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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.
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.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
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.
The yellowcake is a lie.
"Dibs."
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.
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.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
>> 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.
onto reservations
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!
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.
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 ) :-)
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.
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.
The yellowcake is a lie.
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.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj