Canadian, UK Law Professors Condemn Space Mining Provisions of Commercial Space Act (examiner.com) 218
MarkWhittington writes: The Commercial Space Launch Act, which includes provisions allowing American companies the right to keep resources that they mine in space, was recently signed into law by President Barack Obama. While the act has been hailed as groundbreaking in the United States, the space mining title has gotten an angry reaction overseas. In an article in Science Alert, Gbenga Oduntan, Senior Lecturer in International Commercial Law, University of Kent, condemned the space mining provisions as environmentally risky and a violation of international law. Ram Jakhu, a professor at Canada's McGill University's Institute of air and space law, adds that space mining is a violation of the Outer Space Treaty and should not be allowed.
Sigh... (Score:2, Informative)
Any treaty that is unenforceable isn't worth a damn. If the US, China, Russia or anyone else wants to go mine an asteroid, there's precious little anyone else can do about it.
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Of course there are things that can be done about it, at least by a handful of superpowers back here on Earth.
If any of those powers see this as a big enough threat (and this is a pretty big if), they have the political, economic, and military means to take action. Since there is no practical means of doing this in space, any actions would be between the nations of this world.
At face value, I don't think that this is going to be labelled as a big threat simply because the cost of the exploitation of space
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The Great Powers are going to be the ones licensing the mining. The answer to the threat isn't to nuke a competing nation's privately contracted asteroid mining installation, but rather to build your own.
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A private entitey gaining ownership over what is currently public could be looked on as theft from the public.
There are surprisingly few things owned in space by the public or anyone else. If some crazy dude with a bunch of robots can keep the rest of humanity from doing anything with the Moon other than look at it, then he effectively owns it even if no one else agrees.
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Alternatively you could just make a bunch of those metal things impact earth and mine it from there (businesses of your proposed magnitude wouldn't care much about environmental or people issues such as wiping a small country off the map).
I did say the dude was crazy. Maybe he read too much Heinlein [wikipedia.org].
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By the same token, if aliens came to the Sol system to mine asteroids or take water, there is nothing the Earth can do about it. We lack the technology to stop such a thing AND we don't own the Sol system. We happen to be here but we have no claims to anything beyond the moon.
For a practical matter, aliens or space miners would not need to bother with the inner system anyway. There are tons of moons, rocks, asteroids and comets in the Oort cloud where they could mine freely and we'd probably never even
The treaty says no such thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The treaty says no such thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
It prohibits the militarization and/or colonization of space.
The Outer Space Treaty [wikipedia.org] does neither of these things. It prohibits offensive nuclear weapons in space, but does not prohibit conventional weapons. It does not prohibit colonization, it just prohibits exclusive territorial claims.
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Which is also stupid. As unseemly as it might be to Canadians, an unrestrained land-grab in space is the most likely vehicle to spur progress. The "traditional" way a person or country laid claim to land on earth was you had to go there and establish a permanent colony. If we had a similar rule (instead of this stupid treaty) we would probably already have colonies on the moon and Mars by now.
Forget a land-grab (Score:2)
Forget grabbing land. What you need in space is a way to provide oxygen and water to support human life. Can you "claim" anything in space with a probe/drone?
Re:The treaty says no such thing. (Score:5, Interesting)
It does not prohibit colonization, it just prohibits exclusive territorial claims.
Right, which does not necessarily prevent claiming materials found as private property.
That said, this is all a tempest in a teapot. At this stage of technology asteroid mining is about the worst imaginable investment anyone could make. It's a purely emotional investment, driven by enthusiasm, and it doesn't stand up to critical scrutiny. We don't even go after the valuable on the sea floor because the cost of finding and raising them makes that unprofitable. If there were hundred pound chunks of refinery-pure platinum floating around in the asteroid belt it would cost more to fetch and return them than they'd fetch on the market.
The economics of space travel is dominated by the cost of moving mass in and out of gravity wells and imparting the necessary acceleration to match position and velocity with targets. It follows that we're looking for stuff with the highest value/mass, and until costs drop by a couple of orders of magnitude there's only one commodity worth returning from space: knowledge. The first physical substances worth mining will be things useful in the pursuit of knowledge -- e.g. water that can be converted to rocket fuel without tankering to the outer solar system.
Re:The treaty says no such thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Much of how one looks at this depends on your time frame. Certainly in the near (20-50 year) future, asteroid mining won't be economically practical. And for longer time periods it may never be practical. But, our ability to cast the future is very poor. If you have money to burn in the interim, you can make an argument that staking out the high ground (so to speak) is indeed economically sensible way to spend part of your (or better yet, some other poor suckers) money.
The big question is who gets to decide about this? A couple of bored, space nutter billionaires or some law professor somewhere?
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Well, as I said it's an emotionally driven investment, which is not to say it's an irrational investment, so long as you understand that.
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"The big question is who gets to decide about this? A couple of bored, space nutter billionaires or some law professor somewhere?"
Whichever of these parties has the money and the initiative to go out there, assay some asteroids, and start mining.
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Getting things *to* locations in space is inherently expensive. The cost of getting them *back* is not inherently so, if you don't insist on each return having a custom reentry vehicle and instead just shape it as its own reentry vehicle, with full expectation that it'll suffer some ablation during atmospheric entry. Some NEOs have only dozens of meters per second delta-V to reach earth intercept with an optimal trajectory and timing - a good baseball pitcher could do that unaided ;)
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I considered the near Earth object case. Clearly that's the easiest place to return material from; the problem is that it's coals-to-Newcastle. So far as we know the bulk of that material is stuff that's easy to get here on Earth: silicates, sulfides, iron, nickel etc. Judging from meteors found here on Earth there are exotic materials like iridium, but in trace quantities.
While there's no doubt lots of valuable stuff like platinum up there, I think people are picturing it as floating around as nuggets of
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Not at all. In a similar thread I linked to a USGS study on the prospects of space mining that showed that for an entire class of asteroids the average precious metals concentration is 28 ppm, with findings as high as 200ppm. In bulk, not concentrates, no overburden. I mean, t
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200 parts per million might be insanely rich, but it also means you have to process over 300 pounds of ore to extract 1 oz of platinum. That's nothing to a terrestrial mining operation which might crush several tons of rock to recover a single ounce of gold, but remember they do that with mass-is-no-object machinery and consuming, from a spacecraft point of view, unthinkable amounts of power. In space operations mass and power matters a great deal.
I'm not saying it won't happen eventually, but it won't
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200 parts per million might be insanely rich, but it also means you have to process over 300 pounds of ore to extract 1 oz of platinum. That's nothing to a terrestrial mining operation which might crush several tons of rock to recover a single ounce of gold, but remember they do that with mass-is-no-object machinery and consuming, from a spacecraft point of view, unthinkable amounts of power. In space operations mass and power matters a great deal.
Getting the energy into the ore is easy. Getting it out again is the hard part.
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I'm not saying it won't happen eventually, but it won't be profitable until we're measuring cost per pound to orbit in pennies rather than thousands of dollars.
In other words, it won't be profitable until the mass for that machinery and propellant comes from somewhere much cheaper than Earth, say the asteroid you're mining.
Re: The treaty says no such thing. (Score:2)
So you'd have to find objects that provide: oil/kerosene (a fuel), liquid oxygen and/or hydrogen (a catalyst) and your precious metal all in close proximity near earth, find multi-billion dollar investors to mine stuff we can easily find on earth.
Alternatively you could just make a bunch of those metal things impact earth and mine it from there (businesses of your proposed magnitude wouldn't care much about environmental or people issues such as wiping a small country off the map).
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No need to "wipe a small country off the map". Take any of the countless areas on Earth with low populations of ideally nomadic people and offer them a nice chunk of money if they'll be willing to, every few years with long advance warning, move out of the impact zone along with their livestock. Or simply pick an area with no people at all. Greenland would love some extra income, they're big into encouraging mining and have vast glacial landscapes which would be easy to find your impactors on (it'd have
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Alternatively you could just make a bunch of those metal things impact earth and mine it from there (businesses of your proposed magnitude wouldn't care much about environmental or people issues such as wiping a small country off the map).
Maybe, we should refrain from doing stupid stuff, eh?
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You don't have to pre-enrich it to those extremes. With a delta-V requirement of only dozens of meters per second, your cost to lob either single-stage concentrated ore, or even raw ore, back to Earth... hmm, let's do some calculations.
Solar panels for space usage are generally cited at 300W/kg (although with a large fixed installation one could probably do a lot better with concentrated solar or nuclear... and there's a lot of room for improvement on that 300 figure.. but let's go with it). 1kg to a NEO su
Re:The treaty says no such thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
And when we get to that point, we'll worry about it. Heck, various nations claim chunks of Antarctica, in one way or another, and thus far it's been meaningless flag planting.
But when we do get to the point where we can mine other bodies in the solar system, we'll have to come up with some sort of system of claims. The UN isn't going to be mining, it's going to be commercial and state players doing the mining, and we'll have to come up with a new treaty that will inevitably recognize the rights of those players to make what amount to territorial claims.
Probably the biggest concern, in my view, is privately-owned entities making claims independent of any national or international body.
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Just how did Weyland-Yutani get started, anyhow?
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And Argentina claims the Falklands. What eventually determined control of the islands wasn't any sort of legal code: It was being defeated militarily. If they had a good enough navy to beat the British, they'd have the islands right now. International law, like all law, ceases to exist if it cannot be enforced. This includes territorial claims.
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Things don't always come down to that. Look at the Cod Wars between Iceland and the UK. Three times Iceland pushed the UK - a nuclear power with hundreds of times its population - back further and further out its shores. The UK had the military ability to crush Iceland like an ant. But Iceland succeeded by combination of making it economically unfeasible for the British to fish Icelandic waters (net cutters, for example) and well-played international geopolitical maneuvering (for example, threatening to
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Things don't always come down to that. Look at the Cod Wars between Iceland and the UK. Three times Iceland pushed the UK - a nuclear power with hundreds of times its population - back further and further out its shores. The UK had the military ability to crush Iceland like an ant. But Iceland succeeded by combination of making it economically unfeasible for the British to fish Icelandic waters (net cutters, for example) and well-played international geopolitical maneuvering (for example, threatening to give the NATO base at Keflavík to the Soviets if the US didn't exert pressure on the UK, while also successfully positioning itself as a small weak state being bullied by a large powerful one)
Ah, but I'd distinguish on a couple of grounds. First, the UK was trying to encroach on waters already owned; no such ownership claim exists to objects in space. Second, "making it economically unfeasible for the British to fish Icelandic waters (net cutters, for example);" short of shooting down the rockets--which, again, would be in the equivalent of international waters, not territorial--how would you propose a country (and, for that matter, which country--who has the claim of right?) exert such force?
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It's not that simple. In each case Iceland was pushing the boundaries of law on ownership of seas. Remember, there was a time where there was no such thing as coastal waters, and then later when there was no concept of an EEZ. In fact, Iceland was the first country to lay claim to an EEZ for fishing (Britain cried foul, but they helped pioneer the concept by laying claim to ocean-bottom mineral
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The US already planted a flag on the Moon and since then no one else has stepped foot on the moon:) Maybe the US is using the Mars rovers to survey the landscape looking for the best parcels of territory to claim just in case enough people actually travel there and start arguing over zoning regulations and eminent domain claims. If a sizeable number of humans ever leave the planet we will most likely take our prejudices, animosities, and god help us, our politics with us where ever we go.
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The Space Treaty was prompted by the moon race. Smaller countries didn't want to have to stand by while the mighty US and the all-powerful Soviet Union divide up sovereignty of space objects and shut everyone out.
Today the Soviet Union has disappeared completely and US manned programs have been sidetracked by anti-science fears. Time to stand by and watch China occupy the nearby bodies. Will it cooperate with or compete with the various private initiatives?
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So the fine point on mining or colonisation is whether it is a territorial claim or a development claim. If you can get up there and colonise or mine, then pretty much you are entitled to claim what you are actually colonising or mining, as a developmental claim. As a territorial claim it should of course be banned, you can not point to the sky and claim to own it all because you have lots of nuclear war heads. It might seem odd compared to claims on earth but in all seriousness it will most likely suffice
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The missing part is making explicit that an entity owns what it mines and has the right to work the mines it develops. I think given the context it's pretty clear that this was expected, but it is an oversight. You know, if one corporation spent billions clearing the overburden off an asteroid, then another company comes in and just starts mining the ore in question... that's a big problem. It needs to be controlled. Really, it should be allocated out in blocks, with exclusive rights given to use the bloc
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You know, you post as AC but it's really obvious who you are, you have the same writing style everywhere you post ;)
Anyway, here's what the treaty actually says:
Any questions?
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National ownership and private ownership are two entirely different things. The US has no right to grant or deny access to an asteroid, under the Outer Space Treaty. But once there's property in question within the United States (having been returned to the surface), ownership of that property is a key issue that needs to be decided by law. The US has made clear that it considers that the private property of the company in question. This is in no way "national appropriation by claim of sovereignty" to the
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I don't get your argument. How is saying "I'm not going to take it from you" equivalent to "I hereby claim an asteroid in the name of the United States"? So do you think that the US government is required by the treaty to confiscate the material? Or if not, that some other entity is?
I don't get your line of argument. If a private entity mines an asteroid - the very using of space for the benefit of mankind repeatedly discussed as being beneficial in the OST - then what exactly do you think should happen t
The law is ridiculous anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
The idea that the USA - or any other nation state alone, for what its worth - could have the power to grant anyone property rights of extraterrestrial bodies is ridiculous anyway.
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Who should do it? Who does Mars belong to? If we go by the old law of "he who first lands on unclaimed territory is the owner", we might have to ask Putin if we're allowed to settle...
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It takes more than just flag-planting to make a territorial claim. A nation has to be able to demonstrate some sort of permanent control of the territory, usually in the form of colonization or economic exploitation. That's like trying to say that we need to ask the Danish, Norwegians and Swedes if Canadians can live in Newfoundland.
Before any nation can make claim to any extraterrestrial territory, it's going to have to be able to actually hold that territory, and we're still decades away from that.
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Your making his point. Even if there first, they couldn't hold it.
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Wait, so... colonialism was ok? I mean, those people couldn't hold their land, so it was a-ok that we took it?
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I don't know, do failed landers actually count? I guess the earth equivalent would be someone sailing to a new island to claim it, launching boats to land on it, but getting stuck on a coral reef on the way in. ;)
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Well, apparently severed hands count [wikipedia.org].
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Neither Putin nor any other Russian has ever set foot on Mars, so they have no claim whatsoever to it.
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It is very well legally possible. But the idea that some nation on earth would have to make a law to make it possible in the first place is utterly ridiculous. And only a bunch of complete assholes would get this idea without consulting the rest of the world first.
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So someone who wants resources from Mars needs to get permission from everyone in the world first?
Presuming someone has the technical means, what's stopping them from just going there and taking what they want? Are the police going to arrest them when they get back? Which country's police?
If you want to stop all progress in space (or any other scientific or technological progress) then go ahead with that idea that nothing is allowed unless governments grant specific permission in advance.
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Ask the American Indians how ridiculous it was that nations projected their power far outside their original sphere of influence.
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Those nations projected their power by means of gun powder and the spreading of diseases, not by passing laws. As an inhabitant of the American Colonies of the British Empire you should know that.
Oh come on, the US just celebrated thanksgiving and I doubt 1 in 10 of them even know they are celebrating genocide.
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There's no utopia on Earth, and there won't be in space either. The same economic conditions that have driven human progress since we first walked out Africa 100,000 years ago are still in play today, and will be into the future.
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Need for resources drives expansion. That's been true since the first self replicating molecules evolved.
Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
"Meanwhile, the Moon Agreement (1979) has in effect forbidden states to conduct commercial mining on planets and asteroids until there is an international regime for such exploitation. While the US has refused to sign up to this, it is binding as customary international law"
This guy is a specialist in international law? You didn't sign up for a treaty, but it's still binding? Sure we'll see how that goes.
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So does it forbid states, or does it forbid corporations with a HQ in a state? Because there is a big difference
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So does it forbid states, or does it forbid corporations with a HQ in a state? Because there is a big difference
By the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, anything launched under the flag of a given state is subject to the laws of that state while in outer space. Under the Space Station MOU, for example, each module on station is governed by the laws of the state that launched it. That gave Cmdr. Hadfield fits when it came time to clear the rights of his ISS version of Space Oddity, as he flew through a bunch of different modules in the video.
Re:Nope (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Customary international law (CIL) is regularly followed/applied by SCOTUS when international disputes come up. E.g. SCOTUS pretty much always follows the protocols listed under UNCLOS. The US has not signed on, but it has regularly followed UNCLOS as CIL. It's basically seen as "common law".
162 States, including many maritime powers, have signed on to UNCLOS III. It is reasonable to view it as CIL. It is not, by the same standard, reasonable to view the Moon Treaty in the same way, as no major space power has ratified it.
Note, also, that nothing prevents the US from adopting laws that go against CIL, as long as it is based on agreements we have not ratified.
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And when US law conflicts with CIL which one wins, Would hazed to guess US law in a US court.
Todd Hoffman and his Gold Rush crew (Score:3)
They already have a friend building them the Big Red Rocket to take them into space to mine gold in the asteroid belt.
umm... what? (Score:3)
That would mean that anyone that mines anything anywhere has no right to it? Earth or space. What's the difference? Used to be any country that landed on a newly discovered land claimed it as their own. Why would space be any different?
ownership of an object, sovereignty over territor (Score:5, Insightful)
There are two distinct issues here. First, the common law says that if a person harvests a wild animal, plant, or other thing, it is his to eat or otherwise use. That's about ownership of an object.
A different, though related concept, is that the first -country- to start using some territory has a claim of sovereignty over that territory. Meaning essentially that the area becomes part of that country.
The treaty says that -sovereignty- rules are different in space, no country can claim the moon or another planet as part of their country, by colonizing it. The treaty's Article 2 reads, "Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to_national_appropriation_by_claim_of_sovereignty_, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means."
The treaty says that Mars wouldn't become part of the the USA if the US colonized it. It does NOT say that you can't go to Mars, pick up a rock, bring it home, and then own that rock. That's ownership of an object, not sovereignty over territory, and the treaty doesn't prohibit ownership of an object.
see Rule of Capture (Score:2)
It is called the Rule of Capture in English, and has been recognized common law in British empire for hundreds of years. The first known written statute stating the principle was from Sparta, over a thousand years ago.
An interesting and well-known case on the application of Rule of Capture in America is Pierson v. Post.
Boo Hoo say unelected bureaucritters (Score:2)
This "Space Treaty" restricting mining is a complete joke and an attempt by the world's bureaucrats to hamstring civilization into a highly pointless "approval" process fraught with do nothing committees making the entire process needlessly expensive. The first country that figures out how to cheaply get a payload in and out of the atmosphere will become the next thousand year empire with all others bowing to its feet. Dare I say it a galactic empire beyond our wildest imaginations.
Whether it's Russia, Ch
They're just jealous (Score:2)
Environmentally Risky? (Score:3)
What is with these space law professors? (Score:5, Informative)
It is had not to agree with Ricky Lee of Australia, who wrote his thesis on the subject:
Quite.
I went to the House hearing for this Bill, and also talked to various staffers and actual space lawyers (as opposed to professors) about it. I feel, and they seem to feel, that the 2015 Space Act is entirely consistent both with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which says
and also with the precedent set by the US, Russia and Japan, all of which have material returned from celestial bodies. The reality is that these three countries have all treated those materials as property, which can be and has been traded. That is the actual customary international law here, not the Moon Treaty, which has been ratified by no major space-faring nation, and which is a dead letter. In addition, each state gets to set the laws on actions by their citizens in space, and are responsible for those actions (say, if they cause damage to another country's spacecraft).
Finally, the 2015 Space Act itself says
So, despite most of the headlines announcing this law, it doesn't (and couldn't) allow for the ownership of asteroids, just of material extracted from asteroids, exactly as is allowed for in the Outer Space Treaty.
I have to say that the space lawyers I have talked to share my puzzlement as to what the professors say things that seem so ungrounded. (They are of course welcome to disagree or oppose, but you would expect that they would have arguments grounded in facts.)
Note, also, that none of the other space powers has complained about this act, which they were and are certainly able to do it they feel it violates the '67 Outer Space Treaty.
Re:What is with these space law professors? (Score:4, Informative)
Ricky Lee's (large) thesis Creating a Practical Legal Framework for the Commercial Exploitation of Mineral Resources in Outer Space [murdoch.edu.au]
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Ricky Lee's (large) thesis Creating a Practical Legal Framework for the Commercial Exploitation of Mineral Resources in Outer Space [murdoch.edu.au]
Oh great, just what we need to help open a new frontier; massive piles of regulation.
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I have to say that the space lawyers I have talked to share my puzzlement as to what the professors say things that seem so ungrounded.
It's the technique of the Big Lie. If you repeat a blatant lie often enough, there are a billion low information voters around the world who will quite quickly start telling each other that it "sounds reasonable", because everything familiar sounds reasonable.
When you get right down to it, the only people with the funding, the attention span, and access to the required technical skill to pull off mining an asteroid in our lifetimes are US billionaires. This is the beginning of every other country acknowle
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Ram Jakhu says that the purpose of the Outer Space Treaty is that "there shouldn't be private property in space". So he's claiming a treaty signed at the height of the Cold War established communism in outer space in perpetuity. Hmm.
Even if he's right, which I very strongly doubt, it's a terrible idea. Communism hasn't worked on Earth and is no more likely to work off-Earth.
The environmental arguments are even worse: they assume all human modification of the environment is inherently wrong. That makes sense
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I went to the House hearing for this Bill, and also talked to various staffers and actual space lawyers
Presumambly you mean American lawyers. And if they where at the house for the reading of this bill they may well represent corporate interests in this so hardley be impartial.
I am sure that they do, but it's a matter of what kind of arguments they use. There are good reasons to argue that the 2015 SPACE Act is consistent with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. I would be glad to hear arguments that it isn't, but they need to have some weight behind them.
After the Subcommittee hearing, I had a long chat with Prof. Joanne Gabrynowicz, Director Emerita, Journal of Space Law, who testified at the hearing. Her viewpoint was to be that nothing should be done until there is an international
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There are good reasons to argue that the 2015 SPACE Act is consistent with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.
Assigning ownership certainly looks like an act of sovereignty to me. After all presumably the USA would try and enforce the property rights that it had given. If there are laws that allow the USA to requisition private property this would seem to further exacerbate the issue.
While this might be an attempt to set CIL it fails in and of itself as it is one nations law. If they actually where interested in that they should have got an agreement with other nations. A treaty between other nations might come from this, and therefore from one point of view being successful, but it might be quite different if just to show not being under the USAs thumb.
Of course another option is that other nations just pass there own laws with the result of different people claim different rights on the same thing. After all it would be just as valid for another nation to make its own incompatible law. An extreme example is that it could just assign random mineral rights to individuals and as far as I can see that would be just as valid as the USA's law.
In other cases, other nations have adopted US law as a template for their laws. If enough countries do this, you have CIL. This is part of the intention here.
Think a little about how this might play out. I, a citizen of one country, send a spaceship to asteroid X and start doing stuff. As long as I am there, you (a citizen of another country) are not allowed to interfere with my operations. Now, interfere can mean a lot of things (is it interfering to land 100 m away? How about 100 km away?), and that will
Imperial Stormtroopers Assemble! (Score:2)
All your space rocks are belong to us.
Supply and Demand (Score:2)
It is to the benefit of all mankind for the supply of these rare resources to become less constrained on the supply side, thus driving the prices down. Imagine rare-"earth" minerals mined by the cubic meter from off-world bodies, vastly increasing the supply for land-side electronics while simultaneously driving their prices down and moving the environmental impact somewhere with essentially no environment, and thus no impact.
Posting to kill an accidental moderation (Score:2)
They need space Viagra from Canadian space pharmac (Score:3)
These countries are just upset because they don't have a space program that their own mining interests could use or build on their own to go do mining.
They are going to be locked out of this market. They have rocket envy. Maybe Canada Pharma can work on making space Viagra for when you don't have a rocket.
Anyway the OTHER reason these countries don't like this is that they all have big mining interests. Finding a cheap way to mine in space and get those resources back to the Earth would devastate the value of minerals mined on the Earth. Who the hell will need De Boers if space diamonds are found in abundance? A diamond FROM SPACE might even be worth a lot, but not to De Boers.
This brings to mind that a LOT of Earth companies would be happy in these space mining efforts blew up on the launch pad or failed in space. Those who go to do this space mining are going to have to watch their backs all the time. There is far too much money in the hands of companies on the ground who would be happy if a loose bolt or something caused a failure. Probably no proof, no way to trace it.
Gov't owns you, and what you could own but don't (Score:2)
The University of Kent (Score:2)
It doesn't even have a physics department anymore. Sad to go back to where I spent so many years of my life and find it replaced by an architecture department. I think they abdicated their claim to have a say.
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Hmm. I may be mistaken. It may just have moved. I didn't see any signs for it though. Oh well...
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Yep, moved to the Ingram building. Wish I'd have known. I went quite far out of my way to visit last time I was in the area.
Lets open asteroid mining to private investment (Score:2)
The concern over this is bizzare. The way these people talk as if you can only use an asteroid for scientific means is insane. These people are worried about mining some lifeless rock when we are turning areas of the earths surface into moonscapes for mining? If we have a way that we can alleviate the strain on limited terrestrial resources, and reduce the impacts of mining on terrestrial ecosystems on earth, I think we should go for it. The idea that private companies should not be allowed to invest and be
Re: Pirated in the name of the Oligarchy (Score:2)
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He an evil mastermind set on world (Mars) domination. Didn't you see the Colbert interview?
And he's obviously played waaaay too much Kerbal Space Program.
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Let me guess...the Asteroids belong to Everyone!
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The law is based on the same idea as old-fashioned mining claims: Whoever discovers and get their first gets to claim it as their own. It doesn't claim anything in space for the US - it says that under US law objects in space may be claimed as private property. It's an approach that worked in the past, as it creates a profit motive for exploration and expansion - advocates point to the manner in which private ownership of claims lead to investment in the expansion westwards during European colonisation of t
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The law is based on the same idea as old-fashioned mining claims: Whoever discovers and get their first gets to claim it as their own. It doesn't claim anything in space for the US - it says that under US law objects in space may be claimed as private property.
No I didn't see anything like that,
even one of the critical articles doesn't imply any kind of claim, it's go out there collect some booty and haul ass home; wash, rinse repeat.
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Green wackos believe that the whole idea of exploiting space resources is a space nutter fantasy that will never happen, so what are they worrying about? This "angry reaction from overseas" is the voice of one law professor who is incensed at the idea that some place exists, however potential and distant, that Greenpeace cannot control.
He is in any case wrong on the law. The Space Treaty forbids Earthy governments from extending their sovereignty into space. It does not prevent private organizations from se
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No, as I recall all it says that the US will recognize property rights of space resources brought back to the US. Very different thing. It does open the legal possibility of economic space mining since miners don't have to worry about doing all the work and hauling their Earth-valuable minerals back to the surface and having the government or someone else immediately claim them as their own. It doesn't say anything about the asteroid itself, or any mining equipment, habitats, etc. built in space from "nat
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Not really - its only in the last couple centuries that "perpetual" growth was even possible. For the entire history of humanity up until then, stable business models were the only real option, and quite often jobs were passed down through multiple generations.
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Everything stops growing. You did.
Upwards, at least.
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"Economic growth" can't be sustained forever. A new social model will have to replace that idea. So sorry.
So what when there are at the least, centuries of growth left? After all, not everyone currently enjoys a developed world lifestyle. That's one avenue for growth. Not every society is fully industrialized. That's another avenue. We don't live indefinitely; we don't have massive space civilizations; we don't have post-scarcity conditions; we don't fully understand the universe; we don't have a host of things which we can put into our grasp eventually.
There's plenty of room for growth and it makes no sense
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On a practical timescale, however, the economy can keep growing pretty much indefinitely. Advances in technology allow us to become more and more productive and raise the standard of living for everyone, including pre-industrial societies. Medical technology could definitely still be improved, that's economic growth too. FYI, most trees keep growing pretty much as long as the
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I don't get what all of the fuss is about...
It'll probably take a million years for us to suck our solar system dry if not longer and by then we'll have colonized many other solar systems.
The fuss is because there are those who view humanity's very existence as a bad thing. Exploitation of resources in space extends humanity's time and allows for expansion and growth which they see as a bad thing.
The fuss is also about political power. Environmental groups who have used their political power to control if, how, how much, and by whom the Earth's limited natural resources are exploited as a political/economic weapon and means of control over populations see the exploitation of unlimited natura
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No the fuss is there because the USA is trying to claim sovereignty of stuff in space by assigning ownership rules.
Sounds more like you want to benefit from other people's investment, risk, and labor for free (invest in your own damned space mining!). Or that you want to make all resources off the Earth forbidden for anyone to use which is Luddite in nature to the extreme.
I object on the grounds of the USA unilaterally extending its powers into space without reference to the rest of the world.
Nobody is going to declare the Moon or some other celestial body a US Territory or Possession. It specifically says that in the bill that was passed. All the bill that was passed says is that if you extract resources from some celestial body you keep w
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Guess you never heard of The Andromeda Strain [wikipedia.org], then.
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