Of course the moment those minerals leave the US then their ownership may come into question depending on local laws.

Re:US being Reasonable (for once)

[erikkemperman]

Sorry for being thick I suppose... But bringing it to earth presupposes ownership, to me anyway. And by saying it is all right to go get it, congress is making rules about stuff it does not own. No more than anybody else at least.

Re:US being Reasonable (for once)

[Roger W Moore]

And by saying it is all right to go get it, congress is making rules about stuff it does not own.

...and what's wrong with that? Governments regularly do that since most of the property in a country is owned by the citizens and not the government. If you mean rules about things which are not yet under its jurisdiction then again this is common: all trade and customs laws do this by saying what you are, or are not, allowed to bring in to a country and what happens when you do. As I said this is a perfectly reasonable law and in keeping with what many other countries already do albeit in different contexts.

Re:Asteroid Orbit

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> 165 feet wide

Oops, that's one 7 megaton blast. I think we can live with that, considering an event like that naturally occurs somewhere on earth once every 1000 years and it would probably land in an unpopulated area.

For your own "oops I nudged an asteroid" math, may I suggest:
http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/cgi...

Re:I have a new law too

[idji]

You fool. it is not a sheet of canvas, it is a bronze firmament.

Re:Asteroid Orbit

[bughunter]

If it's small enough that a mining craft could alter its orbit, then the craft won't "land" on it. It will dock with it.

And the same kinds of smarts that got the craft there are required to predict what forces will have what effects. And the very small technical risk of altering the orbit is further reduced by the tiny probability that the altered orbit will intersect Earth's. It took a lot of delta-V on a very small mass to get the ship there. A few newtons to bury a harpoon isn't going to do more than move aphelion/perihelion by a few cm.

The argument that mining will create a risk of Earth impact is up there with being afraid of hostile spacefaring aliens on the improbability curve.

Be patient.

[sabbede]

Eventually there will be a treaty between space capable nations establishing rules for off world resource exploitation. First, those nations need to start setting their own rules so that there is a compelling reason for them to get together and hash out the differences.

Odds are that it will not be done through the UN. The few space capable nations won't want 160+ other nations making the rules for them. And as all of the permanent members of the Security Council are space-capable, any attempt that isn't their idea will be vetoed.

Re:Asteroid Orbit

[MachineShedFred]

And the bigger it is, the harder it will be to overcome it's inertia.

The Apollo 11 CSM had a launch mass of 28,801 kg, and took the most powerful non-nuclear device mankind has ever created to get it to the moon.

The asteroid "99942 Apophis" is ~325m, which is close to your hypothetical 350m asteroid, and has a mass of 4x10^10 kg. That's 40,000,000,000 kg. It also has an average velocity of 30.728 km/s.

It would take a pretty fucking big accident to get that one to crash into the Earth, even with it passing fairly close by. Like, an "accident" that involved the purposeful mounting of rocket engines and fueling over many tanker launches (or refining of materials collected in space) to the asteroid to turn it into a kinetic weapon on purpose, to say nothing of having to do a massive survey of the thing to make sure you get the rockets thrusting against the exact center of gravity so you don't just enhance it's natural spin, and then calculate the proper transfer maneuver to actually hit Earth, because it turns out that it's pretty easy to miss a planet.

If it's big enough to mine, it's big enough to secure yourself to without altering it's trajectory in any meaningful way. Newton's laws still work.

Yee Haw!

[ebvwfbw]

I'm already a billionaire or so. All I have to do is figure a way to get to an asteroid and bring it back from space. Then make mega bucks! Ok... now to work on that space part.... Anyone have 3-4 billion they can spare for seed money?