The Deseret Morning News in Salt Lake City has a brief article about former senator and astronaut Jake Garn’s role in promoting the Vision for Space Exploration. Garn is heading the relatively little-known organization Global Space Travelers (which the article reveals was founded several years ago by Buzz Aldrin, but has done virtually nothing in public to date) that recently joined the Space Exploration Alliance. The article notes that Garn himself won’t be participating in the Moon-Mars Blitz next week because of speaking engagements in Utah.
Should we “Own a planet or space property morally “….?
“Technology has risen to a new level, and we are facing a new issue. This issue is the exploration of space by privately owned companies or individuals, or in short, Capitalism In Space.
The issue today is in mid-legislation from Congress. The House of Representatives has passed a bill, called the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004, which allows the private travel of citizens into outer space. Currently it is being argued by the Senate.”
http://www.masslive.com/living/republican/index.ssf?/base/living-0/1089186554310190.xml
Harold, I had the URL for this same article cached ready to paste in an appropriate forum.
But you posted it first!
IMHO, writing the rules for property ownership in space will be the “Great Game” of 21st century geo-politics.
Who will write those rules?
Americans view property rights in the context of the political tradition of Hobbes, Locke, Adam Smith and so on. Will the Chinese, Indians and the Islamic world accept those same premises and ground rules, let alone the French and Russians?
Is there consensus within America on how ownership of celestial resources should be established?
The Germans are on record as dead-set against the idea of property rights in space.
“The Germans are on record as dead-set against the idea of property rights in space.”
Ever?
The idea that no one can own something just because it is in space is to me ridiculous. The ownership of “things” is what has driven most all technology and discovery in the past, if that incentive is removed from space then the road ahead will be slow indeed.
Bill wrote:
“Is there consensus within America on how ownership of celestial resources should be established?”
Maybe it must first start from a world based organization though I do not put much faith in the UN.
It just maybe time to start a Space UN with membership of those capable of rocket launch to sub orbital. Leader nations are those that can get to orbit or to other destinations to make up the ruling counsel.
Mr. White asked:
“Ever?”
I suspect that this has to do with Green Party influence.
However, it is worth keeping in mind a few things:
First, the Outer Space Treaty says some specific things about property rights.
Second, the United States is a signatory to that treaty. If the US is going to change its position on property rights in space, then this will require either reinterpretation or abrogation of the treaty.
Third, there is widespread international fear that the United States doesn’t really care much about treaties anymore. After all, the US withdrew from the ABM Treaty.
So no matter what you think about the subject, there are entanglements. It’s not as easy as simply waving a hand and doing it. There will be complications that somebody will have to address.
Mr./Dr. Day is exactly right, in my opinion, about any US led property rights plan being frought with diplomatic peril and entanglements.
What can the space commercialization proponents offer Washington and the world to agree to create an acceptable system of space property laws? Yet without such laws, how much private secctor investment can we expect?
Letting the Russians sell boosters to US companies without tariffs or restriction might win Putin’s support for an American led plan, yet can we end that source of pressure on Russia’s support for Iran’s nuclear program?
And this is a very simple example, IMHO.
Much nuance and diplomacy will be needed.
My own thoughts on space property rights:
My friend Chris and I discuss this issue on and off very much. It is our opinion that only those spacefaring nations and organizations capable of reaching not just space, but extraterrestrial resources themselves, have the right or claim to establish private property rights in space for themselves, or for the spacefaring cultures of the future. The defeat of the infamous Moon Treaty of 1979, of which I played a small part, is the first great battle for establishing space property rights based on Western Civilization’s body of common and written law concerning property rights in space.
If Jim Benson of SpaceDev can get to an asteroid, by my reckoning, he has every right to a transferable title to that asteroid. The same thing goes for the Moon, Mars, or anywhere else. By dint of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, a nation state or corporation cannot claim ownership or establish a transferable title to any extraterrestrial body, but individuals can evidently establish rights of use, and even title to a specific area of the Moon or Mars, or an asteroid.
I know that if I ever am an investor in a company that sends a spacecraft to an extraterrestrial body, be it the Moon or a near earth asteroid, and this spacecraft lands on said body with intentions of processing the regolith into ceramics, glasses, fiberglass, semiconductor material, oxygen, carbonaceous compounds, or whatever, I am going to want my share of the property rights to such a body and the profits from the processed materials gotten from such extraterrestrial bodies. Anything else is not worth my investment or my time, and I would certainly seek legal title to such an object with the intenetions of processing it into useful products, for purposes of making a profit and helping to establish legal precedents for private property rights in space, or I would sue in a court of law and get as much money as I could from whomever sought to keep me and my fellows from claiming title to any body out in the solar system I and others individually or collectively paid our own money into to get to, process, and create wealth from.
Any other arbitrary, unnecessary, authoritarian, bureaucratic, hierarchical impediment to private property rights and use of extraterrestrial resources out in the solar system is, in my opinion, an intrigue, concentrates more wealth and power in the hands of either big established businesses or meta governmental organizations like the UN, and I am opposed to this with every fiber of my being, and would certainly use whatever means necessary to insure my rights out in space. And anyone else who knows what is really going on and what’s at stake with respect to property rights in space had better do likewise if they know what’s good for them and their posterity, out in space and here on Earth both.
Posting comment,Sorry about the lack of paragraphs, I did not separate them successfully after pasting it from word. Sorry for the inconvienent format for reading. Perry A. Noriega.
Perry, do you see a distinction between ownership of materials you have removed from the celestial body (by mining or processing) and a claim to the underlying real estate?
If I or my company are the first to Mars, how much of Mars should I own?
The entire planet; 100,000 square kilometers, 10,000 square kilometers; 1 square kilometer?
Next, unless we have global consensus (or a significant majority) any unilaterally imposed system of laws will be a source of great international strife and conflict.
Here is an interesting historical example.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tordesillas
When the Pope divided the old New World between Spain and Portugal, England, France and the Netherlands were decidedly unhappy.
Great quote:
“The remaining exploring nations of Europe such as France, England, and the Netherlands were explicitly refused access to the new lands, leaving them only options like piracy, unless they (as they did later) rejected the papal authority to divide undiscovered countries. The view taken by the rulers of these nations is epitomised by the quotation attributed to Francis I of France demanding to be shown the clause in Adam’s will excluding his authority from the New World”
I like the phrase “later rejecting papal authority to divide” the New World. An American imposed property rights regime will suffer the same fate, IMHO.
Dr. Day, the OST says *nothing* specific about property rights. Perhaps you’re thinking of the Moon Treaty (that the US has never ratified)
The phrase “property rights” doesn’t even appear in the treaty. The only really relevant portions are from Articles I and II:
“Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be free for exploration and use by all States without discrimination of any kind, on a basis of equality and in accordance with international law, and there shall be free access to all areas of celestial bodies.”
This might imply that you couldn’t put up a “No Trespassing” sign on any land claim that you make.
And:
“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.”
Most legal scholars agree that private parties can extract resources, and that property rights are not excluded by the treaty. The real issue is how those rights will be defended by that right-holder’s nation if sovereignty is not allowed.
I tend to agree with Rand on this point:
“Most legal scholars agree that private parties can extract resources, and that property rights are not excluded by the treaty. The real issue is how those rights will be defended by that right-holder’s nation if sovereignty is not allowed.”
Once ore is removed, I see no problem under current treaties saying that the mining company “owns” the ore. The sunlight hitting your solar panel? Well, d’uh. The remaining land or asteroid, or hte sun itself? I am less sure about that.
You can collect all the sunlight you can collect yet you cannot block anyone else from access.
Now, how close can Company B positon a robot mining operation to Company A’s site? Slant drilling and similiar issues such as robots drilling into a rich vein underneath a competitor? Current law about fishing trawlers crossing each other’s paths in international waters might be useful precedent.
Can Company B deploy a solar panel between Company A’s space station and the sun? Will sun rights access be like water access to public rivers?
= = =
Next, will any Terran government allow the importation of the material without tariff? Environmental and contamination issues?
No one can launch to travel to the asteroid (or whatever) without a governmental sponsor.
= = =
A possible short term compromise might be for the US Congress to declare that any resource transferred into the cargo hold or transported to LEO by a private company is the lawful property of that company while NOT recognizing any claim to the real property the mining operation is loaded on.
Write rules similiar to when a baseball player has made a lawful catch. Move the ball from the glove to the free hand, and then its a catch. Move 1 ton or ore into a cargo ship or actually begin propelling it somewhere useful and its yours.
The Space Settlement Initiative – http://www.spacesettlement.org/ or click on my name – tries to answer some of these property rights questions in a context that claims to be compatible with our treaty obligations. Debatable, but it’s withstood quite a bit of criticism. I’ve thought about it off and on for a few years now, and generally think it might be exactly what we need.
But others with legitimate points do disagree on the legal grounds here – Wayne White for example has written a series of interesting papers proposing a specific sort of “pseudo” property right based on usage/improvement (at least if I remember correctly)…
Arthur,
I am curious. Are there drafts of sample legislation to carry out your plan?
With law, the devil is always in the details.
Has a fully detailed proposed Congressional bill been drafted by anyone you are aware of?
FYI, I have posted a separate entry on the article that triggered this discussion:
http://www.spacepolitics.com/archives/000226.html
You may want to move your discussion there in the event anyone still wants to talk about Jake Garn…
In the broadest of sense a crusade is almost always about land, resources, people and finally of religion.
Should we or why would we go to mars is asked in the article.
Simply because it is there we must go. It is a challenge, an adventure, a chance for riches and of fame or of glory.
Garns establishing of a mission launch site on the moon only makes sense if all the materials to create the rockets that one would go in are processed from the moons resources. A permanent base also only makes sense if there is a reason to stay. Is the study of the moon for scientific reasons enough or must there be something else?
Jake Garn wrote a book “Why I Believe” I wonder if that book influences his interest in space.
First stake in the ground on an asteroid gives you the whole asteroid? Eh?
What if you land some factory/mining probe with enough exploitation equipment to use only, say, .01% of Ceres. And somebody else lands enough equipment on the other side to exploit .01% of Ceres not long after. What if your equipment fails (oops, not exactly what I meant, but anyway), and the other party’s works?
I started an SF story last year (never finished) with lunar exploitation based on an odd legal premise: that those staking lunar mineral-rights claims had to actually walk the perimeter of their claim, in space suits but otherwise on the surface, exposed to radiation. Of course, it was just a flimsy pretext for putting more characters -indeed, a whole frontier-society subculture – on the Moon. And it would require a definition of “space suit” that precluded any mobile apparatus that allowed you to rove the entire circumference of the Moon, self-sufficiently. Still, it got me to wondering: just how do you make a claim purely robotically? Robots might get very small, very fast – they already have.
We have to acknowledge, I think, that property rights are an evolved, long-thought-out institution, not axiomatic. Space is unprecedented, an encounter with legal unknowns. Making a claim remotely, with equipment – what’s the precedent for that? Analogies may not work.
First stake in the ground on an asteroid gives you the whole asteroid? Eh?
What if you land some factory/mining probe with enough exploitation equipment to use only, say, .01% of Ceres. And somebody else lands enough equipment on the other side to exploit .01% of Ceres not long after. What if your equipment fails (oops, not exactly what I meant, but anyway), and the other party’s works?
I started an SF story last year (never finished) with lunar exploitation based on an odd legal premise: that those staking lunar mineral-rights claims had to actually walk the perimeter of their claim, in space suits but otherwise on the surface, exposed to radiation. Of course, it was just a flimsy pretext for putting more characters -indeed, a whole frontier-society subculture – on the Moon. And it would require a definition of “space suit” that precluded any mobile apparatus that allowed you to rove the entire circumference of the Moon, self-sufficiently. Still, it got me to wondering: just how do you make a claim purely robotically? Robots might get very small, very fast – they already have.
We have to acknowledge, I think, that property rights are an evolved, long-thought-out institution, not axiomatic. Space is unprecedented, an encounter with legal unknowns. Making a claim remotely, with equipment – what’s the precedent for that? Analogies may not work.
Oops, sorry for the double-posting, I got confused … or more confused than usual, I should say.
Bill, not my plan – it’s Alan Wasser’s, but I think it’s a good one. They have a first draft of legal wording here:
http://www.spacesettlement.org/law/
but this has never been introduced as law, as far as I am aware.
Unfortunatley I see the 1967 Treaty as an opening for corporations to exploit space. They, and the very rich, are the only ones who could technically get there. By the time an average joe could get to a ny place, it would be owned by the “Microsofts” of that time. I could also see company having employee’s sign waivers, much as they do today about Intellectual Porperty, where an employee signs the rights to wherever they are to the company that got them there.