The Great Meteor Grab 152
RocketAcademy writes "New regulations by the Federal government define asteroidal material to be an antiquity, like arrowheads and pottery, rather than a mineral — and, therefore, not subject to U.S. mining law or eligible for mining claims. At the moment, these regulations only apply to asteroidal materials that have fallen to Earth as meteorites. However, they create a precedent that could adversely affect the plans of companies such as Planetary Resources, who intend to mine asteroids in space."
Putting the cart before the horse. (Score:5, Insightful)
Talk about worrying about the wrong problems. Why worry about how this is regulated before anyone can even come close to doing it?
First come up with a way to mine an asteroid, then you can worry about the legal semantics.
Don't worry about it (Score:5, Insightful)
The well-funded asteroid-miners will be able to buy the politicians and get the rules changed before they launch and call it a cost of doing business.
The not as well funded ones... well, it wouldn't be the first time lack of excess capital to pay lawyers or lobbyists stopped a project before it started.
Besides, if only the US has this law, then companies will just launch under other nations' flags and sell the minerals to countries that don't have a problem with mining asteroids.
Talk about crying wolf (Score:5, Insightful)
The article makes a huge logical leap: that US laws governing items on federal lands somehow apply to items that are not on federal lands (for example, the asteroid belt). This is akin to saying that US antiquity laws would prevent a US citizen from prospecting for fossils in, say, Canada. What a load of baloney. The author is trying to conflate and confuse two issues (mining in space and prospecting on US federal lands) which are utterly unrelated.
Nebulo
Words have meanings (Score:5, Insightful)
"A meteorite is a natural object originating in outer space that survives impact with the Earth's surface" - Wikipedia - Meteorite [wikipedia.org]
So unless someone plans on mining an asteroid by slamming it into the planet, they probably don't have to deal with laws pertaining to meteorites. There is also the fact that US law does not extend to the Asteroid Belt.
Total crap -- /. summary is wrong (stunning!) (Score:5, Insightful)
Total fail.
1. "A meteorite is a natural object originating in outer space that survives impact with the Earth's surface." Wiki source [wikipedia.org].
Re:Total crap -- /. summary is wrong (stunning!) (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Putting the cart before the horse. (Score:5, Insightful)
That will be ignored as soon as the capability to occupy celestial bodies exists.
Re:Putting the cart before the horse. (Score:0, Insightful)
Yes, because corporate bodies never need to be regulated. They all behave like angels.
Re:Don't worry about it (Score:4, Insightful)
Large scale metal mining and retrieval is likely to use very large, roughly formed, vaguely aerodynamic bodies with cheap re-entry shields. Basically, form the metal into a plane shape, whack a shield on the front and drop it in a desert. Scrap it for the metal in it. Any valuable metals you put in the centre, if the wingtips burn off a bit, so what.
The problem comes when the thing misses your couple of square miles of desert, and the BLM says they now own your multimegabucks worth of rare metals.
Re:So what? (Score:0, Insightful)
A man could do in a day what curiosity does in a year. You watch too much sci-fi, in reality our robotic technology is not advanced at all.