The perseverance rover’s landing on Mars is still fresh in the minds of humans, privately owned companies transport people and supplies in orbit, and NASA continues to work on ‘the most powerful rocket’ it has ever built. But while world governments and private companies are keeping an eye on opportunities, an SXSW panel called “Who on Earth Governs Space” makes it clear that the laws that deal with space are not evolving as fast as the technology we use do not bring.
“People like to think of space as the Wild Wild West – nothing out there, there’s an open border, we can do whatever we want,” Michelle Hanlon, president of For All Moonkind, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of mankind’s cultural heritage in space. “Unfortunately or fortunately, this is not true at all.”
Hanlon referred to the space treaty, which was developed in 1966 and ratified by more than 60 countries in early 1967. Given that the treaty was implemented two years before mankind landed on the moon, it is not surprising that the document is heavy. on broad principles, but light on details. One of the biggest hits: outer space must be free for exploration and use by all states; states must avoid harmful pollution of space, celestial bodies will be used only for peaceful purposes, and perhaps most importantly, the claim that outer space is not subject to claims to sovereignty by governments on earth.
The treaty has come a long way in establishing a set of high values that determine how we approach and use outer space, but things have changed dramatically over the past 54 years. “We’re looking at this moment in human history where we think, ‘Well, we really want to do something in space, but we can own nothing,'” Hanlon said. the space is going to be contemplated, and the mining rights in the space. ‘
The idea of exploiting asteroids and other celestial bodies for their resources apparently peaked in the mid-2010s, when companies such as Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources regularly made headlines. (By 2016, the latter had managed to raise a whopping $ 50 million in funding for their space exploration efforts, including investments by former Google CEO Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, former chairman of Alphabet / Google. ) Nowadays, however, the enthusiasm has decreased slightly. Dr John Junkins, interim president of Texas A&M University, told the panel that mining “and material processing in space will one day take place” and that a legal framework is needed to allow these activities.
“The moon is a huge source, and it will be mined before the asteroids are likely,” he added.
Determining those property rights and frameworks is one thing, and it will take some time before it can be completed in full. The maintenance of the rights – and rights defined by the Convention on the Spatial Environment – is a separate issue that has not been fully addressed, despite incidents that should justify it.
Junkins reminded viewers of a day in 2007 when China destroyed one of its weather satellites with a missile, leaving a dangerous cloud of rubble with difficult orbits. A deliberate act such as the OST’s attitude towards ‘pollution’ of outer space seems to be going awry, but China has never had serious consequences for what Junkins called a ‘monumental environmental space crime’.
Strictly speaking, however, China is not alone: the United States and Russia have allowed their share of litter to float in orbit around the world, with Dr. Junkins suggesting that 40 percent of the mass litter belongs to the now defunct Soviet Union. This leads to a troublesome issue of liability, which Caryn Schenewerk, VP of Regulatory and Government Affairs at Relativity Space, does not think will come to the fore until a catalysing moment forces the problem.
“By launching something into space, you are not giving up ownership of it,” she said. ‘And if you leave it in space, if you leave it, you do not relinquish its ownership. This is therefore an interesting issue … you maintain its liability aspect, which by the way is not strictly liable in space; it’s just strict liability on earth. In space, then, you actually have to prove who is to blame and then fight among themselves. And congratulations on proving who has the fault in space! We will get better at it, I think if we have to, but we really need a impetus for this. ”
Efforts have been made to more fully codify a set of rules to regulate the way we approach space, including the Artemis agreements recently signed by the United States, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Luxembourg, Italy , Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates in 2020. Ten countries are a start, but a number of significant space states – including China, India and Russia – have not bought the largely US-designed agreement. It is difficult to say exactly what (if anything) the international community will need to agree to a comprehensive set of guidelines for the use of outer space. But one thing is clear: with the technology to get us and let us grow in space with the day, these are issues we can not afford to keep hitting.