Hotel Tycoon Seeks Property Rights On the Moon 248
SonicSpike writes "The founder of Bigelow Aerospace, Robert Bigelow, made a fortune in the hotel and real estate businesses, and he's pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into an enterprise that will create inflatable habitats designed for life beyond Earth. He entered into an agreement with NASA to provide a report on how ventures like his could help NASA get back to the moon, and even Mars, faster and cheaper. Bigelow is applying to the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation to amend a 1967 international agreement on the moon so that a system of private property rights can be established there. 'When there isn't law and order,' he said, 'there's chaos.' Bigelow said he believes the right to own what one discovers on the moon is the incentive needed for private enterprise to commit massive amounts of capital and risk lives. 'It provides a foundational security to investors,' he said. Bigelow does not feel that any one nation should own the moon. 'No one anything should own the moon,' he said. 'But, yes, multiple entities, groups, individuals, yes, they should have the opportunity to own the moon.'"
Give everyone a few square meters (Score:5, Insightful)
Divide the moon up into N Billion equal pieces, and give each person on the planet an equal share. Then Bigelow can buy his land on the free market. Oh wait, that's not what he wants. He wants the moon carved up and given to the wealthiest people to make them even wealthier, backed by the world military to make sure that the poor get nothing out of it. Ah, capitalism. How you solve all the world's problems.
Too. Fucking. Early. (Score:4, Insightful)
Bigelow is applying to the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation to amend a 1967 international agreement on the moon so that a system of private property rights can be established there.
Too early. And if ownership is to be given, let it be to nations in terms of sovereign rights (or leases), not private individuals. Then those nations can lease exploitation/leasing rights to individuals and corporations.
The Moon is humanity's patrimony. Individuals and private entities must not have ownership right on the moon just in the same way we do with Antarctica. It is simply just too early. Here be dragons.
I would much prefer private entities explore the concept of asteroid mining and space station building. Once that is done, and it is done for a while, maybe, just maybe we can talk about private property rights on the Moon.
Re:reexamining the idea of property (Score:4, Insightful)
This is how the Earth's surface, originally not "owned" by anyone, turned into what it is today. If you accept that it worked here (as most people do), then there's no reason to suspect it won't work on the moon or anywhere else.
Re:reexamining the idea of property (Score:5, Insightful)
Your counterexamples, the Americas, are no exception to the idea of homesteading. The indigenous peoples (or their ancestors) that once ran the show did at one point in time arrive in an unpopulated land. They, through homesteading, appropriated said land. Many centuries later, white man came and killed them.
When the indigenous peoples' ancestors first pouring in across the land bridge where we find the Bering strait today, they didn't feel the need to reimburse everyone "back home" for the new land they were homesteading. When they settled on the American land, they had not "in effect taken that property from everyone else". They had taken that property from nobody else.
Of course, with extraterrestrial land, people have this odd notion that the human race collectively owns the entire universe. Perhaps the result of some unfortunate treaties, this belief is one of the biggest obstacles to commercial development of space. Why should I have any stake of ownership in the moon? I've never been there, I've never done anything to warrant such ownership. Though it would be incredibly profitable to mine the moon for water, why would anyone bother if they couldn't legally sell any of the water they mined for lack of ownership rights?
Re:If you can defend it .. it's yours (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, by Robert Heinlein. My first thought was a scene from that, or maybe it was another story, I don't remember - but the character D.D. Harriman walks into a Pepsi exec's office with a Coke logo pinned to his suit (I'm sure the companies weren't mentioned by name, but that was the idea). The exec is pissed about it, Harriman says from the distance from me to you, this button is the exact size of the full moon. I just came from there - they've got a great plan to write their logo across the face of the moon. The exec - that's outrageous! Harriman - yes, a travesty - we've got to stop it, but I just need some more money to get this ship launched - if I get there first, then it won't happen. And, of course, Harriman does the same thing the other way around, extorting every dime he can.
Anyway, it's a fun story - very interesting to see real life creep up on it!
Re:Good Grief (Score:2, Insightful)
Would you mind elaborating why the treaty is so bad? 2D property rights in a 3D world with the Earth's center as its center have worked fairly well so far because all land area is also divided into nations, which thus enforce them. But how would it work on the moon which at the moment doesn't have any division among nations and thus there's no nation enforcing rights (so you could also say it's like Somalia). Even if the Chinese build a permanent base there (let's be realistic, they're the ones that will do it first) would you consider it reasonable to let them claim that the entire moon is part of China? Probably you wouldn't so what would be reasonable? Any area they draw a line around in the lunar sand? Do you think they would agree to it? Presumably they could defend any area they like on the moon simply through the technological advantage they're likely to have by then but at the same time no other nation would consider it reasonable to let them call the entire Moon as theirs. So would it then be an act of war if they e.g. destroy an unmanned lander from an American billionaire? And if so, do you think the US would really go to war with China over it? If not, the US have accepted the unreasonable claim by China and if yes the US is going to war over what isn't much more than China wrecking an expensive RC toy in what China claims as its airspace (and as we all know, drone incidents in "ambiguous" or disputed airspace are not unheard of).
Now, what could work is that the surfaces of other celestial bodies are treated like international waters and resources harvested like fish caught there. Any construction would be treated as a vessel at sea and thus when operations on a lunar mine or "hotel" cease, it's treated like a shipwreck (assuming that whoever put the base there doesn't remove take it with them). Thus the surface is never owned by anyone but what is placed on it is owned by a party from a nation and they can profit from whatever they do there for the duration of their stay in said location (defined e.g. as a certain radius around every base outpost with some type of activity and not just a flag in the sand). And that would be pretty close to what the situation already is. The idea should be to ensure that only technological limitations stop you from benefiting from space exploration and resource harvesting but at the same time political conflicts shouldn't arise from unreasonable claims made by those who overcome the difficulties first and those who refuse to respect those claims because they're unreasonable.